ABSTRACT
There has long been a close relationship between social science and the geographical representation of information. The nineteenth-century invention of the term social survey is in itself suggestive of the close historical relationship between cartography and social research. This relationship was more than simply metaphorical. Charles Booth’s survey of London life and labour used coloured maps to show the complicated patterning of social class and poverty; these maps called into question simple generalizations about the social geography of the city. A map can often represent information more clearly than a number of tables or a written text, and will give extra information about the spatial attributes of that information. Many of the central issues for social scientists, such as social inequality, social stratification, and racial, ethnic and gender divisions within societies, are both expressed and to some extent constituted through geographical relations.
