Collaborative Cartography

When I think about Collaborative Cartography I think about a collection of ideas to support one main focus. For example, our combined efforts and thoughts on the atlas pages is a great example of Collaborative Cartography. I like how we can post our own thoughts and ideas and people will comment back on how it can be made better or something that is a really good idea. This is sort of like writing a paper and editing that paper using a lot of people to improve it. Over the course of the semester we have participated in an ongoing assignment on our blog sites. This also is a collection of ideas and it to offers a great resource to find out more about others ideas in various cartographic topics. All of this has helped improve the thought process of everyone and it was cool to see others ideas that i did not think about. Basically with collaborative cartography you are tackling the problem from all angles and that helps delete discrepancies.

Mapping Nevada

With the technology that exists today mapping and mapping Nevada have endless possibilities. People have mapped out the road sytems of Nevada. People have mapped the railroads. the mountainous terrain has even been mapped. One area of mapping Nevada still is under the radar and that is the caves of Nevada. there are not many known maps of the underground. I think it would be interesting to make a complete index with full maps of each of the known caves in the state of Nevada. Using todays technology we could have 3-dimensional models of each cave and also paper maps that are complete and accurate. Although cavers are very secretive about the exact locations of caves this would be a great collection for licenced caving clubs to have. This type of map could incorporate google earth pro and could have a flyby over nevada to each of the cave locations. What would be really cool would be fly thoughs of each cave. It would be similar to google pro fly overs. I have become very interested in three dimensional fly overs and fly throughs during this class and this might be something to pursue as a project in the coming semesters.

Virtual Worlds

After spending about two hours on Celestia doing flyby's through the universe i began to think about the geographical applications. This program has a lot of potential in that we soon will be able to see what distant planets look like with great detail. This program offers a lot to everybody. Like myself people can get lost in the universe and never find planet earth again as i did. I had to type in go to Earth and i took a good couple of minutes for the computer to ttravel back to Earth. It was amazing to me that there is a computer program that has much of the entire universe mapped out and named. Each star or planet that i went to had a name. As technology improves we will be able to look at other planets like we look at planet through Google Earth. Space is the final frontier and with the technology of telescope satelites we will be able to explore deep into any galaxcy. Using this kind of technology makes you wonder what the next level will be like.

Very Spacial Games

After playing a few of the geography games like GeoSpy Geography Game i found myself missing a few of these questions and it made me realize that geographical awareness is not very good. I tried the locate this country in Europe portion of the game and I had some trouble with the countries in south east parts of Europe. What i became concerned with was the fact that if I am having trouble with this and I am a geography major what is the knowledge level of your average person on this topic of locating different counties. This game was a little childish and lame but it actually made me think and i think it could be worth the try to sit down and try to remember where different counties are located. these games even though they where a little childish they where a lot of fun to try and see how many questions you could answer correctly. At this same time while having fun and getting a few questions wrong i was able to learn a little more about the locations of countries in Europe. I think that everyone should take a look at these geo-games and see how much they really know.

Mapping Hazards

Mapping hazards can mean so many different things. For example it could deal with mapping volcanic lava flows, areas of high vulnerability for avalanches, violent weather, or earthquakes. As you can see this map which shows the earthquakes that have happened around the globe in the last hour to week. it represents all magnitudes of earthquakes. There are 228 earthquakes that were mapped and plotted onto this map. notice the locations of the earthquakes. Naturally they are located on major plate intersections. Most of which are located on "the ring of fire," a well known area to having seismic activity. Mapping earthquakes is highly scientific study. By mapping out earthquakes you are able to locate the movement of plates. For example, if one earthquake happens and then another theoretically you can predict where the next one might occur. This is similar to a zipper on a coat. as pressure builds it snaps to release and continues in that pattern in a single direction moving along fault lines. granted this is all theoretical but it does tend to occur in this manner. People who map hazards like these have a lot to offer with their studies because if we can count on an earthquakes occuring in certain predicted spots we may be able to save more lives.

Political Cartography

What is political cartography. It can be many different things. The one idea that sticks out in my mind to what political cartography entails is a map showing political boundaries such as the map above. political boundaries are the separation between different states or countries or even continents. The cool thing about political boundaries is there relationship to the physical world. a lot of times political boundaries are determined by rivers or major bodies water or even mountain ranges. This characteristic of political boundaries has it pros and cons but sometimes they are hard to determine. for example, most rivers migrate and if they migrate they may take away land that once was another countries and due to this you can witness conflict. Even in the mountainous regions of India and Nepal you find conflict over land. political boundaries are an important thing in today's society. they have the power to start and end conflict and even prevent conflict.

Another thing to keep in mind is that political cartography can include special interest maps that are trying to show a specific idea like who won what state or even where a specific land owners property ends. So you see political cartography can include ideas from all sorts of fields.

3-dimensional mapping

image1image 2

3D Cartography

This break through in computer technology is one of the greatest advancements in technology because it allows us to view something with great detail. for example when looking at a standard topo map there are topo lines that help you visualize elevation but with a 3D image you can actually see the change as in image 2. This is not the only thing that has benefited from 3d imagery. Cave mapping has taken great use of 3-dimensional mapping as you can see in image 1 above. The survey tools that are used in cave mapping are very sophisticated and really cool to use they are so useful because caves are so much better to view in a 3-dimensional world. Caves are wild and most of the time go off into all directions. the technology that is being used has opened so many more doors for scientist to study caves. This goes for many other fields as well there are 3-dimensional modeling programs that hydrologists, geologists, vulcanologist's and other scientists use to map the worlds wonders in a 3-dimensional world.