Tactile Maps and Mapping

摘要

While the new millennium delivered significant advances for map-making and map acquisition, with a focus on maps production for digital and two-dimensional printed maps, acquiring and producing tactile map can still be a challenge. In addition, the tactile mapping community is mostly untouched by the cartographic advances made over the past two-thousand years. And these advances provide the foundation for many cartographic standards and conventions used by large-scale producers of maps in the United States. This paper has three aspects to its purpose: (a) to identify the cartographic communication process and some of the cartographic conventions that have been systematically developed, tested, and applied to maps; (b) to argue that the tactile mapmaking process and the tactile map-readers may benefit from the cartographic communication process and subsequent map conventions; and (c) to outline several projects (and their free availability) undertaken in an effort to investigate potential tactile map conventions.?