I’ve heard plenty of arguments against my claim that there is less art in web cartography than has been in previous forms (e.g. there’s no difference between using the “science” of a pen and the “science” of digital technologies). But, at least for now, I am unconvinced.

In many ways, I believe recent interest in “art maps” (bogus or otherwise) indicates a penchant for more art in cartography. I certainly have that penchant. The “artsy” look that we sometimes see in modern maps (and I’m talking about even ones that I LOVE) seems scientifically forced and aesthetically misplaced to me.

The term “art” is too vague and all-encompassing to be entirely absent in… well, anything, really. But consider the following few examples with regard to web cartography vis-à-vis traditional techniques:

1. Hand generalization is employed less and less with various algorithms and whizzbang tools that can “do it for us”.

2. While maps (even when copied) used to be built from the ground up, now everything has a default from the beginning (projection, color, extent, resolution, &c.). “Artistic” things can be done when departures are made from the default. But in digital media, these methods generally appear as scientific-looking emulations of their analog inspiration.

3. Hand lettering and-in a complicated way-typesetting will always be more artistic than simply selecting a typeface. Sure, creating a font is an artistic pursuit. But even that, with its identical iterations, is significantly less artistic than the unpredictable flexibility that came with traditional typographic and cartographic methods.

I could list more, but this comment is getting exhaustive (and I’m sure you get the point).

I should point out, however, that I believe traditional cartography was and is a great application of a scientific method to an artistic pursuit. That is, maps are visual and aesthetic. But the things we need to show with them require careful measurements and thoughtful consideration. So, as cartographers, we feel comfortable saying we reside in this hinterland with equal influences from art & science.

You argue that the science of cartography has migrated to GIS and left modern cartographers with the task of art and design. But what I am saying is that—even in that scenario—web (or even more broadly, digital) cartography relies too heavily on computer science (html5, flash, javascript, &c.), algorithms (Douglas-Peucker, Spline, IDW, &c.) and tools created by other people (read: Brewers) to claim that it is influenced by art as much as it has been in the past.

Cartographers still have the ability to make “artistic decisions”, but to call a photograph of construction paper thrown over some polygons with various transparency settings in Illustrator just as much “art” as “science” seems like hyperbole to me… for now.

To me, cartography is art. The science part is the data, the analysis, which is now GIS (but was originally part of cartography). What remains in modern cartography is the art and design part.

If web cartography lacks art, it is no longer cartography. Art/Cart is a fundamentally human pursuit about how I can take the contents of my knowledge and present it in a way that will influence the mental concepts of another human reader. More and more mapping is done with little to no human thought. Hence the lack of art.

Hard question: if web cartography isn’t cartography, what is it? What are undesigned/poorly thought out/all digital maps generally?

Simile: Cartography is about interpreting information and impressions about the world, like a journalist. What automated web maps are doing is not journalism, it’s tweeting what you had for breakfast.

I’m partly just arguing to be argumentative, and I’m not sure how convinced I am by some of my propositions, but I think they’re worth making, at least. I need to process this to come up with a more conherent argument.