Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Mapmakers of yore worked hard to remind viewers that a given landscape was much less flat than the paper they were holding. Cartographers employed contours, hachures, and other shading techniques to indicate slopes and varied terrain, and while these abstractions conveyed the general gist, if you had little else to go on, it could still be hard to glean the “reality of the landscape,” writes Chris Fleet, map curator at the National Library of Scotland, in an email.
That nuance mattered, though: “The development of canals, roads, and railways, the location and growth of settlements, and patterns of population density, were often all influenced by relief,” Fleet says.These days, of course, much of the planet has been mapped by satellites, and viewers can parachute in and survey jagged ranges and humped hills the way birds see them. Meanwhile, a number of historic map collections have rolled out tools for engaging with old maps in new ways, through swooping, zooming, and more. The National Library of Scotland is among them, and recently revamped its 3D tool by dialing up the vertical exaggeration.
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