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

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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.

old maps and new maps

The old maps and the new maps. As you can see there is a huge difference in detail between these two maps. thats the ability that we have today and they did not have hundreds of years ago. With technology we are able to gather much more detail and present that detail much easier but the old maps were drawn be hand and that is something to be proud about. hand drawn maps have special sense about them. even though old maps do not have the detail that we have today they still were used for the same purpose and they got people to the locations that they wanted to get to.

Maps of the News

This is a map from CBS that displays the 2004 elections. Maps can be a very powerful tool that can help aid in displaying data for the viewer. This map in particular is showing the democratic votes in blue and the republican votes in red. The three dimensional view makes this map stand out even more because you can really see the typicall voting beliefs for the various regions. most two dimensional maps have a hard time at displaying this kind of data. With the 3-D effect you can see the political differences geographically and you can see how much political difference. With maps in the news we are able to see things that may not be easily explained by words. With that it can also be true that maps can be altered to get a desired effect. all these things come in play with maps in the news.

Interactive and Animated Cartography is very interesting and it provides many areas to explore. For example, the map that i have found is a kind of change over time map. it shows the growth of the United States. Animated cartography is relatively new to mapping because it requires the use of a computer. Animations can be very useful to help show anything you want. For example, you could have it show the spread of disease or immigration patters. Animated maps have opened many more doors for cartography as a whole. They have made representation much easier. Animated maps can show a viewer information much quicker than could a non animated map. This animated map of the growth in the US is a fantastic example of displaying the data much easier. It takes one map that flashes a every few seconds and up dates itself to a new year. Without the technology it would take several maps to represent this data.