Lights, Camera, Projection!

Map projections, in general, are intriguing as they illustrate the world we live in numerous ways from distorting one part of our world such as size as the stereographic conformal projection. Although, we know Africa is one of the largest continents the projection doesn't convey that at all. Even though, some of the data is skewed the projections still explain many things about size, ratios, distant and the gradient. Each of my maps helped me look at the world from in a different eye, from being flat(planar) in the cylindrical conformal map to looking at the world as a hexagon in the Eckert series projections. The significance of this is that you can be educated of distortions as well as realize how different people view the world for various reasons. There is now way to look at our world or measure it as different measurements give you a variety of results--I had the option to measure the two points in the geodesic, planar, loxodrome, and Great Elliptic. The different measurements varied from type to type from a few miles to few hundred miles. It is almost overwhelming how many ways Earth can be measured, seen and manipulated by technology.

Another benefit of the ArcGIS program is the ability to customize your data as much as you please. For example, all of my maps have different colors for the different data and I deleted the borders (could have added) to make the final draft look spacious.Customizable features such as the previous listed are reasons why projections can be very interesting and information you want to be seen can easily by recognized compared to some maps that are cluttered and confuse the reader.

My map projections were spot on for the most part, for example the scale for my equal area maps were equivalent as it should be but my equidistant maps gave me different distances from D.C. to Kabul which is unusual considering its suppose to be equidistant. Although, it was only ~2000 miles difference it still could throw someone off if they decided to use this projection to get an exact distant; they would be in Turkey or China instead of Afghanistan.

As a whole, the overall experience of using different projections is a compelling aspect of ArcGIS because it allowed me to manipulate the axis of the Earth as well as other attributes. Also, the ability to have a multitude of projections at your fingertips is another reason ArcGIS has so much potential for the geography field. In addition, if you are new to geography you may have trouble deciphering the distortions in the projections but, if you are familiar with the different distortions and projections it should not lead you astray when you are making a map. Ultimately, the possibilities of ArcGIS are expanded by projections and the efficiency of the geography work field.