You're Projecting!: Types of Maps and Map Projections
This type of map focuses on geographic locations and seeing where things are. It can show boundaries, roads, cities, and other features that can help you understand the "where" of an area.
What is a Reference Map?
This type of scale features more detail than its counterpart, zooming in on a smaller area rather than broadly describing a larger one.
What is Large Scale?
This vocabulary item describes a problem all map projections face because a three dimensional globe can never perfectly translate to a two dimensional map projection.
What is distortion?
What are longitude and latitude?
This three letter acronym refers to an integrated network of satellites that use data to help users navigate, a system often used when a person drives to an unfamiliar address or around a new city.
What is GPS (Global Positioning System)?
This type of map focuses on showing spatial patterns and the relationship between space and data. Examples include choropleth, cartogram, proportional, and dot density maps to name a few.
What is a Thematic Map?
More specific than just "geographer," this is the name of a geographer who makes maps.
What is a Cartographer?
This aspect of Human Environment Interaction considers how humans use the earth's land and other resources. It tries to protect the present and future by developing tools to decrease or terminate our reliance on things like fossil fuels.
What is Sustainable Development?
Two of the five themes of Human Geography, this pair is often used interchangeably in daily conversation to describe where something is, but they actually describe two distinct but related concepts in HuGe.
What are place and location?
This three letter acronym is one of the five themes of geography. This theme focuses on how we impact the world around us, and how the environment impacts us.
What is HEI (Human Environmental Interaction)?
This phrase refers to a two dimensional representation of our three dimensional planet. All of these are distorted in some way, with examples including Peters, Polar, and Robinson to name a few.
What are Map Projections?
This type of region may be called the same thing by two different people, but those two people may disagree on what qualifies as a part of that region. A familiar example of this is which states constitute "the South" in the United States.
What is a Vernacular (or Perceptual) Region?
This map projection is great for navigating across oceans thanks to its accurate depiction of direction as well as longitude and latitude lines that meet at right angles. It's not so great because it is notoriously very distorted, particularly around the poles. This might have led you to believe Greenland is close in size to Africa.
What is the Mercator Projection?
The first of these two alliterative terms describes data that that is numerical, while the second describes data that refers to characteristics like color or shape.
What are quantitative and qualitative data?
This three letter acronym describes a sophisticated software which layers data and allows the user to view data sets individually or simultaneously.
What is GIS (Geographic Information System)?
This type of map falls in the Thematic Map category, intentionally distorting the size and shape of different areas to communicate the value of specific data such as population.
What is a Cartogram?
This three word phrase describes a phenomenon in which relative distances seem to shrink over the course of history due to advancements in technology and transportation.
What is Time Space Compression?
While this type of thematic map is great for using different sizes of symbols (circles, arrows, etc.) to represent a scale of data values, it can also be difficult to interpret depending on the data and areas represented.
What is a Proportional (or Graduated Circle) map?
The first of these two terms refers to the area a map covers and is described as either small or large. The second of these two terms refers to the scope of the data that a map is representing.
What are scale and scale of analysis?
The essential questions of HuGe can be boiled down to these three short ideas which all begin with the same letter.
What are "Where?, Why There? and Why Care?"?
A type of thematic map, this one uses dots to represent density and distribution of data values. The legend on this thematic map often tells you whether those dots have a one-to-one ratio or a one-to-many ratio, so it's important to read the legend carefully.
What is a Dot Density (or Dot Distribution) Map?
The answer to this question is NEVER distorted in any two dimensional map of Earth, regardless of map projection.
How many oceans are there?
With an election coming up in November, we see this type of colorful thematic map more and more often. While it can be useful to communicate the way different areas vote, it can be problematic because it doesn't always consider factors like population or possible differences between the popular vote and the electoral college.
What is a Choropleth Map?
These first of these two alliterative terms describes an absolute location, and the second describes a relative location.
What are site and situation?
These five themes cover each major area of discussion in HuGe and were introduced early on in Unit 1, but discussed more in depth throughout each activity.
What are Location, Place, Movement (or Flow), Human Environment Interactions (or HEI), and Regions?