Alan MacEachren

"When visualization tools act as a catalyst to early visual thinking about a relatively unexplored problem, neither the semantics nor the pragmatics of map signs is a dominant factor. On the other hand…"

"The representational nature of maps, however, is often ignored – what we see when looking at a map is not the word, but an abstract representation that we find convenient to use in place of the world.…"

"Without categorization, maps would not be possible."

"Maps, due to their melding of scientific and artistic approaches, always involve complex interaction between the denotative and the connotative meanings of signs they contain."

"Use of the term visualization in the cartographic literature can be traced back at least four decades . It was the 1987 publication of a report by the U. S. National Science Foundation, however, that …"

"It may be that the human brain not only perceives but stores the essentials of a visual scene using the same geometrical, quasi-symbolic, minimalist vocabulary found in maps."

"Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information acc…"

"To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization."