A Cartographer by trade, I forced my (3yr old at the time)son to go to a map museum a few years ago. FDR's globe behind him.
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halfEmpty, tell me more about being a cartographer. Like what kind of maps do you make? Geological?
How have google maps/satellites impacted your career?
I'm a huge map nerd and just skimmed through this book.
Spending half my life with Google Maps it had never occurred to me how important accurate maps were for the military back in the days before satellites. Like I know we raided all the Nazi's scientists/technology but it I had no idea we also jacked all their maps as well.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-secret-mission-seize-nazi-map-data-180973317/
Honestly, I don't make many maps any more.(or what I would call a publish quality map) I used to make geology maps when I was finishing up college and worked at the Kansas Geological Survey. I do love maps though and have always been a geography nerd even as a child. I miss the intricacies of making a really fine map.
I use google maps for driving directions. Not really used all that much for professional mapping or analysis (unless pulling data from google for analysis).
I'm a solutions architect now and mostly plan projects, integrations, and spatial analysis. I spend way more time writing code than I do making maps.
Geography has really started blowing up in the last decade or so. For instance, company B wants to build a new store. They'd ask a GIS(Geography Information Systems) person to analyze patterns and tell them the best locations to put that new store (this could be based on traffic patterns, demographics, nearby retail, local income, etc..
For me, working in the public sector now, we have issues with project funding and where to spend money. So I'll build a model of all our assets, what condition they are in, how much longer they will last, etc.. with the spatial component, I can map out locations around the city where we have multiple asset categories nearing their end-of-life and/or have high consequence of failure. We can focus project money on those locations, get a better ROI and avoid the always embarrassing, replace a road and 2 years later dig it up to replace the water line underneath scenario. You'd think that would be a given to do them both at the same time, but that has always been a massive problem in government silos.
VR, 3D and AI/Machine Learning are really the next frontiers of Geography. Some really cool applications coming out.
I kind of veered there and didn't really talk about maps all that much.