This week, I georectified a map of “Nordamerika” from the David Rumsey Map Collection. The map was published as part of the 1945 Stielers Handatlas. When aligning this map, I came to two conclusions: the icy part of the globe is a very difficult area to map and scale correctly and a more practical conclusion. The map was extremely busy, especially when there are so many land and water masses close together. An interesting detail that I noticed is that the old map showed more landmass in some regions. This led me to the conclusion that this type of technology could allow us to take older records and let us see noticeable physical changes to the landscape, letting us track climate change. This would be facilitated even more through the addition of layers depicting altitude on land, the volume of the ocean, and temperature. These separate layers could then be multiplied into more layers depending on the year. With these, an argument about the detrimental effects of climate change and their domino effects (eg. melting icecaps) could be established.
When sharing the map, the viewer has the ability to export it as WMTS, TileJSON, or XYZ formats. Apps like ArcGIS QGIS can then process these files into tiles placed on a map. While this technology could be extremely helpful in depicting geographic information, some problems arise. First off, not even modern maps and globes are immune to warping. This leads to scaling issues and inaccuracy. When using older maps, some of which are even less accurate due to lack of modern technology, some visuals can deviate even more than usual, making the comparisons more or less noticeable than is the actual case. More practically speaking, however, is the inappropriate use of maps. As was the example in class, one would not need to use an entire country graph if they were only comparing statistics from a small number of independent regions. This would create unnecessary confusion and would take up too much space.
