Maps and journeys - Yuwei Lin's lecture

Key points of the lecture

• Maps can be used to demonstrate power and political points of view. Examples of this are, boundaries, freedoms and restrictions and the lack of privacy through cctv 
• maps are used for geography and navigational purposes
• alot of technology is used in modern day mapping which has led to some interesting creations such as geotagging, geocaching and open street map 

Geotagging - this is when you can tag your location in media such as photos and videos. Geottaging is used a lot in social media today today through the use of gprs systems that are built into phones/ compact digital cameras.  Here is an example of how geotagging is used on Instagram 

once you have taken a photo on Instagram, 

you can choose the option to add your photo to your photo map, where using gprs  instagram finds locations around you it thinks you may be at our you can add the name of the location in manually. 

once the photo is upload it goes onto a virtual map on the users profile, where other people can zoom around the map and see where  the person has taken pictures all around the world  

using geotagging can be quite dangerous as anyone  can acsess the images and find out where you have been / where you are which can allow them to track you down. 

geo caching - this a recreational activity that also uses gprs and geotagging. It is kind of like a world wide tresure hunt. Geocachers leave waterproof boxes with objects inside them and then tag that location onto a map so other people can go out and hunt for the objects, if they want to take whats inside they have to leave another object behind. 

some people give there objects a journey to go on, so once the object has been found it gets moved around and re tagged in another location. 

open street map -  is like goggle maps except it allows users to update the map, so it has more detail and information on it than google maps.  Users can update the maps from a pc or on the move from there phones, then can add details like cash machines, if car parks are one way etc things like that that google maps dosent have yet.