Cartographers have long ago developed maps for understanding the complexity of our environment. Whether it started for war or general education, cartography has developed over time in an astonishing way. While analysing the quote ‘Cartographers have strongly emphasised the visible, the tangible, the static, the physical and the historical values over the invisible, intangible, dynamic, human and futurist aspects of the world’ by Muehrke, I began to understand the graphic projections have a long history in creating visual representations. This essay will argue that cartography develops a better understanding of what is visible, tangible, static and physical. I will also discuss how historical mapping has changed and evolved to enable the mapping of the invisible, intangible and dynamic. The last paragraph will portray my personal view of cartography and how this statement relates to my emerging cartography philosophy.
From the beginning of the lecture I have learned that cartography is ‘the organization and communication of geographically related information in either graphic or digital form. Cartography includes all processes from data acquisition to presentation and use’ (Chalmers, 2013). Maps have many classes; each used to categorise certain features. The data available is too vast to fit on one map therefore the different classes of maps help understand where features lie in New Zealand. The history of mapping is a complex and an undefined subject. Maps have been found in caves found from 1,000BC depicting the land and area surrounding it’s creator. For the purpose of this essay I will focus from the time of the great age of exploration to the current 21st century. Historically speaking, maps were generally used as a tool to show information of