Ever since I was a child, I’ve always loved maps—I was a major geography nerd growing up. Jumping forward to today, my like-minded roommates are just as obsessed as I am: the walls of our dorm are literally covered floor to ceiling with maps. These include (but are not limited to) a glaciological map of Antarctica, public transport maps of numerous cities (Toulouse, Christchurch, and New York are just some examples), and a road map of my home state of Washington!
Maps aren’t just a fun hobby: They’re also enormously important in numerous research fields (in addition, of course, to just being plain useful). Whether your research field of interest is history or meteorology or epidemiology, there’s a good chance that you’ll be reading—and making!—some maps. In my own field of glaciology, maps are of paramount importance, whether it’s a map of glacier melt contribution from southeast Alaska or a map of Antarctic ice core sites. I’ve written this guide to provide some helpful resources and tools for making maps for your research, so hopefully it will serve as a good starting point! I should note that this isn’t a tutorial, but plenty of great tutorials should exist on the Internet for all of these tools.
Continue reading The Art of Cartography: Creating Maps for your Research
