Second Order Drainage
West Branch of Fish Creek
Blossvale, New York
January 2009
Friday, April 6, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
almost daily river picture, day #2
Colorado River headwaters,
Rocky Mountain National Park
June 2009
googling earth: in literature
Now, it is not often that one may see a GoogleEarth image in literature. Although I swear I've seen a simple overview map in a published article before, I cannot think of in which journal it was in. Alas, it is not important.
I'm fishing for opinions here. I'm putting together some masterful (if I do say so myself) geomorphic maps for a Fluvail Geomorphology term paper tied into a chapter of my thesis - and the issue of GoogleEarth's place in literature comes to mind. I've been going back and forth between GE and ArcMap. GE helps me find things. Every shapefile I have has a kml/z twin. It runs clean and for the most part, looks just as nice.
Within this term paper, I needed an overview map. One which depicts a broad view of my study area, the Laurentide Ice Sheet margin at 18kya, and a single, clean background.
I tooled around a bit in ArcMap, but the computing power necessary for their terrain basemap and subsequent mediocre quality irritated me - as did conversion of some necessary ice margin shapefiles.
So I turned some layers off (well, all) in GoogleEarth, turned my ice margin on, and got this:
Crisp. Clean. There's colour. There's an ice margin. If you ask me, it looks good. Add a scale and a key and we're there. Now this is just for a class term paper. It will not be heading to Nature Geoscience or Geophysical Research Letters anytime soon (although, every paper is a Science paper, that is, until it is rejected.) I like this map and I intend to use it for this paper.
And therein lies the question: Should it work? Some will say no, some will say yes. Its a broad enough region as to know where it is, what it represents. However, academic is a fickle beast. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to get a negative comment on this as it may be construed as unprofessional, childish, lazy, etc.
Let me know your thoughts. Comments welcome.
I'm fishing for opinions here. I'm putting together some masterful (if I do say so myself) geomorphic maps for a Fluvail Geomorphology term paper tied into a chapter of my thesis - and the issue of GoogleEarth's place in literature comes to mind. I've been going back and forth between GE and ArcMap. GE helps me find things. Every shapefile I have has a kml/z twin. It runs clean and for the most part, looks just as nice.
Within this term paper, I needed an overview map. One which depicts a broad view of my study area, the Laurentide Ice Sheet margin at 18kya, and a single, clean background.
I tooled around a bit in ArcMap, but the computing power necessary for their terrain basemap and subsequent mediocre quality irritated me - as did conversion of some necessary ice margin shapefiles.
So I turned some layers off (well, all) in GoogleEarth, turned my ice margin on, and got this:
Crisp. Clean. There's colour. There's an ice margin. If you ask me, it looks good. Add a scale and a key and we're there. Now this is just for a class term paper. It will not be heading to Nature Geoscience or Geophysical Research Letters anytime soon (although, every paper is a Science paper, that is, until it is rejected.) I like this map and I intend to use it for this paper.
And therein lies the question: Should it work? Some will say no, some will say yes. Its a broad enough region as to know where it is, what it represents. However, academic is a fickle beast. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to get a negative comment on this as it may be construed as unprofessional, childish, lazy, etc.
Let me know your thoughts. Comments welcome.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)