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| Cartography
serves multiple purposes. Maps and diagrams are widely used for communicating
information. I would like to take this opportunity to promote their use in inductive
and deductive reasoning. In this talk I would like to illustrate the use of maps and
diagrams in concept refinement and evaluation. I would like to go back some 20
– 25 years to when I was evaluating summary statistics which drove elements of
public policy. For example, the allocation of vast sums of public money towards the
regeneration of deprived areas is driven by so-called Indices of Local Conditions. |
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| The derivation of such instruments of
policy from large volumes of routinely collected data is not easy. Twenty
years ago, Carley (1981) noted that there was a mismatch
between indicators and the themes they were designed to represent. He felt then that
this was inevitable given that "social statistics and social theorising were still
at a very early stage of development". Dicennial population censuses, such as that to be taken in 2001, drive a review
of the social indicators used in the preceding decade. Each successive review abandoned
past methodology and adopted new methods. Carley’s observations therefore
may still be pertinent. |
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| In a paper
delivered at IFIP '84, entitled Concept Refinement through the
Graphical Representation of Large Data Sets, I suggested that advances in IT
could be harnessed to facilitate social research. With the advent of networked graphical
workstations, such as the Xerox Star Office System, maps and tables had become two-way
virtual devices. I anticipated that they would soon be used for probing databases
and, more excitingly, for cross-referencing information across a set of displays in the
pursuit of insights and understanding.
However as Jim Foley (2000), the principal author of the big
bible on Computer Graphics, observed creative information visualisation is among
the top ten challenges left in year 2000 for Computer Graphics.
I would
like therefore to illustrate the use of maps and diagrams in investigative research using
the problem of the statistical definition of social indicators as an example.
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| I will start by briefly introducing
the process involved in the statistical definition of Indices of Local Conditions. I
will focus initially on the use of just two variables for locating the worst areas. We
will look at the worst areas as picked out by the traditional metrics and then see how the
new metric, I proposed, changes our perceptions. We will then look at the
outcomes of my research.
I will then look briefly at the more interesting multi-category themes, such as
demographic types, before drawing my conclusions. |
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