Cartography has existed for thousands of years. From the early days of tribes marking off where their best hunting grounds are, to the modern day of mapping flight paths, cartography has evolved and developed in various ways to what it is today. There are now technologies that allow for people to design maps in ways never imagined before. Computer programmes exist that allow for different types of data to be stored so that accurate representations can be formed. It has been said that, “Maps are pictures of the world’s land surface, showing its features, resources and the way it has been developed.” (Bondi, et al., 1977)
Origins and History
The beginnings of Cartography
It has been said that Cartography originated thousands of years ago. Wall paintings believed to represent a maps of the heavens exist all around the world. The oldest maps that have been preserved on Babylonian clay tablets are from around 2300 B.C. Cartography as a whole was dominant in Greece as the subject was more advanced than other locations and so the spherical Earth was well known amongst Greek philosophers. (Aber, 2008). The reference-line principle was created by one of Aristotle’s disciples. Dichaearchus was this disciple’s name and he obtained this theory by placing an orientation line that ran from east to west. (Fuechsel, 2013)
The Roman Era is the next part of history where Cartography was involved in. Maps in this time were created from military routes and were constructed using more practical methods than the mathematical method employed by the Greeks. The Middle Ages soon followed this era, and Cartography as a whole did not develop a great amount further during these times. The church was said to be responsible for this as they based their...
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Like the Arabs, the Europeans sometimes let their religion come between them and the truth. The best example of this is what Boorstin refers to as the “Great Interruption,” a time in the Middle Ages where theological, rather than geographical, accuracy was prioritized in mapmaking. Rather than continuing the work of Ptolemy and refining his rectangular coordinate system, cartographers “spent their energies embroidering a neat, theologically appealing picture of what was already known, or was supposed to be known.” (Boorstin, 100) Maps depicted the world as a circular disc divided into three parts, the three parts being the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, separated by a T-shaped flow of water. Jerusalem was always in the center of the maps; the justification came from a verse in Ezekiel saying that God had placed Jerusalem in the midst of the nations, which was interpreted literally. Allowing Christian dogma to determine the shape of the earth was a major failing in Boorstin’s eyes; nevertheless, the episode was only an “interruption,” and Europe eventually resumed discovery. Firstly, Boorstin credits the west for the modern clock and calendar. Although earlier versions of clocks from other parts of the world are mentioned, the author focuses primarily on the contributions of westerners to its development. When missionary
Ken Jennings was a map nerd from a young age himself, you will not be surprised to learn, even sleeping with an old creased atlas at the side of his pillow, most kids his age were cuddling with a trusted blanket- Jennings was not. As he travels the world meeting people of kindred spirits--map librarians, publishers, geocachers, and the engineers behind google maps. Now that technology and geographic unknowing is increasingly insulting us from the space and land around us, we are going to be needing these people more than ever. Mapheads are the ones who always know exactly where they are and...
Professor Anthony Grafton is a renowned historian at the Princeton University. He is noted for his studies about the history of culture and science of Renaissance Europe. In his paper, Dating history: the Renaissance & the reformation of chronology, he first talked about the science of geography that was revolutionized by European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. As Grafton argued that “While the western understanding of geography expanded during the Renaissance, then, the traditional dating of the past and future remained curiously narrow-minded.”, he then started to talk about his profound study of the scholarship and chronology of one of the most significant classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Justus Scaliger: “……won renown for his reformation of the traditional approach to chronology. Working in decades around 1600, Scaliger relaid the technical foundations of the field.” According to Grafton, in order to “appreciate the explosive impact of this reformation of historical chronology, we need to look backward”. He looked back to examine the chronology in fourth and fifth century C.E., in the fifth century B.C. Greek, and in the Romans of the late Republic and early Empire.
You need to understand and be able to construct geometric figures by using a compass and a straightedge. Both the compass and the straightedge were used before when the computers were invented. The first person to use a compass and straightedge was Euclid, “the father of geometry”. Drafting with both of these tools were the foundation of all geometric constructions.
