From this week’s reading, I found the post by Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter entitled “Anatomy of a Web Map” to be very informative and easy to follow. I learned that Google maps and Google earth, tools that I use daily, are so efficient because they are “slippy maps”. McConchie and Schechter explained that most web maps utilize tiles and slippy maps are effective because the tiles adjacent to the tiles you are viewing are pre-loaded so when you scroll over, they are already loaded and you don’t have to wait. Mapquest became so irrelelvant because it wasn’t a slippy map and everytime you scroll over to a new tile, the whole page has to reload.
Last year, I took Architecture and Urban Design 10A and one of the projects we had to do was based on a web map made by Diane Favro at UCLA. The project can be found at Digital Karnak. The project contains a timemap of the Karnak site in ancient Egypt and shows when each pharaoh made renovations to the site. The map goes from 200 BCE to 500 CE. When I was taking this class, this project was super helpful because it was an interactive, visual example of the different architectural structures being made and taken down as time passed and each new ruler took charge. In ancient Egypt, each new pharaoh wanted to assert his or her dominance and did so in the form of new architectural feats. When I took this class and studied Karnak, my research was focused on Hatshepsut and her son, Thutmose III. Until recently, Hatshepsut had been overlooked in the history books because there were no records of her rule. This is because her son was resentful of her power and defaced all of her statues and tore down many of the temples she resurrected. Without humanities work uncovering the ruins of Hatshepsut, her legacy would have been forgotten forever. Without digital humanities projects such as the Digital Karnak, this information would not be as accessible and easy to understand for the public.
Web maps really are a useful tool and I think their accuracy, efficiencies and capabilities will continue to grow. My younger brother has always been interested in maps, but was hesitant about studying geography because cartographers are no longer needed; however, I am going to tell him about the field of web mapping as I think that combines two things that he really enjoys and will only expand in the future.