HIST 230A: Capital Cities in History

A short, friendly guide to the principles of map design.

Intro to raster data. The lesson is geared for R users, but the underlying concepts are applicable to any GIS.

Intro to vector data (points, lines, polygons).

OER text authored by members of Penn State's Geography Dept. Provides an overview of map scales, datum transformations, map projections, etc.

Intro to coordinate reference systems (CRS), including datums and map projections.

Poster highlights key properties, characteristics, and preferred uses of many historically important projections and of those frequently used by mapmakers today.

Axis Maps' Cartography Guide provides a nice intro to map projections.

Overview of the differences between a geographic coordinate systems and projected coordinate systems. While this blog post is geared toward ArcGIS users, the underlying principles are applicable to QGIS.

Snyder and Voxland's paper provides an introduction to map projections. Includes descriptions of different types of map projections, the properties different map projections distort/preserve, etc.

New equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for world maps jointly developed by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny. It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.