Final Blog Post

In the final blog post, I would like to talk about the creation of my map project and the reflections about what I learnt in this course.

For the map project, only after I started working on it than I realise how difficult it is to create a map. It requires a extremely detailed planning and you cannot be wrong about the locations of the map. My map is about bikes which is related to the lives of students in UC Davis, and that is why I tried to make it perfect. Through different methodologies and research works, I still can't make it to be the map I wanted to be. There are quite a lot of barriers, such as impossibility to visit all the bike racks in UC Davis and therefore I am not able to create an extensive map by myself. Yet through the making of this map, I realised how great Google maps or simply technology is as they create such hi-tech maps to benefit different users. Apart from that, from an internet article, I also learnt that Google Maps is actually collecting databases from the users everyday. For example, if you are using Google Maps in navigation on certain highway, Google Maps will collect the real time data together with other users, thus determining whether the highway is crowded or not and show other users the crowdedness of the road. We are utilising technology, at the same time we are also contributing to it.

While for this course, it is actually an eye-opening experience of knowing how Americans interpret the environment around them. For example, the national aerial view can actually be regarded as a way to symbolise democracy and express the idea of American exceptionalism. All these allow me to know more about the rationales behind the images of America.