Alloting

A map is meant to be a beautiful blending of science and art. Staring at a stack of city maps should inspire not just practical solutions to problems, but romantic images of wonderful places to travel. A good cartographer is going to succeed at conveying both ideas at once.

Accuracy is the touchstone of cartography. A map is a symbolic representation of a geographical space. While the features being depicted can never be exactly recreated, cartographers work hard to obtain accurate measurements of distance and features and to translate those measurements into a precise scale. There are plenty of problems associated with translating three dimensional space into a two dimension map. Even globes end up being distorted, due to the limitations of scale. Map makers are constantly forced into deciding what information to depict accurately and what data to omit or adapt.

After accuracy, cartographers strive to create maps that are, if not downright beautiful, then at least aesthetically harmonious. A quality world wall map is going to use a pleasing color palette. It may use standardized symbols, but it can adapt those symbols to fit the color scheme and font style so that the map as a whole is pleasing or even attractive to the eye.

The history of the map of Florida is an interesting one and is a history of the United States itself. Many of the early maps were done by Spaniards, this is because although the British may have laid claim to the Northeast of The New World, Spain had found other areas and had been conquering each of them over time. Most of the people to come over to America through Spain were poor people trying to escape the hand of the Spanish Inquisition. Although these people, often Jews and Muslims, were not safe in America, they were safer and had less to worry about as authority was scarce at best. During this time Florida was not sufficiently explored, and maps reflect this by enlarging the region that is now Mexico and Central America, and by making Florida very small. By the early 1740s this had changed and the style had become more realistic. It could be argued that this is because history started unfolding there around this time. There were many fights and in the mid 1700s Seminoles wiped out the majority of the Native Americans already there. There were few Spaniards who were willing to fight the Seminoles and those that did were wiped out quickly. Eventually the British would step in and help their Spanish friends, but until then, more Spanish became interested in exploring and correctly picturing the land around them than in fight off the invading tribe who was harassing all residence regardless of origin. These map makers at the time spent long periods of time and made many accurate maps of the wilderness, the rivers , even the shape of the coasts. Although the country was given back to the Spanish after the British came in and helped out with the Seminoles , the Spanish seemed to have given up on it and placed it’s attention in other places. As there were no more missionaries arriving in Florida, the United States took over the state. In an early 1800s map, the most accurate and modern image of Florida was recorded. It was not yet broken into districts as would be done in later versions of the us map , but was the first accumulation of the years previous perfecting the shape of the coasts, the rivers, the geography of the towns etc. All these details gave the map a new dimension and marked the beginning of the modern era in the history of the Florida map.