Month: April 2018

In week 14, we we’re to analyze the Giovanni Maria Cassini’s Terrestrial/celestial globes with my person favorite, google earth. Cassini, who is considered to be one of the last fine Italian globe makes at the end of the 18^th century, created 2 globes and 12 terrestrial/celestial globe gores. He also outlines rules for constructing his globes and gores in his personal atlas. My first though on his work is that who though to try and map the constellations and heavens on a globe?? The concept is so cool. I love that on the website you can view the video that shows you the terrestrial globe rotating with the celestial one as the back drop.

I sat and watched for a few minutes and it feels as if you’re viewing the earth and heavens from outer space. Just looking at Cassini’s maps, the maps seems to be accurately made (they look similar to modern maps that I’ve seen). Also, the picture of all of the gores laid flat into a rectangle make the continents look fatter than I’m used to seeing them.

I think that the a purpose of both maps is to show people what the earth and it’s landforms look and their location relative to one another. Both maps are effective in doing this because they both illustrate a certain perspective. The Cassini maps illustrate Cassini’s perspective while google earth illustrates the perspective of whoever is making decisions creating google maps (probably tons of people). I think that the idea that there’s no single map of the world is important. Thinking of the world as a social concept allows you to understand that the map of the world that you think of in your head can be very different from the map of the world that someone else pictures. Google earth is an incredible scientific achievement. I remember going on google earth as a kidding and searching for my house (just did it again for old times sake). The sheer amount of data within that map is outrageous. One thing that google earth shows that Cassini’s maps don’t include clouds/atmosphere. Google earth has the advantage in this regard because it’s online and can be manipulated by a user to find what they want to see. I think the overall purpose of google maps is to allow people to search for things, evaluate what they look like, and make conclusions based off what they have observed. I think that people have a tendency to go on google earth and conclude that what they see represents the earth perfectly because of how scientifically advanced it is/looks. I like how the Finding Our Place In the World article asserts that google earth is not the final destination for mapping the earth. It’s amazing to think that something better and more advanced is sure to come sometime down the road.

For week 4 we’re sent to a website where you could dink around with many of William Smith’s Maps of England. It is claimed in Simon Winchester’s “The Map That Changed the World” that William Smith’s map of 1815 is the first true geological map of anywhere in the world. For being the first of it’s kind, it seems to be extremely well done. The title of the map explains that the map aims to show the delineation of Stata of England, Wales, and Part of Scotland. If this was the purpose of Smith’s map, he certainly accomplished this. Just looking at the map it is quite easy to see the difference between rock layers and where they begin and end.

I was surprised by how important this map was to other people. It’s very cool that this map was originally used by people to create great fortunes for themselves through coal, iron, and oil. When you zoom in on the map, you begin to notice how incredibly detailed it is. A definite silence of the map is people, villages, and other things of that nature. This makes sense because it is a geological map is supposed to highlight geological features, of course. I wonder if Smith ever imagined that his map would be as influential as it turned out to be. This website with Smith’s maps is cool because you can easily compare layers and even stack them on top of one another. The site allowed you to pick two layers and switch between them using a slide bar as well. I did this with Smith’s 1815 and 1828 maps. The 1828 and 1815 maps have a borders and look like they could be easily framed and thrown up in a home. Each map map shows just about the same things but I’m under the impression that the 1818 map is more detailed. It’s certainly more colorful than the 1828 map on the site.

One thing that I noticed is if you slide the bar across slowly, some rock formations seem to move just a little bit. My final takeaway from Smith’s work is that it must have been extremely difficult to make this map alone. The amount of studying and work the he must have put into the maps must be inconceivable.

Both of week 9’s maps depict a natural disaster in their own ways. I think that Suave’s Crevasse appears to have a focus on what happened and what the consequences of the event are. For instance, it clearly shows that a levee break was responsible for the disbursement of water to certain areas. The map did a good job of showing these things to me, but it left me wondering certain things. I’m specifically curious about the other potential variables that may have played a role in the levee break. Also, I would like to know what came after the damage. We’re certain areas able to recover faster than others? How long did it take to sort this all out? What I can conclude from me having these questions is that the purpose of the map is surely not to tell a story with information because it probably couldn’t have done a worse job of that. It thinks that the overall purpose shows the viewer information about the extent of the damage itself. Without the additional text provided by Colten, it would be extremely hard to know anything about the facts leading up to the breach and any subsequent effects other than the flooding clearly shown on the map.

The second map was way more visually appealing to me. This may be because of the artist nature of it. In the map you can see that a flood has occurred and people dealing with it. One difference between the maps is that the first map focused almost entirely on the environment, while the second map shows how human life was affected by the disaster. An example of this is that you can see buildings sinking in flood water and individuals helplessly looking on.  I really love the second map because you can close your eyes and see yourself there because of the way the landscape is presented. I think that the purpose pf the second map is paint a mental image of a disaster rather than just showing a dull overview of where flood water settled after a flood.