Animated Mapping - History

History

The concept of animated maps began in the 1930s, but did not become more developed by cartographers until the 1950s (Slocum et al. 2005). In 1959, Norman Thrower published Animated Cartography, discussing the use of animated maps in adding a new dimension that was difficult to express in static maps: time. These early maps were created by drawing "snap-shots" of static maps, putting a series of maps together to form a scene and creating animation through photography tricks (Thrower 1959). Such early maps rarely had an associated scale, legends or oriented themselves to lines of longitude or latitude (Campbell and Egbert 1990).

With the development of computers in the 1960s and 1970s, animation programs were developed allowing the growth of animation in mapping. Waldo Tobler created one of the first animations, using a 3-D computer generated map to portray population growth over a specified time in Detroit (Tobler 1970). Hal Moellering created another animated map in 1976 representing a spatiotemporal pattern in traffic accidents (Slocum et al. 2005).

Further development in animated map was stalled until the 1990s due to a lack of animation in academics, financial restrictions on research, and lack of distribution means (Campbell and Egbert 1990). In the 1990s, however, the invention of faster, more efficient computers, compact discs and the Internet solved such problems.

Read more about this topic:  Animated Mapping

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.
    Terri Apter (20th century)

    To summarize the contentions of this paper then. Firstly, the phrase ‘the meaning of a word’ is a spurious phrase. Secondly and consequently, a re-examination is needed of phrases like the two which I discuss, ‘being a part of the meaning of’ and ‘having the same meaning.’ On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.
    —J.L. (John Langshaw)