Okay. So, what I want to do now is look at a web browsing based mapping app. This is actually Arc GIS Online which is similar at least at first glance to something you've probably seen before like Google Maps and that you can zoom in and out, you can pan around just like you'd be able to do with any other online mapping application. But Arc GIS Online can do way more than that. It's actually an online browser-based Geographic Information Systems or GIS that can do way more than just look at maps, but for now I just want us to kind of pretend or just treat it as though it's just a regular mapping application. Why am I doing this? Well, the main reason to begin with is I just want us to kind of do that deconstruction, do a little bit of critical analysis as we're looking at a map is what am I seeing, why is it designed that way and then really gets you to think about how this might relate to what you would do when you're making your own maps. All right. So, let's have a look at this. So, just to begin with is if we look at this map of the world, you'll see that we have different colors that are telling us different things. We have Greenland here which is white and why is it white, Gee I wonder. Well, people associate Greenland with ice and snow which are white. So, if we make something white in our maps is the same thing with by the way with Antarctica down here. If we make something white on a map especially in a map like this, then people are going to associate that with snow or ice. That's not always true in every situation but in this particular map that would make the most sense, wouldn't it? Okay, what else do we have? We have green for vegetation. Right. So, there's the Amazon for example and then we have blue for water. So, the predominant colors here are green, white and blue. Notice that none of them are really dark or high contrast or super bright that's intentional. The idea is that they are there and they're kind of pleasing to the eye, that there nothing stands out too much. Because if you do have something that's really bright or dark or high-contrast, then your eye is drawn to that and you're trying to tell somebody that's the subject of the map. Here there is no real subject. We're just kind of saying here's a map of the world. That's one thing. Something else is that these choices of colors are important. So, this may seem really obvious to you is that, okay, yeah, the waters blue. Okay, but you'd be surprised how often people make these mistakes is that, yes you know white for ice, blue for water seems obvious. But, if you are making your map and I've seen this happen many times where someone will be making a map of your study area and they'll make part of it light blue that's not water, but when someone else looks at that map, the first thing they think is, Oh, is that water?, and then they get confused because they're like I don't remember there being a lake in that study area there. That's, what is that? Oh, that's actually whatever something like a certain kind of vegetation or something. So, if you do that if you make that mistake, you're going against the tradition, you're going against that they're not speaking that language correctly if you want that graphical language which can be confusing to people. Again, may seem obvious but when you're making your own maps and you're spending a lot of time on those that may not occur to you at the time. So, I'm just encourage you from the very beginning to look at other people's maps, what are the conventions that they've used and what might I use when I'm making my own. Okay. So, let's zoom in a little bit and see what we can see. So, I'm only going to zoom in one zoom amount let's say. There are actually set stages for these and right away you'll notice that something's been added to the map. We now have lettering that's been included. So, we have let me just put it on my thing here, North America, Pacific Ocean and so on. So, why am I pointing this out now. The main thing is to see that North America is in black type, its capital letters and as we'll talk about in the section on typography, it's a serif font and as opposed to the Pacific Ocean which is in title case, in other words the first letter is capitalized but the rest isn't. It's a different color, it's light blue and it's italicized and that again, I'm not going to do a whole lecture on typography right now but the point is that they've chosen these intentionally to tell us things in this kind of code. Right. So, the fact that the North America is in black lettering as are all the continents, it's telling us that these are things that are important. Now, we're starting to see a bit more contrast. These are things that they want us to key in on. The oceans are there. Typically, generally speaking, the people are more interested in the land than the water so they've made them a little more subtle. They've also differentiated the fact that one's an italics and one isn't. So, they're telling us that those are two different things, land versus water. You'll see that a lot on maps. Is often water bodies are labeled with italicized type and land is with non italicized. So, they're trying to tell you that there are different categories of things on the map here. Some are in one category land, some are another category water. If we zoom in some more, there's more detail added. So, you can see here that the Rocky Mountains have been included now. So, again, you'll see that that's a different type. Right. It's it's there, it's black but it's a different type face than say that which by the way, now we don't have continents labeled we, have countries labeled which again are very prominent, they're in capital letters, it's high-contrast because people generally want to know where different countries are. So, here we have Canada and then we have Rocky Mountains which is a major land form or the Appalachian Mountains here. So, they want to include those but again they're in a different typeface and you'll notice that those are in italics so is the water, but they're using different colors and typefaces in different ways. So, on land the italics means something like a mountain range, in water if you see them in blue it means that it's water. You'll even notice that for example the Caribbean Sea is now labeled but it's smaller than the Atlantic Ocean because it's a smaller land feature, the typeface is smaller to indicate that it's lower on that hierarchy. Okay, if we zoom in another level and I won't do this all the way through. You're probably wondering how much of this is he going to do. I'll just kind of point out a few things is that now we can see major cities. So, again, notice the lettering there. Now you can see the labeling of major rivers like the Missouri and the Arkansas. Interestingly, there's the Mississippi. That's on there as well. We keep zooming in and you'll notice that more details being included things like the names of each stat. Now we're seeing. Smaller cities. So, for example in Ontario, cities like Hamilton or smaller than Toronto. So, they're not as visible at a zoomed out more but as you zoom in you start to see smaller cities like Hamilton, Kitchener, Peterborough and so on and if we keep zooming in, notice that more detail is being added to the map. So, more and more features are being added as we go to what we would call a larger map scale. We'll talk about map scale and another segment. So, sometimes this is referred to as Zoom layering. So, whoever is creating these web maps is deciding when you zoom in this amount, then this type of theme becomes available so that people can see it. But even here I think they've done a really nice job of being able to see or being able to design it in a way that there's a lot of information packed in here but none of it is too overwhelming. None of it is dominating the map too much. So, now we can see things like major expressways and highways, river systems and streams, major roads, they're all there but it's done in a way where you can pick that information out if you need it. If we just kind of zoom in more quickly here, let's see if we can find. Let's go to Hyde Park, and so what this version of the map now we're getting contours, we're getting a little shading, we're getting names of neighborhoods, major roads. Okay, you get the idea. So, I won't go into any more detail. I think you get the point here is that as we're moving in here, you'll notice that these maps are covering different areas, there are different map scales going from the entire world down to a neighborhood and as we're doing that, there's changes in style of what's or substance in terms of what's being shown and style in terms of how it's been shown so that whatever zoom later you're out which is basically a map scale, that different information is becoming more obvious or less obvious so that you can focus on just the stuff that you're interested in and not have to worry about filtering out a lot of extraneous information that's not important. So, I hope this kind of gives you an idea of what to look at when you're looking at a map like this and even think about the fact that what if we had a paper map. Well, that's a totally different thing again. You don't have the option of changing what people see at different map scales. It's a set scale, you have to make set decisions about what people are going to be able to view with that paper map. With a digital map, we have a whole different set of options available which is great but it's also more complicated and more decisions are required.
