Map Making (1961) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Map Making (1961) [video]

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48 pointsgeospeck12 comments

I do like these old style of videos. Straight and to the point, no influencer posing or ad breaks, and cheery music. I wonder why this style went out of fashion? It does seem old fashioned now, but I wouldn't mind this making a resurgence.

Not only are old British public service films fun to watch, without them there would be no Monty Python.

That is indeed how I learned about the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Propagandistic as hell to boot.

They're light, and convey very little actual information, most of that incidentally.

In this case, I actually learned quite a bit about how map making was done in the early 1960s and the technology and processes involved. I learned more in a shorter time than many YouTube videos of today. And todays' YouTube videos suffer from self-promotion and more overt advertising than the more subtle propaganda of these old videos.

There's always a hazard in comparing a specific genre or studio's production to an aggregate average. Sturgeon's law is tremendously optimistic: far more than 90% of everything is crap.

British Pathe, especially during and after WWII, was unabashadly propagandistic. It produced short newsreels for popular audiences to view before the main feature in theatres. Themes were pro-British, pro-Empire, and pro-Industry. Technical content was minimal.

At its best, YouTube offers markedly better. One example off the top of my head is the Engineer Guy channel, with numerous phenomenally good, non-self-promotional videos. His on the RMS Titanic, the British Airship R.101, on the design (and manufacture) of the aluminium can, and his re-enactment of Michael Faraday's "Natural History of the Candle" (proving that the Brits can actually create high-quality educational content) are all excellent, and I've watched all of them.

Bill Hammack has his own biases, occasional blind spots, and does occasionally promote (he wrote a book on R.101, as he'll happily tell you, and does). But he produces excellent work, first and foremost.

It's amazing to see the level of specialization of labor so explicitly displayed. To think that so much of that effort is now automated, and all those specialties are redundant makes a deep impression on the soul.

For greater technical detail of mapmaking at about the same time, though of a somewhat different subject, there's Richard Furno's "The Race to Map the Moon", in two parts, covering the 1963--1969 effort to fully map the Earth's natural satellite, half of it with imagery only just obtained for the first time in the years and months immediately preceding publication.

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1481

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1588

And the result, or at least an archived copy, as NatGeo's moon has gone 404: https://web.archive.org/web/20061125134203/http://www.ngmapc...

For an earlier map (near-side only), see:

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/astrogeology-science-center/sci...

A now deleted youtube channel with archival US government documentaries had a great series by US geological survey department on all aspects of map making / cartography that I've been trying to rediscover for years.

I'm just captivated by that clip of the operator working the stereo tracer. That is the height of etch-a-sketch art, just perfection coming out of those knobs.

We should bring back lab coats and mustaches. So dignified.

that's cool. and here i am making a map with react-leaflet

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