I thoroughly enjoyed going through the “Anatomy of a Web Map” presentation by Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter. It covered many major and informative points without making it feel like a long read. I’ve now learned the appropriate way to describe web maps as they load in raster of vector tiles and the different components that make up a cohesive map. It’s eye-opening to think of how far we’ve come from the MapQuest days and of the possibilities when one can layer on different pieces of information within certain locations and have them load quickly for the user. There are plenty of apps now with the ability to track real-time locations of multiple objects to make our lifestyles even more efficient than ever.
For example, there is an app called Glympse that I taught my Dad how to use because he sometimes worries about my drive back and forth between LA and my hometown. Its interface allows you to send a “glimpse” of where you’re headed, your location as you’re heading towards your destination, and (sometimes unfortunately) the speed in mph you’re traveling. Although apps are a different medium of maps, it’s still amazing that we’ve advanced this far and that it’s all made possible because of new interactive web mapping technology.
Furthermore, other open-source tools were briefly mentioned in the presentation that illustrates how one can manipulate and feed certain data into a map to relay one’s argument. From Jim Detwiler’s article of “The Introduction to Web Mapping,” I learned about the advantages and disadvantages of using certain types of web-mapping tools. In particular, the public API providers already supply the base layers so the developer would only have to add more information on top. However, the downside is that if the base layers are not to the developer’s liking, it can’t be changed. Also, they are not very compatible with complicated data sets that involve a large amount of polygon data.
This reminded me of a map that my urban planning professor had shown our class that used a Google Maps API and the 2010 census to map out every individual’s race and ethnicity. The visualization is basically an American snapshot of the racial diversity in every neighborhood of the country and is composed of 308,745,538 color-coded dots. From a zoomed-out perspective, one can see how clustered certain colors are even though there are sporadic splashes of varied dots. However, upon closer inspection of the interactive map, one can see in more detail, the network of specific races in context of the different cities.