The most helpful additional reading for this particular lecture is probably the help documentation that comes with the online map software you use most heavily, especially Google Maps and Google Earth. There are myriad websites and apps for accessing online maps. Since many include functions that can be fairly technical, it generally pays to devote some concentrated time to learning their capacities.
If you'd like to learn more about the digital revolution in cartography, which has utterly transformed our relationship to maps, you have several excellent courses available to you on campus, especially Geography 370, 371, 377, and 378, depending on the technical level of difficulty you're prepared to take on.
But if you'd like to do some reading on your own, these are solid introductions:
A. Jon Kimerling, Aileen R. Buckley, Phillip C. Muehrcke, Juliana O. Muehrcke, Map Use: Reading, Analysis, Interpretation (8th ed., 2016). (comprehensive, technical, but accessible introduction to map-making and map-reading)
John Krygier & Denis Wood, Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS (3rd ed., 2016). (easy and highly graphical introduction to GIS)
Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser, Bob Abramms, Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World (2006). (accessible overview of the many perspectives maps can offer)
Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (3rd ed., 2018). (a classic discussion of the ways maps can distort and deceive if you're not careful about the way you make and read them)
The goal of this lecture is to show the kinds of online and digital cartographic information that’s now available on the Web. The best way to illustrate these is to explore them online in real time. Remember: you don’t need to memorize all the minutiae either the lectures, the readings, or exercises like the ones you'll be doing at the Map Library. Instead, we hope you'll focus on broad patterns and processes for understanding landscape change over time, and the tools available to us for exploring these patterns and processes. We’re giving you a toolbox of places you can when you want to find something out. This involves not just direct targeted searching in Google, but also simply rummaging.
Let's begin with a couple examples of the power of big data for online mapping:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-96.07,46.49,940
This map shows current wind patterns in real time. Distills complex wind data into vectors to show the direction and speed of the wind over the surface of the globe. Through this simplification, however, it’s also an example of how we distort things on maps to make them visible to us.
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/
This places a dot on the map for every single citizen counted by the 2010 Census, then colors each dot according to the racial categories used in that census. The spatial patterns of distribution and segregation it reveals are quite remarkable. Only immense computer processing power now makes it possible for us to create such maps far more easily than could ever have been done in the past.
One problem with maps made from big data is that they are usually from the recent past. We have vastly more of them for the past 1, 5, 10, 20 years as a result of the digital revolution. If you go back further, you’ll find yourself before Google, search engines, HTML, the Web, etc. Get back to World War II and you’re back to an almost completely paper-based world. That paper world lacks the digital pointers that Google uses to rank its search results, which means that even when paper documents are digitized, they're still much harder to find than materials that were born digital. Quite different techniques--and entirely different frames of mind--are needed if you hope to find and use them.
I talked in my lecture about Library Mall about how differently you need to explore that pre-digital world if you hope to discover its treasures. That's one reason we're sending you over to the Map Library this week to look at paper maps: to see the kinds of documents that cannot easily be found by digital search alone, and that can actually be easier to view on paper than they are on a screen.
The same emphasis I gave in my Library Mall lecture to the value of browsing as opposed to searching applies to digital resources as well, which is why the spirit underpinning today's lecture is also that of browsing and wandering rather than searching. What kinds of maps might you be able to discover online? That's our core question today.
We begin today's lecture by viewing "Powers of Ten," the classic 9-minute documentary produced by the modernist designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1977. The Eameses were hired by IBM to do a documentary to give viewers a visual sense of the concept of "orders of magnitude"--powers of ten. The film is today regarded as a classic introduction to the problem of scale. It raises a host of questions relevant to our study of digital maps (and maps in general). The film illustrates what happens when we zoom in and out of a particular place, and the amount of information we're able to observe at different scales. The question of resolution--how much information can be conveyed in a given space, what we might now refer to in terms of pixels--has always been a problem for map-makers. Powers of Ten is about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero to our unit of measure as we change scales. It begins with a picnic, zooming out by a power of 10 (an order of magnitude) every ten seconds to convey the macro-level vastness of the known universe. It then zooms back in to convey that same vastness on the micro-level of atoms inside a patch of skin. For the purposes of this course, we’re generally most interested in phenomena ranging from about 100 to 108 square meters.
If you'd like, you can view Powers of Ten again on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
I concluded my introductory remarks by telling a story about his son Jeremy, who once drove with a friend a thousand miles from Madison to their college in Lewiston, Maine. Although Jeremy is a professional wilderness guide (you can read about his recent adventures on his Chasing Cairns blog, http://chasingcairns.com) and a very skilled map-reader when leading trips in remote areas, on this particular trip he routed himself back to college using Google Maps on his iPhone. So when I asked him what route he had followed on his thousand-mile drive, he wasn't able to answer. When I asked even to know which states Jeremy and his friend had traversed, they still didn't know the answer. The space around the blue line on the Google Maps screen was just too narrow, hiding any real knowledge of the larger contexts through which they were traveling.
