assignments
due Thu Sep 5
Assignment 0
Hello all! As mentioned in class today, before Thursday morning you need to do two things...first place a pin in
this map (or circle or star or little boat or whatever) on the place where you are from (interpreted how you like) and add to that pin a paragraph describing your interest in the course, what you hope to learn, and how that fits in to the work you are doing here at Marlboro, especially your plan if that's relevant. Matt and I will do the same. Thanks! Adam
due Tue Sep 10
Assignment 1
Readings: start with the introduction to Monmonier's book "How to lie with maps," available on the
"Resources" page.
Then, go to the reserve shelf and pick a book of maps to look through and contemplate. There are historical maps, modern maps, computer maps, hand drawn maps, art, etc. Just pick one and look at the variety of information portrayed and the spectrum of design and thought available. Be ready to talk for at least a few minutes next Tuesday about the maps in your chosen book.
due Fri Sep 13
Writing Assignment
A couple of people asked for a clearer description of your short writing assignment, so here it is. Essentially, you should take one of the maps you described on Tuesday and put a description of it on paper. As you do so, you might expand some of your thoughts thinking about the following questions:
What is the map trying to portray or communicate?
What choices does the map maker make in order to portray their message more clearly?
Are there messages that they are forgoing or hiding with those choices?
Is there something they might have done to improve or strengthen their message?
What does the map tell you about its maker (this is particularly a good question for historical maps - what does the map say about the society that used or wanted to look at such a map)?
You need not answer every question, but choose a selection of them that makes sense given the item you are looking at. Some maps will lend themselves better than others to some of these questions and some of these descriptions. Particularly modern maps with clear agendas, you could also include questions like, "why are they using a map for this agenda rather than words or other communications - TV adds perhaps?" This assignment should be 2-4 pages, so quite short. It's really practice to describe and think about maps more clearly, and it's something we will do again later in the semester.
due Fri Sep 27
Math Assignment
Short version: Do something mathematical that involves maps that you could not do before the start of the course.
More suggestions...
- Find the distance from your hometown to Marlboro College in as many different ways as you can (assuming the earth is flat, with the haversine/cosine approach, asking Google...). Talk about how much they differ and why.
- Something else you might investigate is area: what is the area of the triangle formed by three points of given latitudes and longitudes? (This will probably need some reading to get you going---let me know if you want to investigate this and nothing suitable is coming up in library/internet searches.)
- Continue the projection work we started on Tuesday. A good next step after the work of both groups is to find the "stretching ratio" of the standard cylindrical projection between two latitudes, for various choices of latitudes. More precisely, what's the value of \( e/d \) where \( d \) is the actual north-south distance between two latitudes on the globe and \( e \) is the same distance on the map? Try this for various choices: \( 5^{\circ} \) to \( 5^{\circ} \); \( 45^{\circ} \) to \( 50^{\circ} \); \( 80^{\circ} \) to \( 85^{\circ} \). Even if you can't get the trig ironed out, can you comment on what you expect the answers to be?
- Other projection stuff worth doing is to investigate the other questions on the Instructional Tidbits link we used in class, or to browse the wikipedia pages (or elsewhere) and compare the attributes of different projections.
As we said in class, we're not looking for you to do all of this. Follow what interests you most and do a reasonable amount of work on it, pushing yourself a good amount along the way. Also, handwritten, wholly or in part, is fine---drawing diagrams electronically and typesetting math notation are not skills we're looking to build as part of this assignment, although if you're curious we can help you with them.
due Tue Oct 1
Reading Assignment
Vol. 1, Any chapter between 3 and 14: These cover chapters on prehistoric mapmaking, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman map making practices. We mentioned these particulars in class, so go ahead and choose from the section you decided on (Greece and Rome have a few options)
Vol 2, book 2 any chapter between 3 and 8: If you choose one of these chapters, try to look at least two of them - they tend to be a little shorter than some of the chapters above.
Reading Assignment due Tuesday 2013-10-08
For next Tuesday, we will be talking about "thematic maps." The short form is that these are all maps that display or demonstrate data in one way or another. Everyone should get some idea of what a Choropleth maps, dot maps, proportional symbol maps, isopleth maps, and flow maps are. To do that, there's a handful of readings. First, start by reading the first five pages of
This short article on thematic mapping. Then, you should read the first portion of several chapters on Thematic mapping, one chapter each on these different map types. So read pages 102-111 of
Chapter Six on Choropleth maps; pages 119-127 of
Chapter Seven on Dot Density Maps; pages 131-137 of
Chapter Eight on proportional symbol maps; pages 150-157 of
Chapter Nine on Isarithmic Maps; and finally pages 188-194 of
Chapter Eleven on Flow Maps. That might seem like a lot, but all of them have maps on some pages and it only totals to forty pages in its entirety. Lastly, pick a map type that really interests you and try to read to the end of the chapter to get a more detailed sense of how you make one. If you want, for this, you can also look at
Chapter Ten on cartograms, which are pretty fun to look at.
Reading Assignment due Tuesday 2013-10-15
As before in the history of mapping material, people can choose their own reading based on their interest and we will try to have a more general discussion in class. This time, there are a few chapters from the Chicago History of Cartography, but there is also a reserve book option. For the reserve book, read some of
The world map, 1300-1492 : the persistence of tradition and the transformation by Evelyn Edson. If you want to read that book, read the introduction and some combination of two chapters - I would recommend chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6, but any will do. For the online material, If you prefer medieval Europe, first read
Vol. 1 chap 17 (it's very short). Then pick one of Chapters 18-20 on
mappaemundi,
Portolan Charts, or
local cartography respectively. For Chinese maps, read just the one chapter on Westernization,
vol. 2, book 2, chap 7. For Islamic maps, similarly, start with the intro
following chapters. I recommend particularly chapters 7 and 9, but anything from 4-9 will do. You might also opt to read about
Meso-American cartography, if that interests you also.
