Thoughts On The Representing The 'Real World' With Spatial Data, Analyses & Maps And Beyond - aka "The Map Is Not The Territory” ~ Korzybski, 1931

One of my friends on the Book Of Faces shared the quote from DH Lawrence:

The map appears more real than the land

I have no ‘philosophy’ skills, but Lawrence's quote did remind me of Korzybski's quote (in the title) - and caused me to think it about it more deeply in this current (frankly) more ‘partisan’ climate that we are seeing in politics, the 'post fact world' - the views on efficacy of vaccinations, attempted repudiation of anthropogenic climate change, and so much more – that has been exacerbated by social media and the ready access to incredible amounts of information, data that we try and digest as best we can every day.

It is a common theme.

To pompously drop yet another quote, this one attributed to the statistician George Box:

All models are wrong, but some are useful

It is one which I always remember from my days working as a geologist and cracking open Driscoll’s technical handbook 'Groundwater and Wells' - as I, we tried to model groundwater flow near wells for either water resources or contamination tracking and prediction.

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I work in spatial data, specifically trying to use applied science to better engage with and model the dynamic world, as cliché as that might sound. The analogy of maps, territory is a useful metaphor for the larger differences between our view of what is there versus what is really there.

Although I might not think of it directly, what I 'get' from Korzybski’s quote every day , what I try and remember when using and analyzing scientific spatial data:

1. A map, spatial data is an impression, that ‘wrong model’, but of course often very useful. It is necessarily a parsing of all of the information about the territory, which means that it must leave out details. The person who collects the data and/or makes the map, the representation must decide what is to be kept, and that is generally to suit the purposes of what they are trying to achieve. If we wish to use this collected data, any generated maps, we need to consider their original purpose – and if necessary collect or derive more spatial data.
2. Similarly the interpretations by different data and map generators and users, including on occasion their conscious or unconscious biases, must be considered. Monmonier’s book 'How To Lie With Maps' – in continuous print for 30 years now in various editions – shows us how readily and frankly recklessly this can be done. Often it is more, say, innocuous than that – biases in the attributes collected, the grouping of attributes, colours on a map (red bad, green good being the simplistic example), and so many more ways. Arkell’s 1900 map 'Jewish East London' was meant to describe this ethnicity geographic range street by street - but failed to also measure other immigrant ethnicities, it grouped the households in a way that inadvertently exaggerated their extent, its colours suggested ‘us and them’ amongst other things – and was distorted by anti-immigrant factions and anti-Semitics as ‘proof.’ 
3. Spatial data, maps can be wrong in ways that the viewer / user does not realise.
4. Spatial data, maps can be out of date with things having changed since the data was collected – the river has changed course, buildings have been knocked down or changed ownership

The spatial data, the derived maps, the derived analyses, the models generated are necessarily imperfect, in their reducing of the ‘territory’ to a ‘map.’ These imperfections don’t diminish the efforts and benefits, the need for the spatial data collection, the maps, etc. – it is just something that needs to be considered and allowed for.

As stated, these concepts, considerations extend further than just spatial data, maps, spatial analyses, models…

There are varying levels of inherent uncertainty in much of what we know & hence understand - but that by no means repudiates them!

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Verbose Anecdote:

A ‘past profession’ was engineering geology. We used a tool called a Schmidt Hammer, a rebound hammer to measure the elastic properties of concrete that we used on rock as well – basically a giant spring drove a rod onto a surface and you could gauge the ‘strength’ of the rock. You would pick a piece of rock that you believed to be representative of the natural rock face and makes a test. Maybe it was not representative, maybe there was a joint or fracture within the rock that you did not see that effected the results. Naturally you took multiple readings.

On one project – the road cuts along the F3 Freeway north of Sydney, NSW, Australia that had been degrading with various weathering and similar – a young engineer asked me for some numbers on the rock strength for his retention design work. I said I would get back to him with some better numbers, that he needed to take into account the pretty consistently spaced rectilinear jointing, etc – but the field Schmidt hammer readings seemed to indicate somewhere between 35 to 40 MPa (I seem to remember.) I later found that he had used 37.5 MPa (i.e., to one decimal place) in his design calculations.  

This miscommunication, if it had not been caught (by someone else), could have been costly in a number of ways.

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[ Bruce Buxton encouraged me to produce original content; my writing skills are quite rusty, and maybe were not that good to begin with (!) but I will try & continue to follow his suggestion…]