Thread: Greetings from the Lowlands

Hello everyone,

thought I'd post a short introduction as well as lurking around.

I'm 26, a linguistics graduate student in the Netherlands. My interest in maps goes way back to dreaming up imaginary worlds as a kid, and later drawing up maps for roleplaying games.

I never really seriously devoted time to computer-assisted cartography beyond trying a few basic programs, but that might change in the future. I love the work I'm seeing here!

I'm interested in many kinds of maps basically, and the geomorphological background of terrain. Of particular interest to me (currently) are alternative planetary maps (for example, Mars with oceans!), general maps of fantastic lands, and schematic maps of all sorts of possible concepts (stars, political constellations, etc.)

I'm also interested in cartography related to my research. I'd like to create maps to assist research into studying communication and contact patterns between people and settlements, and how these are determined and influenced by terrain. I'm thinking of communication through land travel, river travel, seafaring, mountains dividing countries, and the like. Since the spread of language and language change is my main area of research, I figure some sidetracking into geography and cartography might be useful to me.

regards,

O