Shout out for paper maps
Does anyone else see the irony in these two statements, which fortuitously popped up in my feed reader one after the other?
It’s so depressing when people talk about phasing out paper maps. It seems to be part of a general feeling that all maps are for is getting from point A to point B on the road. Does your sat-nav point out interesting things you maybe ought to detour for? (I’ll probably get a wry smile from Mr Archaeogeek at this point, who knows I love to buy paper maps of new areas and sit down all evening just looking at all the sites on them. Particularly archaeological sites. He’s very long-suffering). I guess sat-nav just doesn’t have that same sense of history.
Maybe it’s like the hysteria a few years ago about the book disappearing… then it was newspapers, then magazines, yet they’re all still with us. I guess it’s all part of the cycle.
Paper maps are dead.
On tomorrow’s evening news: StreetView use while driving made illegal.
Well, i dont think paper maps are dead.
There will be more and more use of gps for navigation and etc, but maps on paper are used on tons of important things, specially when it comes to thematic mapping.
Does your GPS shows you what is the density in x location? Geology? Climate?
The first reaction came to me when I heard “No” was “Obviously.” It could be because we are living in a digital sphere. A minute later I would say that paper can not be replaced. The total replacement is a fallacy. It just likes we still need printer although there are many digital machines out there for different scales of uses.
[...] fact is that Google maps are not as rich and interesting as those the Ordnance Survey produces. I’ve said in the past that there is more to maps than simply directions from A to B. As more people rely on google and [...]
Yes!
- Paper maps organise your mind: you know on what sheet find what town, artefact, the relations between them, etc.
- Paper maps are interactive: you can draw on it, you can discuss with friends, etc.
- Paper maps won’t let you down: no low battery problem, no hardware failure, formats issue, etc.
- Paper maps do burn, so you can start a fire
- And last, only paper maps will survive in the end, when the last backup on the last device will die (paper is not robust as parchment, but way better than any digital support)
OK, I am an old fossil (used to be a geologist)
@Gummibärli- agreed, but it’s just not cool to think that way at the moment. It’s OK, in a few years we can always re-invent the paper map as a flexible, low-power, interactive, light-weight location device!