Feature / Towards Data Science

From Cartography to Digital Mapping: Do you know the truth?

The Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is currently curating a year-long online exhibition called ‘Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception’. It challenges traditional online displays by offering interactive materials for students. The idea originates from ‘Persuasive Cartography’ — the history of how maps and visual data manipulate reality for subjective agendas. If you think you’ve never heard of this, trust me, you’ve seen it. How about national propaganda and political campaign maps, advertisements, or statistical graphs on the news? The exhibition reflects on how the history of persuasive cartography is relevant for a contemporary society—one consumed by an overabundance of visual data that doesn’t always show what it claims to.

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“Why does misinformation continue to spread by visual maps? They possess a certain power by enabling people’s trust in them and tendency to ‘naively’ accept them as true. Visual language is largely linked to the paradigm of scientific objectivity. As a viewer, we tend to forget that the data we see is never free from context, interpretation or explanation.”