Until the 1950s, Atlases were mostly comprised of maps that simply show space and place. However in 1953, the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, published by Walter Paepcke’s Container Corporation of America (CCA) with Herbert Bayer, changed people’s notion of what maps look like and what information they contain. Bayer believed, that maps were “a record of time and perhaps even a tool of prognostication.” By the use of Isotypes (International System of Typographic Picture Education), Bayer created an atlas that is universal, therefore allowed viewers to understand complex data more clearly and easily.
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Since the beginning of humankind, the study of geography has captured the imagination of the people. In ancient times, geography books extolled tales of distant lands and dreamed of treasures. The ancient Greeks created the word "geography" from the roots "ge" for earth and "grapho" for "to write." These people experienced many adventures and needed a way to explain and communicate the differences between various lands. Today, researchers in the field of geography still focus on people and cultures (cultural geography), and the planet earth (physical geography).
Historical geographer JB Harley wrote an essay on Map Deconstruction in 1989, in which Harley argues that a map is more than just a geographical representation of an area, his theory is that we need to look at a map not just as a geographical image but in its entire context. Harley points out that by an examination of the social structures that have influenced map making, that we may gain more knowledge about the world. The maps social construction is made from debate about what it should show. Harley broke away from the traditional argument about maps and examined the biases that govern the map and the map makers, by looking at what the maps included or excluded. Harley’s “basic argument within this essay is that we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography.” Therefore Harley’s aim within his essay on ‘Deconstructing the Map’ was to break down the assumed ideas of a map being a purely scientific creation.
Geographical concepts have been traced back to ancient days, geography is defining as the scientific study of the location of people and activity across earth and reasons for their distribution. It asks where and why things are where they are. Geographers organizes materials by the places they are located, thus being they have concluded that what happens in one place affects what happens in another place and can further affect conditions in the near future. Like any other subject geography has its own language and knowledge for better understanding of its concepts. Thinking geographically means learning the language, we need both geographical vocabulary and grammar in order to do this. Geography has concepts that enables us to have geographical
time, people were all acquiesce in geocentrism which was put forward by Eudoxus of Cnidus and
The claim being discussed here is that the only way a map or a way of representing things can be useful is if it simplifies the knowledge that the actual territory gives, that is, if it reduces the salient i...
...h tech tools that are now used a lot of the final measurements are determined by the human eye. In the Industrial Age surveying became very important to deal with taxes and this is where the two methods came into play because geodetic were effective for a large area and took the terrain into account which was helpful for maps but plane surveying was more helpful in equally dividing up the land. Surveying became even more prominent as population grew and construction began to expand surveying for roads and bridges to just collect data as travel began to increase and ensure that the establishments could handle the new load that the increased population could handle and thus the tools began to advance dramatically from rod measurement to GPS to give more detailed reading to get further intelligence on the ground and distance more accurately using the new equipment.
Longely et al (2005) state that there are many possible ways of defining spatial analysis but at the end all the definitions express the basic idea that information on locations is essential. Analysis carried out without knowledge of locations is not spatial analysis (Longely et al, 2005). Spatial data analysis (SDA) is a set of techniques created to support a spatial perspective on data (Goodchild et al, 1992). SDA can be differentiated from other forms of analysis by definition. It might be defined as a set of techniques whose results are dependent on the locations of the objects or events being analyzed, requiring access to both the locations and the attributes of objects (Goodchild, 1987; Goodchild et al, 1992). Spatial analysis is the heart of GIS because it includes all of the transformations, manipulations, and methods that can be applied to geographic data to add value to them. In a nutshell, spatial analysis is the process by which raw data is turned into useful information, in scientific discovery and decision making (Longely et al, 2005). A geographical information system (GIS) provides a powerful collection of tools for the management and visualization of spatial data. These tools are more influential when they are integrated with methods for spatial data analysis (Krivoruchko and Gotway, ). Bailey and Gatrell (1995) distinguish between spatial phenomena using the basic GIS operations such as spatial query, join, buffering, and layering and spatial data analysis as the application of statistical theory and techniques to the modeling of spatially referenced data, which is the discipline of spatial statistics. ArcGIS spatial analyst provides powerful spatial modeling and analysis features. GIS ...