Exercises in Cartography - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 23

2.5 Computer Classes
The map drawing exercises that replaced the manual ones took place on the
computer, using specific drawing programmes like Aldus Freehand in the 1990s,
and now perhaps Adobe Illustrator. I suppose every university cartography depart-
ment would train its students with exercises to become familiar with these mapping
packages, learn to deal with the various layers, at least before the advent of GIS
software programmes, when boundary files could just be matched with statistical
data sets, and many students do not get beyond learning how to combine data sets in
EXCEL and deal with shape files in ArcGIS.
Of course the new digital environment also affected reproduction. The repro-
duction exercises contained in the ICA Basic Cartography Exercise manual, like
those on the production of small-scale topographic maps, or of tourist maps no
longer were relevant, and would have to be restructured. The same was valid for the
production diagrams. A fair amount of time used to be spent on exercises on their
compilation; I remember ICA workshops all over Asia where we trained students to
find the least expensive ways of reproducing maps through these exercises that now
had to be reworked, necessitating new sets of symbols for the new digital
techniques required.
2.6 Atlas Production Exercises
Atlas production exercises simulate many aspects of the cartographic profession, as
they would train both the design and the production planning aspects. I reported on
them at the Tokyo ICA conference (1980). In Atlas production classes e.g. lay-out
exercises were done, to establish a template for the individual atlas sheets, and for
finding the best sequence of map subjects. An example here is the exercise how to
structure a school atlas of Turkey, to be printed on both sides of a single printing
sheet, one side in colour and the other in black and white. The sequence had to make
sense and be thought logical; the most important maps would have to be coloured,
but also the chorochromatic maps that would not be legible in black and white. For
all individual atlas maps, preliminary drawings or mock-ups would be made, before
starting with their digital production, in order to be sure all necessary elements
would be incorporated (see Fig. 2.9 ).
Superior examples of atlas production exercises would be the atlases compiled at
Oxford Brookes University where Roger Anson would take his students to the
continent each year in order to gather the information to visualize in the next term.
Toponymy is another area of atlas cartography where exercises are used in order
to speed up the student's grasp of the subject matter. We would ask them, for
instance, to do an exercise in script conversion, or to compare geographical names
on a map of Spain from a Spanish school atlas and from a British school atlas, and
then ask them to work out the rules the editor of the British atlas would have
followed in order to adjust the toponyms to his British audience. Production of a
place names index and from a map would teach students how to deal with generic