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Should this be a map or 500 maps?
- anitil 2y agoQuite a charming story and of course now I want to see the maps. Did I miss is somehow? Is there somewhere I can see the 500 maps?
- elygre 2y agoExactly the same!
- bigiain 2y agohttps://archive.org/details/AtlasDeEspaa.TomsLpez/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/AtlasDeEspaa.TomsLpez/page/n9/mo...
- thinkingemote 2y agoAll the priest maps appear to be in the Spanish National Archives. There are a few academic articles about them . e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228910878_EL_LEVANTAMIENTO_TOPOGRAFICO_Y_LA_CARTOGRAFIA_EN_EL_SIGLO_XVIII_EL_METODO_DE_LA_TOPOGRAFIA_ECLESIASTICA https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228910878_EL_LEVANT... (in Spanish)
- lmm 2y agoI hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
- pfix 2y agoThe worth here is actually in hindsight as now historians can learn a lot about localities and local perceptions. They don't care as much about aesthetics (or at least perceive them in a different manner) But in general I assume you're right about the actual quality and it was hinted in the text. And when you take a look at the maps provided as examples, some of them are not accessible[1]. And for news articles, it really depends for me. Most of the time, I want the essence. But sometimes, especially with articles that are not actually news but a deeper analysis of a situation (e.g. ukraine war, palestine), I've read articles where on mobile it helped that they put extra effort in making the media work for the information by interleaving graphics, scrolling text, and so forth.[2] But as always this is also a matter of taste. [1] e.g.: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F223d349e-571c-45e7-92ff-fe9f6f3fa42b_2880x1800.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... [2] I haven't bookmarked those texts and I am not sure if it is actual useful to pick one random example for this discussion so I just save my time searching for this one example I only vaguely remember.
- beAbU 2y agoYeah I feel the same. Interestingly, with the fact that the article is digital, surely we can leverage so many more different and interesting ways to present the information, but I feel like most prefer to just read the text. I think it's because everyone reads a paper article in a different way. If you ask people how they read a magazine, you'll get as many responses as respondents. Some read back to front (I do that for some reason), some read articles from top to bottom, some scan through and look at the pictures and captions, then pulled quotes, then the main text. Some even read the paragraphs out of order and assembles it all afterwards. Everyone consumes a body of text in a different way, and an article that jacks your scroll and does "fancy" stuff with the way you can access the content makes assumptions about how the reader prefers to consume the content, and this assumption is often very wrong for me personally.
- nicbou 2y agoThis is true on the web, but not in print. Salt Fat Acid Heat is a gorgeous book and the beauty just doesn't translate well to .epub
- card_zero 2y agoHey look, an idiosyncratic map by that illustrator. https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/64240ee4eb3a3ba0c959ffe0_image1.png https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/...
- yen223 2y agoWell, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
- arnorhs 2y agoI'm all for creativity but laying devil's advocate,.. who is this supposed creativity for? If the majority of people just want to scan headlines efficiently and read/parse.. isn't that a good thing for most people? Pragmatically speaking, the creativity is not needed for news articles/headlines. We need better reporting / journalism in online news, not more creative frills..
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThe left hemisphere wondering what creativity is for…
- crazygringo 2y agoI mean, for most of the twentieth centuries books all looked the same. Same handful of typefaces, sizes, margins, etc. Newspapers also. Same handful of column layouts, typefaces, styling. It's not about user metrics. It's that what's important is the content of the text itself, alongside whatever photographs and illustrations are necessary and informative. Websites are no different from the long tradition of books and newspapers in this regard. There are plenty of spaces for artistic, aesthetic creativity on the internet. No shortage whatsoever. More art than there's ever been before. There's no need in also trying to shoehorn it into nonfiction articles everywhere.
- jve 2y ago> Close your eyes and picture the design of a news article on the web. For people with aphantasia: yes, there are actually people that can make/see pictures when eyes closed. Or even use their brain as CAD software. As for us, sorry, can't do it.
