EXPLORING GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION TRENDS IN GEOGRAPHY READY FIGURE ONE! EXPLORING GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION TRENDS IN GEOGRAPHY Thomas J. Pingel Department of Geography Northern Illinois University Invited lecture - March 30, 2016

Three questions What are the current practices for graphic communication in geography? How have these practices changed? How are maps being used as tools of rhetoric in professional discourse?

To assess current practices and trends, I compared Figure 1 from most recent issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers with first two issues of AAAG in 1996.

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http://spacetimecubevis.com/ 2016

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What happened, and why? 1996 2016

As academic use of maps has declined, media use of maps has increased and become more sophisticated, especially within the context of data journalism.

http://www. nytimes. com/elections/2016/national-results-map. WT http://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/national-results-map?WT.mc_id=2016-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=115245&kwp_4=543329&kwp_1=289112

Making good scientific visuals Have a story to tell Craft your figures carefully! Keep it simple Know your data and statistics Whenever possible, let your reader see the data with as little interference as you can Show others your work and get feedback Making good visuals is a lot like writing well; it takes practice and years of training to get good at it

Is “chart-junk” beneficial? http://technicalillustrators.org/2010/04/chart-junk-beneficial/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

http://earth.nullschool.net/

http://www.lucify.com/embed/the-flow-towards-europe/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2hZ6SlSqq0

A few of my favorite geovisual analysis sites