The Sami people of Europe have over three hundred words for snow (Eskimos in fact have a regular sized vocabulary for the word despite the urban legend). The reason for this large lexicon is that the Sami operate and experience snow so much that they need a large word bank to describe the exact definition of what they operate in. Cartographers and geographers likewise use maps for so many things that we need so many definitions for particular maps.
In what may be either a class project or the weirdest case of semi-plagiarism in the blogosphere there are several new blogs which give examples and definitions of various types of maps. Map Catalog, Matt Mudano's Map Blog, The World of Maps, and Maps Galore all have fifty some examples of various types of maps. Planimetric, Cadastral, Choropleth, Dot Distribution, and more shown and described. The definitions are short but it does a good job making the map type easily understood.
If you need to know what a certain map type is then the above blogs are a descent place to start.
In what may be either a class project or the weirdest case of semi-plagiarism in the blogosphere there are several new blogs which give examples and definitions of various types of maps. Map Catalog, Matt Mudano's Map Blog, The World of Maps, and Maps Galore all have fifty some examples of various types of maps. Planimetric, Cadastral, Choropleth, Dot Distribution, and more shown and described. The definitions are short but it does a good job making the map type easily understood.
If you need to know what a certain map type is then the above blogs are a descent place to start.
1 comment:
You forgot to mention my favorite where mapping does not mean maps. I have had many humorous exchanges with social scientists talking of mapping a community wherein the result is not a map. Indeed, I have been looked at quizzically in such conversations when I reference a map representation of information when clearly they were discussing a conceptual relationship. This misappropriation of terminology has probably contributed to the the very slow and in painful adoption of geospatial analysis in the social sciences. If the term "map" is already claimed, what do you call a map?
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