- nicbou 2y agoWe had a lively discussion about Google Maps in my cycling group. It's very annoying to have a map that is only designed to show the fastest route, and that forcefully reroutes you to it. It doesn't let you avoid a road or favour another. It does not show named bike routes and hiking trails. It doesn't even let you keep the screen on without having directions. For most people, the entire experience of using a map is constrained to this mediocre one-size-fits-all solution. Personalisation in general is just gone too. Remember the crazy weird skins for Windows Media Player? Now you're lucky if you can pick the OS-wide highlight colour. In the quest to build universal products, we ended up with a tech culture designed by committee. As software is eating the world, so does this culture. A welcome change from this is OsmAnd, an insanely versatile and customizable map that can be adjusted to your exact needs.
- ListeningPie 2y agoI use Magic Earth on iOS where a route can be saved as a file and then shared with others.
- peebeebee 2y agoMost of our software is bland because it is about practicality and functionality. A UI should do a lot more things than to be expressive. Being expressive is very low on the list. Reliability, accessibility and recognisability are very high on that list. Expressiveness also tends to fight accessibility and recognisability. This also goes for other design fields. As a (stupid) example: I can design all kinds of weird wonderful stairs in public places, that will give the place some charm. But the best one will be with a more boring ramp of with about 5degrees of incline, because that's the wheelchair-accessible one.
- nicbou 2y agoStyle is not the only form of expression. Adapting a tool to your workflow is also a form of expression. I'm surprised that with all of their resources, tech companies still build software that completely ignore relatively common use cases like hiking.
- psychoslave 2y ago> modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness I would highly mitigate this statement. It’s more like some forms of expressiveness are out of scope once you settle for a set of constraints, be it through modularity requirements in precise specifications sent to people that all passed the same qualifying formation, or vague query to a set of random people who don’t held in common much more than ability to match your query with some mind representation of their own. There is nothing that was either created by humans out of ontological constraints, even when nothing close to a mere wishlist was present. No one can instantly turns all its inconsistent dreams into shared reality just by turning its attention to whatever desire flows through their mind. And even dreams and desires and constraints by physical ability of brain mixed with psycho-social constraints.
- acka 2y agohttps://websim.ai/ https://websim.ai/ would like a word with you.
- psychoslave 2y agoSeems fun, thank for the link. Not sure how I should interpret your comment however :D
- breck 2y agoI've made some incredibly expressive art, perhaps the best art in all of history, by ignoring all modular constraints. I'd show it to you, but I ignored the constraint of sticking to the visible frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- netsharc 2y agoReminds me of this Zadie Smith writing about Facebook: https://archive.is/lRddT https://archive.is/lRddT and how we've been lead to categorize ourselves.
- glenjamin 2y agoI think a great takeaway from this article could be "standardization is not inherently valuable or desirable". Standardization, like almost anything, has costs and benefits and tradeoffs and so on. So when you're pushing to standardize something - consider what it is you're gaining and what it is you're losing, and decide whether that's a tradeoff you're ok with.
- arkh 2y agoReminds me of Structurizr and its perspective option to map software architecture. Multiple maps in one map.
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- etalgo 2y agohey this is elan, author of this piece. thanks for sharing and for the discussion for what it’s worth i do agree with the one or two comments here that say that the line “modularity is inversely correlated with expressiveness” is a bit reductive. i did have a long section of caveats but removed them because i felt like they confused the matter more. ironically i’m butting up against the expressive limits of the english language, its own modular technology :p html of course is another shared protocol that is so flexible that it does allow for immense expressiveness even while it makes certain core decisions that limit (arguably helpfully) certain forms of expression squarespace would be the ur example to me of a frankenstein product whose exceptional modularity makes expressiveness a battle with the machine which is all to say, i welcome more thoughts on this dynamic! for those asking to see all 500 maps, i wish i could too! unfortunately as far as i can tell they haven’t been digitized. if you find them please (please please) let me know. happy to upload the higher res versions of the maps i do have later.
