The Evolution of Cartographic Education in the United States

As with most technology-intensive disciplines, cartographic education in the United States has witnessed a remarkable transformation over the past century.Much of the curriculum in academic cartography during the 1930s to 1970s focused on basic mapping techniques, map projections, and map construction using pen and ink or photographic/darkroom methods (scribing, peelcoat, and photoreproduction).Transformations during the 1970s and 1980s saw the use of computer-based methods increasingly dominating cartographic education, starting with the first mapping programs such as SYMAP and Odyssey.Concurrently, educators included more advanced statistical methods, and the results of psychophysical and cognitive cartographic studies were integrated into the modern cartographic curriculum.Throughout this transformation to computer cartography, many of the fundamental cartographic principles-map projections, generalization, symbolization, and map design-were maintained and enhanced.Moving into the 1990s, personal computers increasingly became popular, which ushered in desktop mapping with associated applications such as Illustrator and Freehand.At the same time, the World Wide Web was looked upon as a novel way to disseminate and interact with cartographic products.The modern cartography curriculum of the 2000s, while still including these fundamental principles, has shifted to include animated and fourdimensional cartography, geovisualization, maps and society, web mapping, and very recently, the application of artificial intelligence into cartographic methodology.The paper is designed to: (1) review some of the major trends in cartographic education, focusing on the period from 1950 to the present, and (2) provide a revised curriculum for the modern cartography course using topics from the recently published textbook, Thematic Cartography and Geovisualization.Although the earliest courses in cartography (dating back to the 1920s) can be sourced to Columbia University (with Armin Lobeck), the University of Chicago (with J. Paul Goode), and a few other universities, it was in the early 1950s that the first American comprehensive "model' cartographic curriculum was proposed by George Jenks (1953), who had spent one academic year visiting various agencies to learn about their methods and needs.The culmination of his project was the development of a model curricula, published in the Annals of the AAG in 1953, as "An Improved Curriculum for Cartographic Training at the College and University Level."The model included a five-course sequence that included topics such as training in projections, grids, scale, lettering, and symbolization; the use, availability, and evaluation of maps; compiling and construction of small-scale and large-scale maps; and training in the preparation of simple manuscript maps.Of course, Jenks' model curricula was the ideal model at the time, and few geography departments could offer this type of a robust sequence.Subsequent to Jenks' proposed model, other efforts have examined and proposed the content of cartography courses.One such effort was by Freyman and Sines (1990), who used an extensive survey of instructors to identify the key components of a basic cartography course.Their study identified the most commonly taught topics and included data types and manipulation, symbolization, map design, map projections, lettering, scale, grids, and generalization.Surprisingly, the basic thematic mapping types, such as choropleth mapping, isarithmic mapping, and dot mapping were not always included in their recommended syllabus.Research in the 1980s,1990s, and early 2000s by Nyerges and Chrisman (1989), McMaster andThrower (1991), Fryman and Sines (1998) and Tyner (2005) have taken a critical examination of cartographic education during a time of continued rapid technological change and subsequent impacts on the cartographic process.As we would expect, the modern course in cartography has significantly advanced since the Jenks' model curricula