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> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science.

Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate land maps were also important for military and state finance purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.

I’m not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious engineering field rather than an “art”, and dismissing that rich history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of map-making theory.

What is the interest in this article from 2001? There is a rich GIS and visualization history that has happened since then … if you really want to see something radical look at Wild Bill Bunge’s work

Title needs a (2001) I skimmed the paper looking for new insight only to see it talk about stuff that's already prevalent.

QGIS, FME, D3, Open layers, Mapbox, and others GIS related tools has been prevalent in all the workplaces I've worked at that needed something related to this topic.

Parts of theoretical cartography are model example how Information Theory Bandwagon [1] works:

'By the mid-1970s any historical account of the development of models of cartographic communication becomes unmanageable very largely because of their increasing popularity and the way in which authors making use of them learn and borrow ideas from one another. One commentator faced with the proliferation of these models is distressed by being 'awash in a sea of scientific-sounding terminology mostly pirated from other fields such as electrical engineering.' [2]

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1056774 [2] Christopher Board, "Cartographic Communication", Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 1981