Reddit mentions of Map Use: Reading, Analysis, Interpretation

I studied it in college. My school had a whole Geography Department.

I didn't go to school for it originally, I found my way there via agriculture and forestry (both use a lot of geographic information systems (GIS)), but since then have done a lot with it.

If you want to learn the basics of geography, I can recommend this book, I view it as the authority on cartography.

Cartography is a science all its own, it's the marriage of design and geography. The mission is to convey information to the reader. It really is a mix of art and science. If you are interested in cartography, you GOTTA read this book.

Any real cartography nerd is also a design nerd, and if they're anything like me, could teach a college course on, say, how typefaces affect a reader's mood. Most great cartographers are also students of graphic design, because, that's a big part of the job. Designers want things to either A) accomplish something specific or B) just plain look beautiful. These are the same charges of the cartographer. I'd love to go on and on about good carto vs. bad; but it would take a decade.

If you want to get into GIS, the software most people use to make maps, and the software I use now as a goespatial analytics pro to do a whole lot more than making maps, I'd recommend using this amazing free online textbook and starting out with a program called Quantum GIS, commonly referred to as QGIS. QGIS runs on PC, Mac, and Linux, it's open source and free, plus that course / textbook is customized for it, and it's highly extensible and flexible.

The industry standard is a program called ArcGIS, which can be had for as little as $100 / year for home use.

If you have any follow up questions, I'm super glad to hear them and answer. Geography is a passion of mine.

One bit of advice: I recommend learning the fundamentals of geography with a beginner's mind - don't approach it like you already learned all you need to know about it in kindergarten. It's a science just like anything else, with a lot of the iceberg below the surface of the water. It also coincidentally shares a name with what most people call memorizing state capitals. Approach it like it's called neural hyperbiomechanics or something; meaning, something you don't think you learned when you were 6.