Maps wrap up

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Maps and the Geospatial Revolution is over (it was a five-week class).

The end-of-course survey for Maps asked if we'd reached our personal goals for the class.


Hmmm.  While I'm not sure what I expected from the class, it wasn't what I expected.  I guess I expected more map-making....

What we got was a taste of the tools that are available for map-making.  The software that is available (to random people!) is mind-blowing.  You, too, can go to the ArcGIS site, and make maps.  I think you have to register with them (for free) if you want to save your maps so others can see them.

I was talking to someone about the class this week, and was talking about the difference between interactive maps and paper maps.  I am a huge fan of paper maps -- but -- as our Maps prof said in the first week of the class, paper maps are static.  If you want to see something that is off the edge of your paper map, you need to find another paper map.  If you want to see something that is off the edge of the map on your computer, you can just grab the map and slide it over so you can see what's over there.   (Pretty mind-blowing, all by itself!)

Suppose you open your paper atlas, to find out where Sienna, Italy is.  You can do that.  Suppose, though, that you also want to see where Sienna's main square and cathedral are.  Some paper atlases have city-level maps, but Sienna isn't a very big place.  You would probably have to find another atlas, or some other paper map, to see Sienna's streets.

If you look at Google maps, say, you can see a whole bunch of different scales, right there on your screen, right now.  You can see where Europe is, on the planet.  You can see where Italy is, in Europe. You can see all of Italy.  You can see northern Italy.  You can see all of Tuscany.  You can see all of Sienna.  You can see a few blocks of Sienna.  (And you can see satellite images of all of the above, in addition to, or instead of, road maps.....)

You can get directions from Sienna's main square to its cathedral.  You can see where restaurants (and monuments and hotels and shops) are located.  You can have your smart phone give you verbal directions from one place to another.

All of that is just the beginning, for computerized maps (also known as "live maps").

Using ArcGIS, you can add all sorts of data to your map.  There is a ton of data on the ArcGIS site that you can use.  (Change in the landscape over time, as seen by satellites, for example).  There is tons of data, publicly available on the web, which been geotagged (latitude/longitude associated with every data point).  There is info gathered about the incidence of diabetes in different places, and census data showing education level or household income, just to name a couple of examples. 

You can upload your own data, and, providing that your data is geotagged, ArcGIS will automagically add your own data to your map.  Mind-blowing......

The data is there, as you scale up and down (and sometimes the data is displayed differently, depending on how the data are described for the mapping software's use)....


The guy who helped our prof with management of the Maps class blogged about a story map that he made in 15 minutes.  The conference he had attended was over, and he decided to walk to the airport (something that you can reasonably do, in San Diego).  He turned on an app on his phone that keeps track of your run (when you are exercising).  As he walked, he took a few pics with his phone (so they were geotagged) and emailed those pics to an online photo-sharing site.  When he got to the airport, he uploaded the map of of his route to ArcGIS, added the pics to the map the run-mapping app made (with descriptions of what he was looking at), and, hey presto, a map that showed his route from beginning to end, with clickable pushpins, each showing one of his pics and descriptive info he'd added.  Here's a link to the live map.  Extremely cool, no?  And to be able to do all that in 15 min?  !!!

This also brings me to the other big category of things I learned in the class.  I got a much better look at some of the possibilities a smart phone opens up for a person than I had understood before.  It's not just about being able to look up anything, any time, anywhere.  You can keep track of and upload all sorts of interesting stuff that you might be glad to have later.

While I think it's distinctly creepy that anyone knows where I am at all times, I can see how I might think it was really cool to know exactly where I *was*....  Suppose I wanted to make a map of everywhere I ate in Italy.  If we'd been running software that would keep track of our location, and if I'd been taking geotagged pictures, making a map of everywhere we ate (or everywhere we went!) would be a snap.  As it is, I could reconstruct some of where we went, and then could go to a live map and get the lat/long info for my pics, and then I could do the geotagging by hand.......  I could do it, but it would be a lot of tedious labor.......

I am sold that twitter is useful to get advice about pretty much anything, right now, and am clear that it can be extremely useful if you need help in an emergency.  People talked about using it to avoid a huge traffic jam on the expressway in an unfamiliar city.....

I am still not happy about paying to feed a smart phone, but I have a much better understanding, now, since taking Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, of why I might want to have one anyway.  Just like being annoyed when I realize how much I'm paying for cable or for internet service, I suppose -- I am annoyed, but I do it anyway.............


Did I "reach my personal goals" in Maps?  Not exactly, but I learned A LOT about things I wasn't even thinking about wanting to learn.  Definitely worthwhile!

Recommended!


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