100 words - day 14

Audience

Another key thing to consider before you start to create a map is who is the map intended audience? Is this group of people familiar with the region you are going to map? Do you know about the places and things you are going to put on your map? How will they access your map (online vs offline)? What message do you want to impact with the map?

As I wrote before maps can be influential in shaping our knowledge of the world and others those that view a map. All sorts of detail will influence how the audience feels about places you display. A map is always a simplification of the real world, it is impossible to keep all the detail at the same scale and take a 3D world and put it onto a 2D map (this is what we need consider which map projections to chose).

Also part of considering the audience is what you want people to think, feel and perhaps even do after seeing your map. Do you just want people to simply view it and think wow that’s cool? Or do you want them to think I never realised that (fill in the feature/country/town/lake/river..) was so close to me or this other feature? Or do you want them to take action, perhaps visualising something flooding or glacial retreat on a map can enhance the storytelling?

It is essential to consider who will be consuming the information as this can really inform what to include or exclude and the beauty with digital maps is it becomes much easier to edit this after feedback from a test group.

One final thought, will your intended audience share this map further? Now it is so easy to press that ubiquitous ‘share’ button on apps that ideas can spread rapidly. Giving this some thought might be worth it especially when viewed on different screens or browsers. As with any kind of digital sharing it is important to think about the structure to the data, how is it stored and will it load quickly and can this be improved? While digital mapping offers so many possibilities, it also challenges us to ask more questions. More on this later.