-------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: Nevada Digital Dirt Mapping Project or the Death of Paper maps Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:44:00 -0800 From: Virginia R. Hetrick, Ph.D. <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] For Doug (since Kurt's email isn't in what you forwarded; could you forward to him, please): First, for you, thanks for including the Death of Paper Maps as part of the email subject that got my attention and then Digital Dirt that caused me to look at the blog and the slideshow. I really liked the idea of scientists getting down in the dirt! Now, on the subject of your email proper, one of the things that strikes me about Kurt's presentation is that even on a dual-monitor system with a horizontal size of 2560 and vertical size of 1280 pixels, I wasn't able to distinguish lots of the annotations, even pixelated, even though I was wearing the appropriate glasses. The second thing is that, in some images, the text materials, even when extracted and displayed at a larger size, were not legible. Ditto the glasses comment. So, while the principle of dead paper maps may be admirable, one of the things people need to understand is that they need to prepare the electronic materials so they can be enlarged/reduced on the fly by people with different abilities and, when necessary, printed in part to serve some purpose that Kurt and others may not have considered when they were preparing the map. On a slightly related subject, I've been running with a G3 phone for the last two months and much as I like the access to the GPS system and to the Internet, the inability to read the screen (with the appropriate glasses) when in bright sunlight, makes both the phone and a connected computer irrelevant for me in the field. I was unable to read maps on either system, even when inside the car where the screen of each was not in bright sunlight. v -- -- \ / Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California 0 Email: [log in to unmask] Oo "There is always hope." My fave: http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.gif -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK------ GAT/d+(--) s++ a+++ C+++ UB++ UL++ US++ P+ L+ !e W+++ !N !o !K w+ O+ !M V PS+ PE- T++ PGPP t- 5 X R+++ tv+ b++++ DI+ D---G e+++ h+ r x? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK-------