Formed in
2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue
archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of
history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and
has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Introduction
This
website was produced in november 2015 as part of the course Cartography 2. This
course is part of the Master program in Geomatics at the University
of Gävle. The goal of
this website is to guide you trough the basic principles of Cartography, by
giving examples of different classification methods, concepts of visualization,
projections, map types, visualization and much more. These examples where
executed in the form of exercises and labs, which you can find on the left side
of the web page.
Let's start with a definition of cartography. A widely used
definition is: ''
the art, science and technology of
making maps, together with their study as
scientific documents and works of art. In
this context, maps may be regarded as
including all types of maps, plans, charts
and sections, three-dimensional models
and globes representing the earth or any
celestial body at any scale" (Meynen, 1973).
In the past decades a new world became more important. The previous
definition does not mention the virtual world. Cartography is not only about
mapping visible things, it is also about mapping networks that are not
visible. A good example is a social networks. A key word in the difference
between the virtual world and the real world is topology. Network visualizations
of the virtual world can handle topology, but they cannot handle geometry. This
is different from maps about the real world, which are most of the times
topologically and geometrically correct. Somewhere in the middle
of topological and geometrical maps, we can find cartograms, which
handle topology but are geometrically distorted. Another key word is scaling
structure. Scaling structure refers to the fact that in nature there are far
more smaller thing than larger things. An example of this structure can be found
in the human body. Keep in mind the key words 'topology' and 'scaling' when you
surf through this website.
Meynen,
E. (1973). Multilingual Dictionary of Technical Terms in Cartography. Stuttgart:
International Cartographic Association.