Collaborative Cartography

Over this past semester, I have experienced the world of cartography (as you have read in all of my blogs). We not only employed the art of cartography to create maps of our own, but we reviewed how cartography is seen and affects people in the world as well. Throughout my blogs, I have talked about x-treme cartography, historical cartography, virtual cartography and many other aspects of cartography that many people don't realize. Cartography is employed everywhere to show many different things. When I started this semester, I had little idea about the importance of cartography let alone know how to use any software to create maps of my own. But I learned how. In the beginning we made maps using data from the census burea (great information and data source) and our project was to portray this data as a map on a poster. My poster was on ethnicity. Using data from the census bureau and software from mapviewer, I created my first map. This was a big step towards my future career. From this process, I not only learned how to find data and put it into a from that could be read by the software I was using, but learned about the software as well. From this, I found out that creativity plays a major role in designing maps and tis is what hooked me. Not only are you showing information to a viewer when designing a map, but you are showing them your creativity as well. You can make a million different maps that all show the exact same thing. The next project in the semester was understanding virtual worlds like Google Earth and how to use them to our benefit when making maps and posters. Google Earth is an amazing thing to have. It gives you a whole different perspective that you can't get looking at anything else. In this project, I decided that I was going to use Google Earth Pro and Nasa World Wind (another virtual world) to talk about cycling through the mother lode in California. Using this software was amazing. Not only could I show pictures that I took about the area I was describing, but I could also use aerial photos that showed this areas topography from space giving the viewer a cooler perspective to look at. With all this new technology that was being presented to me during this class, it gave me a brighter outlook about the future of cartograpy and helped to enhance my own creativity. The last project we set out to do in this class was designing pages that would go into an atlas of Nevada. This encorporated everything I had learned from throughout the semester. With an intended audience of younger kids, I had to decide what kind of information I wanted to show but still keep it fun and interesting at the same time. With the class coming to an end, I have to conclude that I have definitely learned a lot this semester. I have also learned that being a cartographer would actually make a great career. Cartography is used in everyday life and the demand for it only keeps growing and growing. With advances in technology happening all the time, there is no limits and how far cartography will go. Stay tuned and think spatial. Some day in the future, one of the maps you see maybe designed by the mapster.