Seeing and Reading Maps

"In Graphics and graphic Information-Processing, [Jaques] Bertin contrasts two kinds of demographic maps, 'seeing maps' and 'reading maps'--and privileges the former (147; see also Semiology 34-35). Seeing maps represent demographic data with a graded set of concrete signs, that is signs having visual properties--above all, area, in practice--homologous with, or mimetic of, their referents . . . As Bertin (Graphics) notes, seeing maps serve viewers well both for ready perception of general tendencies among data and as decipherable, detailed record of the data. In our terms, seeing maps are well adapted for either synoptic or analytic apprehension. In contrast," reading maps would use symbols "whose visual properties . . . are not mimetic of their referents . . . As with seeing maps, the detailed recording of demographic data on reading maps can be deciphered for analytical purposes; in contrast to the marks on seeing maps, however, those on reading maps generally lack the Gestalt properties needed to foster holistic perception. In Foucauldian terms, seeing maps enable panoptic surveillance, that is, surveillance on both the synoptic and the analytic levels; reading maps, on the other hand, permit only analytic surveillance." (Barton and Barton, "Modes of Power" 150-52.)


Seeing vs. Reading Maps