Mapmaking Tools

This mapping assignment was quite time consuming. Although my research focuses on medieval alliterative poetry, I decided to make a map that illustrates the present day city of Toronto with images from the construction of the Yonge subway line in the 1940s and 1950s. I did my undergraduate degree in Toronto, and I decided that my familiarity with the city and my casual interest in urban planning would make at least the latitude and longitude aspects of the assignment relatively simple. Yet it was actually the minor details that took up the most time: where to store the .kml file before I embedded my map on Scalar, where to find the appropriate fields on the Google spreadsheet, and how to record a tour on Google Earth.

Surprisingly, however, I took these mapping skills and applied them to my research in other courses (at a much faster rate this time around). While writing an essay on Somerset Maugham's Liza of Lambeth, for example, I made a quick map of all of the locations in the novel, which is set in London. The learning process in Scalar ended up saving me time and research in my other work.

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Author: Alyssa McLeod
Word Count: 196

Posted on 28 August 2012, 9:55 pm by Alyssa McLeod  |  Permalink