- chatmasta 2y agoI loved the phrase “modularity is inversely correlated with expressiveness.” I don’t think it’s reductive, just incomplete. It’s missing a third dimension of “complexity.” You can increase expressiveness, but only by adding complexity. But even then, you’re just fractalizing into 500 more maps; the complexity is comprised of layers of modularity, each with its own degree of expressiveness. For example, you could mimic HTML by giving each map maker some standard components for expressing and classifying buildings and their relationships (“church,” “road,” etc). And sure, now you’ve increased expressiveness. But you’ve also added a new layer of modularity. So you’re right back at where you started. The maxim holds.
- elphinstone 2y agoA thoughtful and interesting rumination! The bit about modularity and expressiveness is spot on. I guess the king was too cheap to hire land surveyors!
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- skybrian 2y agoSurveys come to mind as another scenario where standardization is practical but hides a lot of individuality. For any survey question, asking the participant “why did you choose that answer?” could reveal interesting information. Maybe they interpreted the question in a surprising way?
- tomaskafka 2y agoThat's what an UX researcher will do with your NPS questionnaire. The score is bullshit, the "why" answers are the gold.
- drivers99 2y ago> I don't want this to be mistaken for a story about web design. If you squint, you will find the same set of tradeoffs in all manner of creative work and systems thinking Lots of comments about literal maps and then web design. This generalization of the idea quoted above made me think of something I believe about technological convergence (putting everything into phones and tablets). We’re losing the way custom made devices for different purposes were able to optimize for one purpose. I was thinking of the alarm-clock/radio (which itself is a converged device, it loses benefits of a wind up alarm clock and the benefits of a dedicated radio) vs just using your phone as an alarm clock and music/news player. For one thing, the alarm clock has the time always visible. For another, the radio is instantly available with a single click. And that’s just one of a hundred things that have been converged into the phone (starting with the actual telephone). I’ve been working on learning to build my own small computers. Part of it is that each one could be for a unique purpose and designed accordingly. (Circuitry, buttons, etc.) Thinking about it like thus article, one could go further and not limit each application to being “a computer” at all.
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- aidenn0 2y agoMy dad had a kit-built alarm clock that was elegant, simple, and useful. It was a split-flap display and derived the time-base from the 60Hz AC power.
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- ongytenes 2y agoGoes to show, when you want a job done right, you often end up having to do it yourself.
- ongytenes 2y agoGoes to show, if you want a job done right, you often end up having to do it yourself.
- naet 2y agoSlightly off topic but when websites disable default touch actions like pinch to zoom it makes for a rough mobile experience, especially when trying to read an article about maps which encourage you to take a close look.
- shkkmo 2y agoInterestingly, I have the "opposite" problem. I have many maps that I wish were "one". I have 7+ mapping apps that I use regularly. Usually I am using several at once and having to swap back and forth to figure out the information I need. I really wish we had an interoperability protocol that allowed me to combine the data sets locked in each app. I would love to use only one map. I think there is a strong argument that such a standardized protocol would allow people to currate and combine these datasets in their own way. While in one sense, it would mean there was just "one" map, but in another, there would be a plethora of maps, each tailored to an individual or purpose.
- lmc 2y ago> I really wish we had an interoperability protocol that allowed me to combine the data sets locked in each app There already are some established ones, e.g., https://www.ogc.org/standard/wfs/ https://www.ogc.org/standard/wfs/ It's widely used in the GIS field, but unfortunately not adopted by the most popular consumer apps.
- ryukafalz 2y agoI'm reminded of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott[0], which is in part about just this sort of thing. Maps were one example presented in the book. And it does apply beyond just that too; I read this blog post a while back relating this tendency to social networks: https://technomancy.us/199 https://technomancy.us/199 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
- colega 2y agoI clicked on the link expecting to find an article about hashmaps.
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoSame, I thought it was discussing a design change from a single dictionary to a list of dictionaries