Our Selection Criteria:

1. significant impact on geographical knowledge: advanced geographical theory or practice
2. abstract visualisation with core spatial element (could be conceptual or data driven), including maps, charts, diagrams, graphs. (Generally excludes other visual media - paintings, photographs, etc.)
3. widely recognised amongst peers as a 'classic'
4. produced in last 120 or so years (taking 1887 appointment of Mackinder at Oxford as start of academic geography discipline)

Defining a 'classic':

• easily recognised,
• wide impact, (crosses over domain, influence beyond disciplines)
• longevity, enduring value (timelessness?)
  
• originality ('breaks mould')
• cited and copied
• elogance, simplicity and self explanatory
• universality?
• ???

Slide Show Version

We put together a simple slide show of Maps that Matter that was displayed on foyer screen at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in August 2008. The presentation show our initial selection of sixteen influential and iconic images in geography.

A pdf version of the slides can be downloaded from here.

Comments are welcome. We plan to enhance this presentation in the near future and display the slide show again.

Mapping London's urban heat island effect

Date: 1958-1964

Creator: Tony Chandler (1928 - 2008)

(Source: scanned from Chandler T.J. (1965) The Climate of London. London: Hutchinson, page 165.)

• The research work of Tony Chandler on the climatic patterns in cities was influential in the late 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his detailed empirical results on the extent of the urban heat island effect across London was widely cited.
  
• He undertook some innovative, large scale data gathering on temperature changes along transects across London, showing that during calm weather temperature differences between city centre and the surrounding countryside could be as much as 6 degrees C. His subsequent data analysis and visualization of spatial patterns provided important quantitative evidence to the variable scale of urban heat islands.
• Chandler recently died and more details on his career are given in his obituary in The Times.
  

(Source: scanned from Chandler T.J. (1965) The Climate of London. London: Hutchinson, page 170.)

Physiographic Diagram of the Atlantic Ocean

Date: 1957

Creators: Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp

• This was the first comprehensive map of the topographic landscape of the floor of the Atlantic ocean created by Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp. It opened up a new space for inspection, contributing vital visual evidence to support tectonic plate theories, with the prominent Mid-Atlantic Ridge being seen as the key driving element in continental drift.

• The map was laboriously produced from many hundreds of sonar scans and depth measurement. It was initially supported by Bell Labs who needed detailed information on the structure of the ocean floor to aid laying undersea telecommunications cables. Subsequent maps produced by Heezen and Tharp enjoyed widespread success and were published as posters and reproduced in various forms in popular atlases and textbooks.
  

• For further discussion see the paper 'Extending modern cartography to the ocean depths: military patronage, Cold War priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp mapping project, 1952–1959', by Ronald E. Doel, Tanya J. Levin, Mason K. Marker in the Journal of Historical Geography, 2006.
  

Central Place Theory

Date: 1933

Creator: Walter Christaller (1893 - 1969)

(Source: Christaller W. (1933) Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Jena: Gustav Fischer.)

• First published in Christaller’s 1933 monograph Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Central Places in Southern Germany), which was translated into English in 1966.
• Location theory delimiting rules governing the distribution, size, number and function of towns, predicting ideal development of settlement. Popularized by Berry and Bunge in 1960s, for emphasis on spatial organisation and regularities.
• Icon of the so-called 'Quantitative Revolution' in Geography, with long-lasting impact on school curricula.

(Source: www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/solstice/win06/Germany/indexPartII.html)

Worldmapper cartograms of social and economic statistics

Date: 2004 - ongoing

Creators: Danny Dorling and co-workers

(Wealth Year 2015)

(Human Poverty)

• Mark Newman and Michael Gastner published a novel software algorithm to efficiently generate an equal area cartogram in 2004.
• Danny Dorling and co-workers at Sheffield University deployed this algorithm and applied it to publicly available national-level datasets from 2004. Published online from www.worldmapper.org and also available as pdf posters, the mapping represents values by areas but preserves the aesthetics of relative geographic position in striking images depicting global inequalities.
  

Newman and Gastner Cartograms

U.S. 2004 Presidential Election

(Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election.)

Heartlands Theory map

Date: 1904

Creator: Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861 - 1947)

• First published in the 1904 article, The Geographical Pivot of History.

• Foundational idea in geopolitics: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
• Geopolitical mapping linking politics to territorial control published ever since. Contemporary resonance; e.g. Barnett’s Pentagon’s New Map.
  

Pollen Analysis Diagrams

Date: 1934

Creator: Sir Harry Godwin (1901 - 1985)

• Technique for quantitative analysis of changes in vegetation developed by van Post in Sweden in early 1900s.
• Popularized in Britain following Godwin’s 1934 publications of two part article, Pollen Analysis: An Outline of the Problems and Potentialities of the Method (New Phytologist, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 325-358).
• Diagrammatic expression of technique exploited by Godwin and other researchers in East Anglia, led to the successful explanation for environmental changes in the Holocene and pioneering of other rigorous dating methodologies.

Godwin-inspired pollen analysis diagram.

(Source: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/midewin/pollendiag.html)

Drainage basin as sediment transfer system

Date: 1977

Creator: Stanley A. Schumm

• Published in Schumm’s 1977 research monograph The Fluvial System, this simple heuristic model stresses the relations between form and process in fluvial systems.
• Frequently used in teaching it comes to represent the turn towards process that dominates much contemporary geomorphology.
  

