Cartography - Topics

How did military maps shape campaigns? How have maps shaped our view of the world? How do maps distort the world? What makes a colour scheme readable for colour-blind map readers? Is hand-drawn cartography still a skill worth learning? Informal settlements: how self-built districts get mapped and why official maps lag reality How can mixing up a spatial reference system shift your data hundreds of metres? How do cartographers decide what to leave off a map as the scale shrinks? Why are contour lines labelled the way they are on a topographic sheet? Why zones are drawn as bands wrapping the globe while regions are not Choropleth or proportional symbol: which shows a rate better? Physical and political maps answer different questions about the same territory How do you document a geographic dataset so that a stranger can reproduce your map? How do you teach map reading to students who have only ever used a phone? How do you write a legend that readers understand without being taught? How big is Russia really compared with Africa? How do modern surveys remove a phantom island that older charts still show Why do two map vendors publish different coordinates for the same village? Reference map vs thematic map: how does the design brief change? How do you read contour lines on a topographic map to judge whether a hike is steep? Why does Greenland look as large as Africa on a Mercator world map? How do you read a false-colour satellite image and know what the red patches mean? Which countries end up at the edge of a world map and does that matter politically? Why is the world map you grew up with not the same as your neighbour's? Why does every map projection distort something and which distortion can you live with? How to judge how steep a hill is from contour lines alone What a topographic profile shows that a map view cannot Why the prime meridian runs through Greenwich: the 1884 vote and who abstained Where can you download free global elevation data at 30 metre resolution? What does a map scale ratio actually mean for a day's walk? Shapefile vs GeoJSON vs GeoPackage: which format should you pick for a web map? Why phantom islands appear when sailors mistake icebergs or cloud banks for land