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During the last years, various new paradigms for cartography have been proposed in the subject's scholarly literature. This article discusses the heterogeneous formulations of these cartographic paradigms in the light of the original conception of the term paradigm by Thomas Kuhn. In accordance with Kuhn, the call for a new paradigm of cartography shall be interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction about the discipline's current capabilities to solve subject-relevant problems. In terms of Kuhn, we can call this situation a crisis. Evidence for a crisis can be found, on the one hand, in scientific literature of cartography – e.g. by means of ambiguities of cartographic key-concepts. On the other hand, questions within the traditional scope of cartography have been picked up by young disciplines like Visual Analytics during the last years. The main reason for this assumed crisis is seen in increasing disparities between cartographic theory and the potentials of cartographic practise, which also has an effect on cartography's scientific self-conception as a mediator between its users and reality. In the course of this article, the above-mentioned disparities will be explored from different angles and finally structured in the form of a triadic semiotic model, which may offer a sustainable framework to answer some of the raised questions on explicit and implicit cartography. |
