Evaluating Trust In Cartographic Representations: Theory, Methods, And Design.
Open Access
- Author:
- Prestby, Tim
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 19, 2025
- Committee Members:
- Brian King, Program Head/Chair
Cynthia Brewer, Major Field Member
Anthony Robinson, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Helen Greatrex, Major Field Member
S. Shyam Sundar, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- trust
misinformation
maps
visualization
geography - Abstract:
- Trust in information is more contested than ever with the rise of misinformation and post-truth politics. Maps are not immune to this trend and are increasingly a vehicle for spreading unorthodox views on science and key societal issues. Despite their historical and contemporary role as rhetorical devices, trust has been the subject of little systematic study in cartography. This dissertation addresses this gap in the science of cartography through three studies. The first study (Chapter 2) reviews contemporary literature in cartography and related disciplines to characterize the methodologies employed to study trust in maps and identify key factors linked to trust in maps. This literature review informed a research agenda for advancing the science on trust in maps by synthesizing methodological limitations of existing research and proposing research questions that address gaps in knowledge. The second study (Chapter 3) develops a reliable and valid rating scale to measure the construct of trust in maps. This scale consists of 12 items that are grounded in theory and empirically-derived based on data from online experiments. The third study (Chapter 4) evaluates how two cartographic design considerations—data reliability representation and semantic color congruence—influence people’s trust in and ability to read maps. Representing data reliability on maps led to significantly lower trust, map reading accuracy, and map reading confidence. However, semantic congruence did not influence trust or map reading accuracy. In Chapter 5, I summarize each study and synthesize their overall contributions to the science of Cartography, outline limitations of the dissertation, and propose avenues for future work. This dissertation contributes to cartography and GIScience by developing methodologies for studying trust in maps and related difficult-to-measure constructs. It also highlights key factors linked to trust in maps by synthesizing existing empirical works and conducting experiments. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the design of trustworthy maps by establishing a foundational understanding of how trust is defined in maps, how it can be measured, and how it plays a role in map reading.