I was thinking this morning about how much of my professional life has been about vector data. From the moment I started using Macromedia Freehand in college in the early 90s (before I had heard about GIS) to make maps to the 3D work, I’m doing with Unity and Cityzenith I’ve used vector data. I wasn’t genuinely introduced to raster data until I started using ArcInfo 5 at my first internship and working with grids and even then it was still about coverages and typing “build” or “clean” again and again. We did a bunch of raster analysis with Arc, but mostly it was done in Fortran by others (I never was able to pick up Fortran for some reason, probably best in the long run).
It’s easy to see and use vectors in professional spatial work for sure. I always feel like Neo from the Matrix, I look at features in the world and mentally classify them as vectors:
- Bird -> point
- Electrical transmission line -> line
- House -> polygon
Heck or how you might think of a bird as a point (sighting), line (migratory pattern) or polygon (range). So damn nerdy and my wife fails to see the fun in any of this. Again, like Neo when he finally sees the world like the Matrix truly is we see things as the basic building blocks of vector data.
As I’m flying to Chicago this morning and I stare out the window of the airplane, I can’t help but think of rasters though. Sort of like that hybrid background we throw on maps, the world beneath me is full of opportunities to create vectors. Plus I bet we could run some robust agriculture analysis (assuming I even knew what that was) to boot. The world is not full of 1s and 0s but full of rasters and vectors.
As I’m a point, traveling a line on my way to a polygon, I can’t help but appreciate the spatial world that has been part of my life for over 20 years. I can’t help but think the next 20 is going to be amazing.