This short video is absolutely a must-watch for today’s digital and crowdsourced-mapping enthusiasts. Produced by Chevrolet in the 1940s, Caught Mapping is an educational film that provides a truly intriguing and at times amusingly enter-taining view into how road maps were made at the time. The contrasts with today’s live, crowdsourced, social-media maps rich with high-resolution satellite imagery are simply staggering. This is definitely worth the watch!
Compare the roadmap-making of yesteryear with OpenStreetMap’s impressive map-making efforts in Haiti 2010 (video below) and Japan 2011, for example.
What do you think map-making will look like in 2040? Will we still be making maps? Or will automated sensors be live mapping 24/7? Will 2D interfaces disappear entirely and be replaced by 3D maps? Will all geo-tagged data simply be embedded within augmented reality platforms and updated live? Will we even be using the word “map” anymore?
No, the real question is: in 2040, will the soundtrack of the Open Street Map video sound as overbearingly dorky as the 1940 soundtrack and narration does to us now?
LOL
With huge power outages here in Arlington and also DC and Maryland, the local Verizon DNS server broken, (and Amazon’s Netflix server down to add to some frustration nationally) a networked map is useless – all digital stuff down yesterday (June 29) from about 6 a.m. until noon – so paper map, paper phone book/list and an old analog phone backup in the kitchen is wise : ) We have friends coming over this afternoon for shower, laundry and a dose of A/C.
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