Home Good Practice PPGIS/PGIS books P3DM Video P3DM Where? Site Map Search Contact us  

Hue (colour) in participatory mapping

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Home
Geo-referencing ITK
DEM Sources
About carton board
About EVA / PE
Coding Means
Reading Maps
Fighting with Scales
Vertical Exaggeration
P3DM Base map
P3DM Base Table

Point Features
Area Features
Linear Features

This page was
last updated on
June 29, 2010

Get details:

 

The most expressive variables associated to symbols are colour and size. More authoritative than others, colour (or hue) serves as a powerful system of differentiation, burdened with cultural meaning, overwhelmed by its associations and its history. Yet colour is a code that is constantly subject to change (Ferrier, 2002). Nonetheless, when it comes to mapping Earth features there are some silent conventions which have become common practice: water bodies are shown as blue and vegetation as green; more is darker and less is lighter.
 

Suggested coding - but make sure that preferences expressed by the community are taken into consideration!

 

 

Hue

 Feature

Hue

 Feature

 

Forest (1)

 

Orchard

 

Forest (2)

 

Vegetable Garden

 

Forest (3)

 

Paddy field

 

Forest (4)

 

Sugarcane

 

Forest (5)

 

Residential area

 

Grassland

 

Resettlement area

 

Shifting Cultivation

   
 

Mangroves

 

Lake, sea and river


Other hues are associated with traditional meanings depending on the cultural traits of the participating communities: death is associated to white in India, to black among westerners and violet amid Mangians in the Philippines. “What these various figurative uses of colour have in common is the way that they present colour as linked with perception, and as perception that is not neutral or objective, but value added that is, overlaid with cultural value (Ferrier 2002).

In mapmaking, the association of a specific hue to a symbol is therefore far from being a neutral act. The same applies to points, lines, areas and volumes, the remaining sets of symbols. When used to depict real world features their choice and their variation correspond to selected interpretations of reality made by those who compose the map.
 

       

 

Hit Counter

Back Home Up Next