100 words - day 8

When I studied geography at University back in the early 2000’s we had a module on Cartography, it was all paper based. We joked that this is the reputation of Geography in school classes ‘just colouring in’ !

Well it was a while ago now, but I do recall being given tuition on cartographic principals, what was needed and essential when drawing a map, as well as the choices you make. A map is always a simplified version of reality. For a start you are putting a 3D version onto a 2D medium and the scale is rarely, if ever the same as the real world, that would just be impractical!

As a result you have choices to make about what to include, how to represent what you do include and this will always be guided by experience and somewhat the author’s opinion. When making these maps it was very time consuming and editing was nowhere near as easy as it is today with computers.

There is an extensive history on the science of map making and I won’t go into this as I’m no expert, but I’m sure we can all imagine just how long it took hundreds of years ago. But it still amazes me how much has changed in such a short space of time and the broad array of people who now have access to map making tools (especially digitally).