Micro-Macro Readings: "Envisioning Information"

Edward Tufte starts us off with Constantine Anderson's axonometric projection of New York- a map that took 20 years to refine. The beauty of a map is that it can hold a tremedous amount of information useful to all manners of people (travellers, pilots, ambulance drivers, petty theives, etc.). A city is condensed into a small foldable field. The problem is that to condense this information, the city must be condensed into graphic representation- translated into a new language that is really only useful to people who know how to read a map.
Anderson's map provides a graphic representation of the city so that it relates more to how we see a city than how most maps re-present that information. These other maps with which we are more familiar require education and decoding.
For instance when travelling in China, having a map presents problems. For the foreigner to negotiate the city an English map is useless to show to a Chinese person who does not speak English, and a map only in Chinese (characters) is rather useless to the illiterate foreigner. But even with maps that have both English and Chinese (even Pinyin), most Chinese people (mainland China that is) have not been trained how to read maps. Though they may have lived in the city for fifty years, the aerial view of the city is just as foreign to them as if you were showing them a map of San Francisco. This is not to reflect poorly on the Chinese education system (which I would be more than happy to do at another time), but rather that maps are learned system, and while perhaps providing vast amounts of information, they require some knowledge by which to decode them.

Also as a sidebar, the history of Chinese painting and philosophy has dealt with the notion of micro and macro. A Chinese painter once said that the entire universe rested at the tip of his brush. When men of education and courts were crowded into dense cities, the ability of painting to condense a scene onto a small, portable page became an important means through which the "lettered men" maintained spiritual ties to natural landscapes. A successful painting transported the viewer to the place that it depicted.