Ok, So i looked over all the historical atlases on the syllabus. I won't claim to have poured over them in depth, because thumper in Bambi told us that he couldn't tell a lie. Actually, that was George Washington, I was just checking to see how many people would catch that one :)
Ok. Historical atlas's are pretty neat, from what I can tell, you can learn a lot just from the types of things they include. A lot of the European maps of the New World include shipping references, angles, distances, and coastlines, but little else past the coastal villages/towns/cities/whatnot. On the other hand, the Native American maps in the Hayes Atlas are much more focused on where big hills are, tribal boundaries, etc. So, looking back, we can tell what this particular mapper was interested in, which is a trait we can follow throughout almost all maps up to the current day. An interesting thing is that even though maps remain specialized, they become more complex and incorporate different features of different types of maps. For example, they could have a US political map that had topography of mountain ranges, major roads, plus markings for airports along with lat/long coords and GPS coods. The map could theoretically function as an av-map (Aviation map), a general driving map to see which route from California to DC would be fastest/shortest, and could also teach state geography to youngsters in school.
So yeah. Now. I'm going to be blunt and say that I don't have a clue what the "evaluation of historical atlases" that's due tonight is. Or pretend that I've done it already. So, I'll probably go look it up now really quick and see what I can throw together.
Oh. I also did a practice in Illustrator. I know it might not be the curvyist thing in the world, but I traced a Ford GT supercar. Just figured it was something I was interested in, so I practiced with the Pen tool :)
I will say that the windows version of illustrator is slightly different than the mac version I used at GMU - and here's the shocker - it's slightly different in a better way. The pen tool works better, allows joining of lines a little easier, in general, I likes it a lot more on my laptop. Now I just need to find a permanent USB mouse that I can use, the trackpad was a little rough, and I was doing gentle curves on the supercar :) I'll post that up as soon as I figure out how the heck you can link images.
~B out.
Comments