Browse Items (52 total)

In some ways, this layer is least important visually, but it also holds a key to my map's purpose and the interesting way that it blends genres. This layer contains a couple of graphic design elements—compass rose and arrows indicating the river…

The final layer of the map I included was the interpretations of the zodiac glyphs that surround the spheres. The twelve signs of the zodiac are divided among the four corners of the map. The upper left features Aries (the ram), Taurus (the bull),…

Creating this layer probably made me most aware of the choices and labor involved in creating this map. When I set out to create a layer that would illustrate inclusion of trees and what appears to be cultivated land on the map, my eye had primarily…

This layer features colored depictions of the continents included in the map. I chose this layer to focus on the Japanese perspective of the globe, which includes very basic depictions of the continents. I noticed nearly every land mass, including…

This layer includes the 12 illustrations of people from different cultures in the map. The images are grouped by region and labeled with Japanese characters. I believe these depictions represent the desire of the mapmaker to make sense of the…

Perhaps the central feature of the map are the bodies of water that run through the territory of Berlin, namely the river Spree and several smaller tributaries. The waterways are emphasized on the map with a separate color (blue) and with curved…

One of the things that stood out most immediately to me about this map—again, both visually and interpretively—was the abundance of fortifications and walls of different types on display. Visually, the darkly rendered lines of the walls give them a…

This layer depicts the fortifications that mark the boundaries of the territory of Berlin, and which focus the viewer's attention on the center of the map. The northern boundary of the city appears to be a walled fortification, which gives way to a…

Because my map is in German, there is much about it that I still don't understand. That's frustrating on some level, but it has also allowed me to employ the map-studying technique of ignoring text to focus on the visual components of the map and…