Lesson 2: Visualizing Earth
January 24, 2024
Review:
- Course intro and syllabus
- Geogrid, latitude, longitude
- Location clues and famous athletes
- Your clues? Hold on to them, for now.
Presentation:
- How do we learn from enormous volumes of data? Data Visualization.
- The most challenging problems require us to combine disparate data types and sources.
- How do we combine these data in a way that makes sense? Geographically, on a map.
- Welcome to the Geospatial Revolution
- List of Map Projections (it’s a long list, here are a few common ones below)
- Mercator – shapes and angles are true; distortion of size, increasing poleward
- Robinson – compromise with subtle distortion in size/shape/angles, good for world maps
- Albers – frequently used for North America maps
- Winkel Tripel – world maps with minimum distortion
- Lambert – good for regional mid-latitude maps
- Map Projections video (06:00)
Activity:
- Draw a world map by hand on paper with pen/pencil.
- Approximate the shape of the continents. No need for perfection or accuracy.
- Plot the 3 points that will be “clues” for guessing your famous person (remember your assignment?).
- Show the precise latitude and longitude next to the location or somewhere on the page.
- Feel free to decorate the map, use color, draw graphics … have fun!
- It’s difficult to tell a story with a map. Here’s your chance to practice!
- Don’t worry, I won’t judge your artistic skills.
- Submit your hand-drawn map (1 page only) to me before you leave class today.
Assignment:
- Watch all (5) of the Geospatial Revolution videos.
- Textbook reading, “The Earth’s Revolution Around the Sun” Ch. 1 pp. 49-55
- Watch Ted Lasso’s take on tea (for Celestine and other tea lovers)
