All language subtitles for 01_maps-in-your-pocket.en

Most of us carry maps around in our pockets every day in the form of apps on our phones.

Maps are incredibly popular.

But, why is that exactly?

Well, maps help us answer some very important questions like where am I?

Where is that thing I'm looking for?

Where's that location?

How do I get there? If we look at a typical mapping app on a phone,

like Google maps, you'll see that it answers these questions in a simple intuitive way.

So, if we just look at it.

The little blue dot is the where am I,

the search bar is the way that we find out where is that place.

So, we type in whatever we're looking for,

and it shows us where that is,

and then the navigation tools allow us to figure out how do I get there.

So , three very important questions,

they may seem obvious,

but when you look at the design of an app like this,

it's a great way of kind of thinking about

the questions that we typically want to answer in the form of a map.

Where am I? Where is that place? How do I get there?

Google maps is very popular and works really well,

but it does have its limitations.

What if I want to customize the map?

Well, sure, Google has some basic options like traffic and satellite images,

what we can think of as map themes or layers,

but what if I want to add other map themes such as neighborhoods,

or voting districts, or pollution levels.

Well, what if I want to add my own places that is

collect data such as the locations of trees,

say on a university campus.

What if I want to not just map the locations of those trees,

but store information about them such as their species,

the age, and the height.

Google maps has a very nice design,

but it's meant to be multipurpose.

So, it's not always the best map for every situation.

Esri, which is one of the largest mapping software companies in the world,

has its own specialized app called explorer.

A first glance, it seems similar to Google maps,

but it can do a whole lot more.

This is the default map which may not be as colorful as Google's,

but that's actually intentional as it's designed to be less noticeable.

This way, you can draw other things on top of it

which will be easier to see as the subject of the map.

You also have more choices for the base map which is what we call the background map.

Most of the map creation happens through a web browser,

or software on a computer,

but Esri has created apps that are designed to then,

use the maps you created in a browser,

or through an app on your phone or tablet.

That's when it gets really interesting.

So you may be thinking, why limit our discussion to maps on a phone?

Well, I started with that because it's probably

the most familiar mapping apps are among the most popular apps in the world,

and people use them probably millions or billions of times a day.

But we can also look at maps through a web browser,

and so let's turn our discussion to that now.

If we stick with Google Maps for a minute,

because it's arguably the most popular,

we have a larger version of the same thing we saw on the mobile app.

We can select different themes, like satellite imagery,

or traffic conditions, or transit routes,

and that's all great, and it's amazing what we can do with Google Maps.

But what if we want to use our own data,

and make our own maps,

and customize them in our own way for our own purposes?

Well, Google Maps is not the best for that necessarily.

Just to be clear, I'm not really criticizing Google Maps,

it's an amazing service that's provided basically free of charge,

it does an enormous amount of things really really well,

but it doesn't really do everything that we may want to do

in order to customize things for our own purposes.

There are ways to make customized maps on anything that you're interested in.

It could be trees in a park,

it could be the effects of climate change,

it could be something to do with crime statistics,

anything that you might be interested in that can be put in a map, we can work with.

So, really what we're starting with are the basic questions of, where is it?

So, where is something? What's the location of it?

We'll talk about how you describe that location,

and then also, what is it?

So, what is that location?

What are the characteristics of that thing that we found the location of,

so, let's say it's a tree.

The where is it might be coordinates in longitude and latitude,

the what is it might be the attributes of that trees such as the height,

the age, species, the condition that it's in, and so on.

Once we've mastered those questions,

we can start asking other questions such as, why is it there?

Why is that tree there? Did somebody plant it?

Did it grow on its own from a seed that blew in the wind?

Those kinds of questions are things that we can start to to examine in more detail.

Then, we can look at, why do we care?

What are the effects of that thing?

So, do we want that tree to be there?

Is that a good thing that, that tree is there?

Is it a tree that's a nuisance?

These all kinds of things, hey, I love trees,

but the whole thing is about you know,

why is that thing there?

So, where is it? What is it?

Why is it there? Then, what effect does it have?

It'll means sort of why do we care in a in a kind of a flippant way?

It's more to say that there may be a reason why it's there,

and how does it affect what we're interested in looking at,

and what we're studying in terms of things that are going on in the world?

So, is it a good thing, is it a bad thing,

does it help us, is it of interest to us,

that's what we're really getting at.

So, these questions form a definition of

geography that was put forth by Charles Gritzner,

who was a professor at the South Dakota State University.

I've always liked this definition.

It's a widely used definition.

It's easy to remember,

but it actually has more meaning to it than might be obvious to begin with.