That narrowness of focus is one of the seductions of the digital world--one reason we see each other with our heads bent over the tiny screens of our smartphones--and almost always gets in the way of our seeing the larger contexts of the landscapes in which we're traveling.
Jeremy later drew his own lesson about this when the New York Times asked him to write an article (published on July 3, 2016) about his ten-month driving trip visiting (nearly) all the national parks in the Lower 48. Entitled "10 Months, 45 National Parks, 11 Rules," (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/travel/national-park-road-trip-tips.html), it offered eleven rules Jeremy used to guide his travels. One of those rules was "Use paper maps," and here's how he explained the benefits he gained from following this rule:
In the age of Google Maps, the spirit of adventure can be sidelined by blindly following the seemingly omniscient blue line on the glowing screens in front of us. When I permit myself to follow that blue line, I sometimes lose track of where I am and forget the bigger picture. I was not going to let that happen on this trip.
From Day 1, my trusty National Geographic Road Atlas rode shotgun. Its colorful pages tempted me with side trips at every turn, and never led me astray.
Without that atlas, I would just have headed south after leaving Death Valley for Los Angeles. Instead, the map guided me north toward Manzanar. What I found there surprised me. Formerly a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans, this deserted landscape in the Owens Valley was a stark reminder of the stories we often choose to forget.
I closed by saying that he's an enormous fan of digital maps, and uses them daily...but I also encourages students to think about both their strengths and their weaknesses, so you can be mindful when using these extraordinary tools. Today's lecture is about digital maps. This week's library exercise focuses on the virtues of paper maps, and we urge you to toggle back and forth between a digital application like Google Maps or Google Earth and the paper maps you view in the Map Library to get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of these different cartographic resources. Each can reveal things about landscapes that are much harder for the other to show you.
The basic wayfinding tools that we all use today in some form or another, whether in a browser on our computers or in an app on our smartphones or tablets:
Google: https://www.google.com/maps
Microsoft Bing Maps: http://www.bing.com/mapspreview
Apple Maps (entirely app-based, originating in IOS): http://www.apple.com/ios/maps/
OpenStreetMap.org (open source vector graphics maps) https://www.openstreetmap.org
maps.me is a wonderful offline app for downloading maps that can be used offline (without any cell connection) all over the world http://maps.me/en/home
And while we're at it, don't forget that you can download all of Wikipedia (or portions thereof) to access when you're offline as well: given its geographical depth of coverage, Wikipedia is among the most powerful sources of information about locations you view on a map, and is therefore an ideal travel companion. The best available app for downloading Wikipedia is Kiwix: http://www.kiwix.org Just remember that Wikipedia is large, so you'll need gigabytes of spare storage to keep it at your fingertips offline.
Digital and online map software programs all work in essentially similar ways, so I'll rely today on Google Maps and its more powerful sibling, Google Earth, for most of what I demonstrate. But don't forget that Google, Microsoft, and Apple often use different satellite views, so you can sometimes gain quite different information by consulting more than one of them if you're looking for views of a particular landscape you're studying.
Google Maps was originally written by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies, who sold their company to Google in October 2004. Google Maps was released in 2005, and by 2013 was determined to be the world's most popular smartphone application, with 54% of smartphone users having tried it at least once. In 2012, Google had 7,100 employees working just on mapping for this program, Google Earth, and other Google applications.
Google Maps can be viewed in any web browser at: https://www.google.com/maps
Bill spent much of the lecture demonstrating basic navigation tools in Google Maps and then in Google Earth. You should be sure to review and practice using these tools yourself, studying the help files for the programs if you wish to learn more.
In Google Maps' Map view (which is the default when you log on, and is the view users use most), be sure you can: Zoom, pan, search, get directions. Then switch to satellite view (remember, historical versions of this are available on Google Earth). Street view is so recent that it's not all that useful, though it does enable you to walk down a street to remind yourself what's there if you're writing about a particular place. Remember too that Street View can be searched historically, though it's only about a decade old. Many users add photos to Google Maps, and you can peruse those at the bottom of the screen as well.
A very useful function is the ability to obtain a URL pointing to precisely the map settings you're viewing at a particular moment: you can access it from the menu in the upper-left-hand corner, then selecting "Share or embed map" and then copying the "link to share" that the program offers you. Help files for Google Maps are here: https://support.google.com/maps/?hl=en#topic=3092425
Google Earth: https://www.google.com/earth/ This is far more powerful than Google Maps, and well worth getting to know well. The main additional function that Bill demonstrated is the fact that Google Earth shows you the dates of the the satellite images it enables you to access, and you can also search back through historical satellite imagery, typically as far back as the 1990s. Be sure to familiarize yourself with this powerful cartographic tool.
Google Earth can only be viewed as a web-based application using the Chrome browser, but it is much more powerful when accessed via the freestanding Google Earth app, which you can download and install for free on many different devices here: https://www.google.com/earth/desktop/ (Versions for smartphones are available via the appropriate app stores.)
Google Earth: https://www.google.com/earth/explore/products/
Google Earth Education: https://www.google.com/help/maps/education/learn/index.html
Bill intended to visit several of the locations below (though he may have run out of time and so couldn't demonstrate all of them) where you can view landscape history from a satellite at various zoom levels. You can visit these for yourself, but it'd be better still to find many others on your own: UW-Madison's Library Mall Picnic Point Menominee Reservation, Wisconsin (and its tornado path of 6/7/2007) Wawa, Ontario's iron-sintering plant pollution track Butte, Montana, copper mine Bingham Canyon, Utah, copper mine Fort McMurray, Alberta, tar sands Elwha Dam Removal World Trade Center
Finally, don't forget that you can also perform straight Google Image searches to locate maps focusing on particular themes. Remember that you can use the menu to show only maps of a certain size (helpful to avoid pixellated imagery), and also to limit your search to maps with with limited or no copyright restrictions if you plan to use them on the Web or elsewhere.
To access these important tools, search Google for the keywords that interest you along with the word "maps," and then click "Images" in the menu (generally not "Maps") to view thumbnails of maps that may depict the themes that interest you. Once you're looking at the thumbnails, click on the "Tools" button just to the right of "Settings" below the Google search box, and then change the settings to limit your search. Especially helpful and powerful are the settings for "Size" and "Usage rights"; I generally limit my searches to "Large" images to make sure they'll look good on a high-resolution screen.
I was almost certainly running out of time by the end of the lecture, so was likely able to share only a few of the following major collections of online maps. All are worth exploring. We definitely encourage you to peruse them whenever you have time. They can be invaluable for studying landscape history.
USGS National Map: http://nationalmap.gov/
USGS Thematic Maps: http://education.usgs.gov
USGS Historic Topographic Maps: http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/
USGS Topo View: http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/topoview/viewer/#4/46.38/-100.06
Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (WGNHS): http://wgnhs.uwex.edu (This site has a wealth of thematic maps and geological reports about Wisconsin, some of which were linked toward the bottom of the notesheet for the Introduction to North America lecture.)
1970 National Atlas: The Library of Congress has a digital version that is probably easiest to navigate at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701gm.gct00013?st=gallery&c=160 The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas-Austin has also digitized all pages of the atlas, though its site is a little more challenging to use: https://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/national_atlas_1970.html
Library of Congress Digital Collections (extremely rich online collection of public domain materials): https://www.loc.gov/collections/ (you can also reach this by Googling "library of congress digital collections")
Library of Congress Panoramic Birdseye Maps: https://www.loc.gov/collections/panoramic-maps/about-this-collection/
David Rumsey's extraordinarily online map collection, which includes a vast number of maps ranging across the whole history of cartography: http://www.davidrumsey.com/ Erwin Raisz's large 1957 "Landforms of the United States" map can be viewed (but not downloaded) in the Rumsey collection here: http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~231095~5508485:United-States----Physical-Landforms David Rumsey is a fine arts graduate at Yale who made a fortune in real estate and finance, started collecting maps in early 1980s, amassed more than 150,000, put many online, and in 2016 donated the entire collection to Stanford.
Charles O. Paulin's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932): http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/ One of the first and greatest historical atlases of the U.S., now fully available online from this site.
Historical Atlas of UW-Madison: http://www.williamcronon.net/uw-campus-atlas/ Developed for this course, this page gives you access to several historic aerial photographs of the UW-Madison campus, along with various documents on the history of the campus landscape. Of special interest in the wonderful history by James Feldman of every building on the UW-Madison campus constructed up through the early 1990s. You can access it from this same page and learn a great deal about buildings you see around you every day.
UW-Madison's Lakeshore Nature Preserve Digital Map: https://imap.lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu/imap/LakeshoreNaturePreserve.html (requires Flash)
Forest Hill Cemetery: http://foresthill.williamcronon.net/
Learning Historical Research: http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/
The most important lesson in all this: it’s a map lover's treasure trove out there! Enjoy the Web and explore it in a spirit of playful wandering as you look for tools and insights to help you understand the Making of the American Landscape....