In the discussion following Tuesday’s map making exercise, which required us to create three maps leading from Studio D to Nummit, Davidson Pizza Company, and Chipotle, a number of people mentioned how they had difficulty managing the scale of their maps.\u00a0I encountered this scaling issue when I ran out of space while attempting to draw the path from Studio D to Nummit. Despite the distance between the two points amounting to only a few hundred yards and the fact that I make this walk on a daily basis, the other two maps that I drew were far more accurate. While I am clearly a terrible cartographer, I believe that my familiarity with the path from Studio D to Nummit\u00a0actually hindered my ability to successfully depict the route. Because I know the route so well, I found myself trying to add every little detail to the map that I fit, and as a result, I had to drastically alter the scale on the map to fit Nummit on the page. Conversely, when drawing the other two maps, I had far better spacing and was able to fairly accurately show how to get from one place to the other. I believe this was the case as I was not as concerned with drawing every minute detail, but instead I focused more showing the route from point A to point B.<\/p>\n
While others may not have had similar experiences drawing their maps, mine left me asking if too much information can be a detriment when constructing a map. Ultimately, this question relates to Monmonier’s<\/a> article and highlights the tradeoff between accuracy and usefulness that all map makers face. I found through this exercise that the more information one tries to incorporate into a map, more difficult it becomes to use the map. On the other hand, too little information appearing on a map is potentially dangerous as the omission of an important detail could render a map completely ineffective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the discussion following Tuesday’s map making exercise, which required us to create three maps leading from Studio D to Nummit, Davidson Pizza Company, and Chipotle, a number of people mentioned how they had difficulty managing the scale of their maps.\u00a0I encountered this scaling issue when I ran out of space while attempting to draw … Continue reading Scaling: How Map Makers Make Mistakes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,6],"tags":[37,39,36],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-2","category-responders","tag-cartography","tag-monmonier","tag-scale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":480,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}