(Source: Newson M. (1992) Land Water and Development. London: Routledge.)

'Hockey sticks' global warming graph

Date: 1998

Creator: Michael E. Mann and co-workers

• Published in an influential 1998 Nature article, Mann et al, Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries.
• Visualization of implied anthropogenic induced global warming provoked significant controversy and frequent reworkings of both data series and its representation, for example in the Third IPCC report.
  

(Source: Brumfiel G, (2006) "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph", Nature 441, 1032-33.)

ITE Land Cover Map of Britain

Date: 1993

Creators: Robin Fuller and co-workers

(Source: http://www.ceh.ac.uk/products/publications/documents/23global2.pdf)

• Pioneering digital processing of LANDSAT TM satellite imagery to produce a useful 25 class land cover map of Britain. Described in 1994 research article by Fuller et al, The Land Cover Map of Great Britain: An Automated Classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper Data in the journal Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing.
• The work has had significant impacts across discipline, offering one of first automated processes of land cover database compilation.
  

The Shrinking World
Date: 1939
Creator: Eugene Staley

(Sources: Image from Schäfer W. (2005) “Ptolemy's Revenge: A Critique of Historical Cartography,” Coordinates. Online Journal of the Map and Geography Round Table, American Library Association.)

• Illustration in Staley’s 1939 monograph World Economy in Transition.
• Perhaps the first visual representation of the impact of technical progress on global travel time.
• Shrinking world concept popularised in the literature of globalization, for example in books such as Peter Dicken’s Global Shift and as an illustration of time-space compression by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity.
  

(Source: Harvey D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell p. 241, plate 3.1.)

Maps Descriptive of London Poverty

Date: 1886-1903

Creator: Charles Booth (1840-1916)

(Source: Charles Booth online archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk.)

• Original publication associated with Booths's Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London.

• Strongly influential on the study of geographies of inequality. Key start point for much thematic mapping, census cartography and descriptive analysis of social geography; e.g. CASA's London Profiler.
  

Booth-influenced London Profiler, 2008.

The Naked City - The Situationists

Date: 1957

Creator: Guy Debord (1931 - 1994)

(Source: www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_interactive_city_sant.htm)

• This subversive mapping was exhibited in 1957 in the First Psychogeographic Exhibition in Paris.

• Strongly iconic of alternative re-imaginings of the city and of the non-representational turn in cultural geography – inspiring numerous contemporary derives and artistic and activist engagements with the urban condition; e.g. Christian Nold’s biomapping of emotions.

Debord-inspiredEmotion mapping of London, 2004.

Mapping emotional arousal around the Royal Geographical Society……
(Source: www.biomapping.net/old.htm)

Burgess concentric ring model

Date: 1925

Creator: Ernest W. Burgess (1886 - 1966)

(Source: Park, R., Burgess, E.W. and McKenzie, R.D. (1925) The City.)

• First published in 1925 in Burgess’ chapter in Park et al. The City.

• First and strongly iconic neo-classical spatial model of urban structure to explain distribution of social classes in the city invoking bid rent curves.

• Came to represent views of the Chicago School and strongly influenced other modellers such as Hoyt, Harris and Ulmann and subsequent quantifiers in Urban Social Geography.

(Source: http://teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu/snyderd/APHG/Unit%206/urbannotes.htm)

The 'Bullard Fit' - hteory of continental drift
Date: 1965
Creators: Edward Bullard (1907 - 1980) and co-workers

(Source: Bullard, E. C., Everett, J. E., & Smith, A. G. (1965). The fit of the continents around the Atlantic. In A Symposium on Continental Drift, Royal Society of London Philosophical Transactions, Series A, 258, 41-51.)

• Published in a 1965 research article by Bullard et al, The Fit of the Continents Around the Atlantic in Royal Society of London Philosophical Transactions.

• Anteceded by numerous mappings of the apparent Atlantic fit of continents (notably Alfred Wegener's Origin of the Continents and Oceans) Bullard and his co-workers produced the first computer-generated map of the 1000 metre isobath fit, and in so doing contributed to the plate tectonic revolution.

(Source: Wegener A. (1915) Origin of the Continents and Oceans.)

Cyclical model of fluvial erosion of landforms
Date: 1909
Creators: William Morris Davis (1850-1934)

Significance:

Source: Davis, W.M., 1909. Geographical Essays. Boston, Ginn and Company.

Time-space geography model

Date: 1970

Creator: Torsten Hägerstrand (1916 - 2004)

(Source: Hägerstrand, T., 1970. What about people in Regional Science? Papers of the Regional Science Association 24, 7-21.)

• Published in Hägerstrand’s influential 1970 article, What About People in Regional Science? in Papers of the Regional Science Association.

• Notion and visualization of space-time paths encouraged a consideration of time as part of social life instead of just an external influence. Continuing influence on wide range of disciplines across social sciences, including in GIScience; e.g. Mei-Po Kwan’s 3D ‘fishtank’ visualisations.
  

Hägerstrand-inspired Kwan’s GIS-generated space time paths, 2004.

(Source: http://geog-www.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/mkwan/Gallery/STPaths.htm)