Portal:Maps
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The Maps and Cartography Portal
A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.
Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or fictional, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping. The space being mapped may be two dimensional, such as the surface of the Earth, three dimensional, such as the interior of the Earth, or even more abstract spaces of any dimension, such as arise in modeling phenomena having many independent variables.
Although the earliest maps known are of the heavens, geographic maps of territory have a very long tradition and exist from ancient times. The word "map" comes from the medieval Latin: Mappa mundi, wherein mappa meant 'napkin' or 'cloth' and mundi 'the world'. Thus, "map" became a shortened term referring to a two-dimensional representation of the surface of the world. (Full article...)
Cartography (/kɑːrˈtɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek: χάρτης chartēs, 'papyrus, sheet of paper, map'; and γράφειν graphein, 'write') is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an imagined reality) can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively. (Full article...)
Selected article -
The California Field Atlas is a 2017 book written and illustrated by Obi Kaufmann. It was published by Heyday Books, a Berkeley-based nonprofit small press. Through passages of nature writing and hundreds of watercolor paintings, the book details California's ecology and geography. Kaufmann, an artist and outdoorsman, was born in California and currently resides in Oakland. He prepared the book over the course of a year, drawing from a lifetime of experience hiking thousands of miles of California wilderness. With the California Field Atlas, he intended to foster geological literacy and conservation of the state's natural environment.
The book contains ten chapters spanning more than 500 pages in total. The first eight chapters examine California's ecological system, the ninth chapter is an overview of nature throughout the state's 58 counties, and the final chapter covers the topic of rewilding. Rather than focusing on already-famous natural landmarks such as Yosemite, Kaufmann sought to present a comprehensive overview of the state that included detailed surveys of lesser-known regions. (Full article...)General images -
Selected quote
“ | We all inherit a great deal of useless knowledge, and a great deal of misinformation and error (maps that were formerly thought to be accurate), so that there is always a portion of what we have been told that must be discarded. | ” |
— S. I. Hayakawa |
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Selected biography -
Edward Wright (baptised 8 October 1561; died November 1615) was an English mathematician and cartographer noted for his book Certaine Errors in Navigation (1599; 2nd ed., 1610), which for the first time explained the mathematical basis of the Mercator projection by building on the works of Pedro Nunes, and set out a reference table giving the linear scale multiplication factor as a function of latitude, calculated for each minute of arc up to a latitude of 75°. This was in fact a table of values of the integral of the secant function, and was the essential step needed to make practical both the making and the navigational use of Mercator charts.
Wright was born at Garveston in Norfolk and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow from 1587 to 1596. In 1589 the college granted him leave after Elizabeth I requested that he carry out navigational studies with a raiding expedition organised by the Earl of Cumberland to the Azores to capture Spanish galleons. The expedition's route was the subject of the first map to be prepared according to Wright's projection, which was published in Certaine Errors in 1599. The same year, Wright created and published the first world map produced in England and the first to use the Mercator projection since Gerardus Mercator's original 1569 map. (Full article...)Selected picture
![Map of Lewis and Clark's Track across North America](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Map_of_Lewis_and_Clark%27s_Track%2C_Across_the_Western_Portion_of_North_America%2C_published_1814.jpg/500px-Map_of_Lewis_and_Clark%27s_Track%2C_Across_the_Western_Portion_of_North_America%2C_published_1814.jpg)
Did you know
- ... that the Canadian League for Peace and Democracy organized a 10,000-person rally at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto to protest a 2,500-person fascist rally?
- ... that in 2007, Arthur Gray's £2 Kangaroo and Map stamp sold for a world record price for a single Australian stamp?
- ... that actress Agnes Mapes had to improvise a complex choreographed dance from basic poses for the 1907 play The Holy City?
- ... that DeepStateMap.Live, an interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, received up to 120,000 visitors in 30 minutes during the Battle of Izium in the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive?
- ... that the actress Lottie Williams was one of the cakewalk dancers depicted on the front cover of the sheet music for Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag"?
- ... that two My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episodes are said to discuss Marxism and Stalinism?
Topics
Map - Atlas - Geography - Topography
Cartography: Cartographers - History of cartography - Ancient world maps - World maps - Compass rose - Generalization - Geographic coordinate system - Geovisualization - Relief depiction - Scale - Terra incognita - Planetary cartography
Map projection: Azimuthal equidistant - "Butterfly" - Dymaxion - Gall–Peters - General Perspective - Goode homolosine - Mercator - Mollweide - Orthographic - Peirce quincuncial - Robinson - Sinusoidal - Stereographic
Maps: Animated mapping - Cartogram - Choropleth map - Estate map - Geologic map - Linguistic map - Nautical chart - Pictorial map - Reversed map - Road atlas - Thematic map - Topographic map - Weather map - Web mapping - World map
Map examples
World
![Metrication](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Metrication_by_year_map.svg/550px-Metrication_by_year_map.svg.png)
Historical
![Map of Asia, 1892](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Asia_1892_amer_ency_brit.jpg/550px-Asia_1892_amer_ency_brit.jpg)
Thematic
![Spread of the Black Plague in Europe](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/Bubonic_plague_map_2.png/300px-Bubonic_plague_map_2.png)
Geographic
![Topographic map of the Isle of Man](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Isle_of_Man_topographic_map-en.svg/300px-Isle_of_Man_topographic_map-en.svg.png)
Political
![Independence dates of African nations](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/African_nations_order_of_independence_1950-1993.gif/300px-African_nations_order_of_independence_1950-1993.gif)
Nautical
![Ocean currents in the north Atlantic](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Ocean_currents_1943_Gulf_Stream.png/300px-Ocean_currents_1943_Gulf_Stream.png)
Categories
Things you can do
Here are some Geography related tasks you can do:
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Atlases and maps of the world at Wikimedia Commons
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