Thursday, April 21, 2011

Lab 3: Neogeography

The world of neogeography is a new one.  With advances in modern technology, the ability to make maps has rapidly developed and in the modern age, has become so easy and so available that anyone can make a beneficial and informative map.

With neogeography though, there are many positives and negatives.  In terms of positives, neogeography allows people to make whatever type of map they want.  This allows for a plethora of different maps to be created.  The creativity given in neogeography to create a map of "whatever you want" allows for maps to be made for nearly anything.  From standard maps of boundary lines to more modern maps of walking tours, the possibilities for a neogeographical map are endless.  Furthermore, with modern technology, the ability to imbed information in a map makes them much more useful.  To only have a piece of paper as a map isn't as helpful as an interactive map with audio/visual aids, like the one above, and many other new wave maps.  Furthermore, putting the power of map making in the hands of the others allows for new and creative maps to be made of areas where little is known.

With these positives does come negatives however.  The biggest downfall to neogeography in my opinion is that the maps suffer from becoming too simplified.  Since everyone can make these maps, and since everyone isn't a full scale cartographer, these maps may not be perfect.  Information such as elevation, scale and other important aspects of a map may be left out on some of these new maps.  Also, depending on the focus of the map, other important details may be left out, which allows for these maps to be incomplete and less of a resource.

My personal map is a sightseeing tour of Los Angeles that pinpoints the locations of the best tourist attractions in LA.  Below is a link to my map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=200438625142593673299.0004a0e63922270ef4aed&ll=34.18795,-118.360519&spn=0.312963,0.54451&z=11

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