Over the summer I was lucky enough to get an internship working as a environmental permitting intern at a local surveying and engineering business in my hometown. On this project I got to work directly with the project engineer designing maps of watersheds and creating drainage devices through a software known as AutoCAD. This got me thinking about how maps used to get made. People had to travel the world and search far and wide to create accurate maps of the land with no perfect way to measure the landscape. 

A lot of maps in history are far from perfect often using estimated distances or non exact calculations to determine the boundaries of a landscape. But, even with their imperfections they were the best maps that could be designed at that time. People would travel the world and make treaties based off of these maps believing they were close to accurate. The ability to digitally collect maps and create them through software such as AutoCAD has revolutionized our ability to craft maps. No longer do we need to make estimations but we have technology such as satellites equipped with LiDAR and GPS that allow us to track points and virtually place them in mapping software.

With the addition of more reliable map making techniques from digital software such as AutoCAD, it is much easier to develop and produce maps accurately and efficiently. In my internship I likely worked on over 30 maps that were eventually presented to the town showing how quickly they can be created. The only real downside to using digital is the aspects of environmental pollution, but those can be disputed by the cost of traveling around outside releasing seperate carbon emissions and other small things like that. Overall, I believe that digitizing the ability to make maps has caused map making to become both easier and more intricate.