Cartography or mapmaking has been an important part of human history for a long time since 8,500 years ago. During these years, our ancestors used cave paintings or sculpting for the examination of new places or territories. In those days, people used to create and use maps as a necessary tool to help them explain, define, and navigate their way through the world.
A map is a symbolic representation of places being illustrated by an element. Maps illustrate the real world on a much smaller image. They help you travel from one location to another. They help you compose information. They help you figure out where you are and how to get where you want to go. Maps are one of the most important tools for students, cartographers, researchers, tourists, and others that use to analyze the whole earth or a specific part of it. In simple words, maps are smaller pictures of the earth's surface. They can be used as a common reference to show landforms, political boundaries, water bodies, and the positions of cities. It acts as a guide in places that we have never visited before. They give us the distance in two places, rivers, mountains, the railway station, airport, and shapes of places or destinations.
Maps have symbols and legends on it to help the reader understand the map better. The symbols represent the area where regions, space, and themes are presented on a map. This is important in the field of geography because it can specifically give the person the exact address of the location of where he wants to go and it will be indicating the current position of a person who wants to navigate a certain location. Maps are usually made to establish a position where location and places are presented in an illustration, paper, or graphical analysis.
To fully understand what's in a map we all need to learn the map reading skills that are required to read and interpret maps. Optical literacy does not only mean solving an image but also comprehending it, understanding the image and its intentional meaning, evaluating it, and integrating it with other knowledge. It may seem easy, but map reading requires a lot of patience and a great approach to comprehend it.
The significance of a map is to currently locate the position of certain equipment, material, place, person, or objects. Employing a map is one of the most considerable ways to decrease the time finding for a lost object, person, or equipment over a certain time. Maps indicate an object that is lost using radars, sensors, and other mapping tools to locate an object.
Twenty years ago, we used paper maps and printed guides to help us navigate the world. Today, we have the most advanced digital mapping technologies like satellite imagery, GPS devices, location data, and of course Google Maps are much more accessible. This change in mapping technology is improving our lives. With a map, one does not have to depend on anybody for local directions. It acts as a direction finder for every living.
How Cartography Has Evolved Over Time
Cartography has evolved and will continue to evolve for thousands of years. Mapmaking started by being made by hand and only including tiniest details, to being produced by computers and including the slightest of details. Many have contributed and will contribute to mapmaking until the end of time. Since the beginning, people have been using maps to help communicate, navigate, and simplify their lives. Maps get more advanced every day as scientists continue to further improve their knowledge of technology and surroundings.
Cartography has evolved drastically since the beginning of time. The first humans made maps on cave walls with stone. Many scholars from various places made remarkable advancements in mapmaking by analyzing each other's work. One of the scholars used simple geometric principles for measuring land. Another one made theory where Earth was a cylinder and also, proved the Earth to be spherical.
During the dark ages of history, cartography went down, rather of factual maps, they became more based on belief and religion. In some parts of the Middle-East and some of the Middle-West however, cartography was being furthered by men who picked up where one scholar left off and continued to improve maps. Maps became interesting to Europeans again in the Age of Exploration and Discovery.
To this day, scientists still use earlier accurate maps to build new maps of the world today. In cartography, everything and everyone is connected, everybody's ideas build off each other, and without the first maps, maps would not have been able to evolve and grow with approaching information.
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What an article, looking forward to understanding more from your future article