Notes, Ramblings, and My First Map!!!

 Hey, hey, hey! I just made my first map! It is a world map that details world population by country. I would very much like for it to be critiqued, so if anyone out there in Cyber-Land has a few minutes, tell me what you like and don't like about the map.

As for the rest of this entry, it's just some class notes and other info. I forgot to bring a pen to class, so no writing for me!!! Unfortunately, I am not a great typist, so these notes are, as my former In-School-Suspension teacher used to say, "Rude, crude, and uncouth." However crude, here they are:

On the Mercator projection, the distance measurements are true for the equator and about 15 degrees north and south of the equator. Large areas are distorted on a Mercator projection, most extremely so around the poles. The Mercator projection is a conformal map, meaning that it preserves shapes and angles. In a transverse Mercator, the same logic applies, only the area that is not distorted is at the poles. In order to get a more accurate picture of any given area on Earth, run the Mercator projection’s “great circle” around the Earth around the desired area.

Polyconic Map Projection

Equidistant Conic Map Projection

Lambert Conformal Conic

Gnomonic Projection

Albers Projection

Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area

Orthographic Map Projection

Robinson Map Projection

Sinusoidal Equal Area Projection

Stereographic Projection

Azimuthal Projection Map

Miller Cylindrical Projection

Here is a link to detailed descriptions of the aforementioned maps.

I think that is going to be all for this edition of GIS WTF? I am going to be traveling to Memphis tomorrow for a Rifle Match, so I will not be attending the Thursday class, but I will try to post something from the trip for all of my loyal followers. Until then, this should keep you entertained. If not, and you are a fellow Cochranite, feel free to use this nifty website I stumbled upon to see what your neighbor's land is worth! Finally, if none of the above links are working, then you must be into this...

History of Maps, Part 1

A Brief Who's Who and What's What of Maps and Mapping

George F. Jenks: Jenks' accomplishments are not as well recognized by the internet community as the next three men on this list, but from what I was able to deduce he derived new methods for showing maps on the computer. His paper "The Data Model Concept in Statistical Mapping" introduced the "Jenks Optimization Method," the particulars of which I am sure I will become more familiar with as the semester goes on.

Erwin Raisz: Raisz wrote the book on cartography. Literally, his General Cartography (1938) was the first published textbook on cartography. In doing so, he introduced the world to the "language" of cartography. By describing landforms as "orthoapsidal" or "armadillo," he gave us the vocabulary and map skills to adequately define and describe what we were wanting to map.

John Paul Goode: Goode developed a new world map that attempted to eliminate the area distortions that were present at the poles on older versions of world maps. His map, called a Homolosine projection because it combined the homolographic and sinusoidal projections, converged the two at the latitude where the scales were the same, and then merged the two there.

Waldo Tobler: An influential figure in cartography. Tobler is a Swiss-American who currently holds a teaching position in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was awarded a honoris causa from the University of Zurich in 1988 for his lifetime work in cartography. His main contribution to geography is the idea that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related to each other." This is known as the First Law of Geography.






A Note on Maps: Did you know that the earliest known map was made by the Babylonians almost 8,000 years ago? If you are interested and would like to know more about this, click here, or here, or even here, but not here. And, for the love of God, whatever you do, don't click here.

GIS POP QUIZ 1

Hello all!

I am about to take a quiz on this blog, so if you are also taking this quiz with me, DON'T PEAK!!! If you are following along at home, feel free to steal my answers and learn more about GIS! FTR, these answers may not be the most correct. Await my instructor's comment on the grade before taking this for absolute truth...

Question 1: What are the skills necessary to be a good cartographer?

The man on the moon does not exist! Trust me, or ask a cartographer. At least a good cartographer would tell you that he isn't real. That is one skill that he must have, knowing the difference between fact and fiction. But, more importantly, he would need to know how to make a good map. See my answer below to find out what all that entails. Furthermore, a good cartographer would be able to take in a task (say, someone asks him to make a map of Mercer University's Macon campus, highlighting the current parking areas) and put out a map that does just that. Of course, he would need to gain more insight into what the customer would want, so he would have to be able to communicate with him/her very effectively. Beyond that, the cartographer would need to be able to know how to gain information and datasets that detail the area to be mapped. These are but a few of the general skills that a cartographer would need to be successful.


Question 2: Distinguish between the elements that result in a "good map" and a "bad map."

A good map is going to have many elements that accomplish one purpose: making the map as easy to read and informative as possible. A scale and legend are must haves; they give the map reader much information about how to interpret the map. Also, easy-to-read color schemes are definitely needed. If the colors are offputting, then the reader will not want to look at the map and will not be as comfortable getting the information that he/she needs. When filling out a map with detail, simpler is better. Too much information is clutter at best, unreadable at worst.

A bad map is much easier to define. It is simply a map that isn't good. A bad map is missing one or more parts that make a good map, or is difficult to read and/or simply uninformative.


Well, that's it for my quiz today. I hope you have learned something about maps and map making, or at the very least, Dr. Rood has found it in his heart to give me an A.

Until next time,
Keep reading and playing along!

GIS in the PLK

I just installed my ESRI ArcMap software on my personal laptop in my Plunkett dorm room. It comes loaded with some base maps of the different regions of the United States, but as for any detailed maps or data sets, it is quite bare. To combat this problem, I Googled for some data sets. I came up with a site, http://www.fws.gov/data/statdata/, which has many links to the different States' public data sets. I registered with the Georgia Data Clearinghouse at http://data.georgiaspatial.org, which has let me access many of the different maps and data sets for the State of Georgia. I am busy now playing with the ArcMap software and learning more about how it works, what style maps are pleasing to the eye, and how to manipulate the data that I place onto the map. I will report back to you when I do something exciting!

Tomorrow's just your future yesterday

Where's the Fun?

This is a blog following Cam Yearty's GIS experience at Mercer University. For those of you who are unfamiliar: A Geographic Information System (GIS), is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that is linked to location. Technically, a GIS is a system that includes mapping software and its application to remote sensing, land surveying, aerial photography, mathematics, photogrammetry, geography, and tools that can be implemented with GIS software. Still, many refer to "Geographic Information System" as "GIS" even though it doesn't cover all tools connected to topology (Thanks, Wikipedia).

In this class we will be learning the basics of GIS as well as participating in a project using the skills that we have learned. I am sure that this will be an interesting experience.