Exercises in Cartography - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 25

cartographic draughtsmen. There were higher education or university cartography
courses that had exercises in a classroom environment, and there were exercises
that formed part of correspondence courses, or of manuals developed by carto-
graphic societies or individual teachers. The Netherlands Cartographic Society used
to invite foreign experts for its courses on specific techniques like map lettering or
hill shading, for the benefit of their members who had to do exercises in order to
master these techniques.
All of these exercises were meant to train, for the participants to practice the
theoretical aspects, to pass on knowledge and experience. The ICA tries to continue
this training work globally with the hands-on courses it has been organizing for
some 30 years, not only through its Commission on Education and Training (CET)
but also through the Commission on Management and Economics of Map Produc-
tion and the Commission on Maps and the Internet, frequently also jointly.
As only a small audience can be reached, however enthusiast these commissions
are, with lecturing teams only within the last 2 years (2009 and 2010) flying in into
Central Asia, Iran, Indonesia or Vietnam, developing web courses are a way to reach
larger audiences, even if interaction and feed-back still present problems. Already an
enormous variety of cartography courses is being offered on the web, and the ICA
Commission on Education and Training under Laszlo Zentai and David Fraser has
selected the best ones and incorporated them on the CET website, a major job that
deserves acknowledgement. The only aspect perhaps lacking in these web courses are
exercises. I think the best and most challenging exercises that we have devised for our
own students should be incorporated onto the CET website next to the current lessons
or lectures that have already been stored there, just as we collected the best paper
exercises in the past for the ICA Basic Cartography Exercise manual.
These best and most challenging exercises should show students how many-sided
and intellectually stimulating cartography is, and they might thus be induced to follow
a career in our discipline. With these exercises we would visualise the challenges of
our profession, to adapt geospatial data to the objectives and the target groups of
information transfer, to support spatial decision making now and in the future.

Annex 1: Overview of Cartographic Exercises

A. Map production exercises
A1. Information analysis
(1a) Establish information/parameter hierarchy
(1b) Establish parameter characteristics
(1c) establish rules for language-dependent toponymy
A2.Exercises in mapping technique
(2a) Map lettering
(2b) Hill shading
(2c) Generalisation
(2d) Drawing panoramic maps/block diagrams
(2e) Line drawing exercises

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