Along with the reading, be sure to visit the artstor folder with a bunch of medieval map images in it and just peruse. By double clicking, you open the map in a different window and you can zoom in A LOT on some of the maps. Go to www.artstor.org and click on "Enter Here" then click on "Folders and Image Groups" and find "Cartography." It will have a few groups of cool images in it.
due Tue Oct 29
"Reading" Assignment
- Watch the data visualisation video linked from here.
- Read much of Chapter 1 of free-to-download OpenIntro Stats (2nd ed). It's moderately long (~60 pages) and occasionally a little technical, so hop around and concentrate on the pieces that you think will be most important for your project. For example, if you're collecting data, from surveys for example, be sure to spend some time on sampling methods. Most of you can happily skip the technical details of variances and standard deviation.
Final Project Description
Due Friday, Oct. 18. Upload your description of the final project - What do your want your maps to illustrate? what data are you going to use? What software or map producing materials are you going to use? What information do you need to know to be better able to create the sort of map you want to make?
Readings for Tuesday, Nov. 5th
For next Tuesday, we will cover some of the Renaissance history of map making, and then some of the European propaganda and political design inherent in Early Modern mapping practices. So first of all, everyone should read
Cartography and the Renaissance from the Chicago HOC. Alternatively, if you want to read a different source, chapter 2 of
the mapmaker’s quest (it’s an Ebsco book - I recommend downloading it talks about the artistic origins of Renaissance map making. After that, there are a bunch of choices.
To start off, if you want a more mind-bending look at how geographic ideas become mutations of the mapped landscape, the
first chapter of Dark Writing (Also an Ebsco book), talks about 17th and 18th century geographic thinking.
For Spanish Imperial mapping, there are a couple of chapters in the HOC on
Spanish Colonial Cartography and a more general chapter on
Cartography and Exporation. Also, on reserve is the book, Mapping of America. The third chapter, “Early Attempts at Colonization,” goes into the Spanish (and other European) efforts at mapping the new world. It is a detailed discussion of the maps, but is somewhat less interested in maps as power or propaganda.
Oh, and lastly, just in case you’re curious, there’s a short (12 page) article in HOC on
Samuel de Champlain’s maps if you’re curious about the French explorer who was the first European to chart Vermont (and for whom lake Champlain is named).
Readings for Tuesday, Nov. 12th
Navigation is our topic for this week. The
HOC as an extensive range of interesting articles on the topic, relating to many different times and cultures. Rather than pick one central one, everyone should read at least two, taken from distinct periods. Think about what the similarities and differences are between those you read about as well as thinking about the intrinsic aspects of them.
Reading more extensively than this is preferred and you can either add more of the navigation ones or take a look at some of the star chart ones. Another alternative is to go a bit deeper into spherical trig;
here is one place to start that includes what we did earlier and also talks about some stuff that we might touch on on Thursday.
Readings for Tuesday Nov. 19
More Propaganda!
This time, I would recommend starting with the chapter on Propaganda in
How to Lie with Maps in the
Resources Folder. The pdf has two chapters, the first one is also pretty useful, but the second one is specifically on propaganda. Then, if you want, pick one of the following two things, both available as attachments in the
Resources Folder. You can either go for the modern history of the Mercator Projection debate (Squabble? Dispute? Kerfuffle? Rhubarb?) which is the next pdf -
Rhumb Lines and Map Wars - there are three chapters, but it's not that long and it's a very readable book. Or you can read about Maps and Nature. There are two readings here, both from
The Nature of Maps: the first one is the introduction - it covers some of the same material as Monmonier, but in a pretty different way. The second PDF offers a specific reading of a particular map looking at the ways it tries to convince or mislead - it's a nature map of Australia called "Land of Living Fossils." If you're going to only read one chapter, read this last one. You could also skim Monmonier and pay more attention to all selections from this book.
Readings for Tuesday Nov. 26
We will be talking about digital mapping and maps of the future. First of all, everyone should go over to Spark (a CBC radio broadcast) and listen to
this episode about mapping. You might also click over and listen to the full interview with Andrew Turner - a GIS tech developer - on the future of digital map-making. After you've listened to your radio fill, read one of these two articles:
Finally, read this short article about mapping ethics and if we have time we'll touch on it at the end of class. It's short: Tom Koch,
False Truths.
Writing Assignment due Friday Nov. 22
As above, this is a map description - if you did a contemporary map for your first description, I would encourage you to do an historical map for the second. You can also think about what you would like to research and write about for the map history paper and this could be preliminary work for that essay. The questions (repeated from above) can include:
What is the map trying to portray or communicate?
What choices does the map maker make in order to portray their message more clearly?
Are there messages that they are forgoing or hiding with those choices?
Is there something they might have done to improve or strengthen their message?
What does the map tell you about its maker (this is particularly a good question for historical maps - what does the map say about the society that used or wanted to look at such a map)?
You need not answer every question, but choose a selection of them that makes sense given the item you are looking at. Some maps will lend themselves better than others to some of these questions and some of these descriptions. Particularly modern maps with clear agendas, you could also include questions like, "why are they using a map for this agenda rather than words or other communications - TV adds perhaps?" This assignment should be 4-6 pages.
Reading for Dec 3
If you didn't last time, read the Tom Koch article on ethics:
False Truths
due Fri Dec 6
Final Writing Assignment
due Mon Dec 16
Final Map Write-Up
