Fifty Years of Cartography: Some Personal Reflections

When the first issue of The Cartographic Journal appeared 50 years ago, I was in Kenya working as an Education Officer for the Government of Kenya and at the same time conducting research for my Ph.D. thesis on rural development in Fort Hall District (renamed Muranga) in which I was working. In thinking about what cartography means to me I thought it would be interesting to compare what I was doing cartographically 50 years ago to what I am doing cartographically today. Cartography featured largely in my research on rural development, while I was in Kenya and formed a complete separate volume of my Ph.D. thesis. The technology I had available was very basic pen-ink and Letraset! Fortunately, there was one base map available at the unusual scale of 1 : 79 200. I never did discover the reason why the Survey of Kenya chose this scale, but I suspect that it was the size of the paper on which the whole District could be printed on one sheet. Using this base map I collected and mapped large amounts of thematic information, both qualitative and quantitative relating to economic and socio-cultural development in the District. I was an early proponent of what is now known as Volunteered Geographic Information. My high school students and their parents helped me collect information for my maps including, among other things, detailed rainfall statistics from a network of rain gauges in the network of primary schools, traditional periodic market information, qualitative surveys in questionnaire form on the effect of land consolidation, the location of village wells, the location of maize mills, transportation routes and costs and even the archaeological sites of the pit dwellings of the pre-Kikuyu people knows as the Gumba (Taylor, 1966). Education was a very important commodity to the people of the District and, as a result, cooperation and enthusiasm in providing and collecting the information I was seeking was never a problem. Much of the material was also integrated into the teaching of geography at the only secondary school which took 30 students a year from a primary school population of over 30,000 pupils. With a team of students, we could attend a market, record all of the prices for different products as well as where both buyers and sellers had come from. This allowed the mapping of market catchment areas. For transportation, we could stop all of the buses, including the minivans known as ‘matatus’, record what goods as well as people they were carrying, the fares being charged and the time taken to reach the main tarmac road to Nairobi. Depending on the season and the intensity of the rainy season, this could vary from 2 hours to days stuck in the mud! Mapping this original information was a major means of understanding the development challenges facing the District. Of special interest to me as a geographer were spatial relationships between and among different distributions and I attempted to do this by using hand drawn transparent overlays. This analytical methodology was very basic but nevertheless useful but after two or three overlays it was very difficult to see anything, especially since without electricity I could not construct even a primitive light table. In 1967, I became involved with the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics where Howard Fisher and his colleagues were developing the early SYMAP computer programs as well as GRID, an overlay program based on a raster matrix. I could put in XY coordinates by hand at a distance manually using a SYMAP ruler and send these by mail to Harvard to be processed. Using GRID I could stack up as many as 20 variables which greatly increased my ability to identify spatial relationships. Harvard also developed early three-dimensional representation programs which were particularly interesting. By this time I had left Kenya and was working at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada where I continued to analyse and map the large amounts of information I had collected in Kenya. Using the 3D programs, I was able to test hypotheses such as that on ‘growth centres’ for example. The theory argued that wealth would spread from an urban growth centre out into its rural hinterland. When I used a two-dimensional representation of average farm income to create a three dimensional representations of Muranga District, I found that the situation was exactly the opposite to that expected of the theory. The closer the small farmer was to the growth centre of Thika the poorer the average income was and this was shown very dramatically by the representation. The town of Thika is in the lower right hand corner of Figure 1 which shows average farm income. This was an early use of visualisation as an analytical tool. I bought my first digitizer in 1968. It was a custom made Autotrol and cost US$24,000 which was a very large sum The Cartographic Journal Vol. 50 No. 2 pp. 187–191 50th Anniversary Special Issue, May 2013 # The British Cartographic Society 2013

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