I’ve heard people talk in scathing tones about “the sort of people who turn the map upside down” when travelling south - the implication being that they’re spatially unaware and can’t cope with reversing things mentally. It’s often said about women (not by me!) or the navigationally clueless.
But when I learnt to map-read, one of the first things I was told was that you should “orientate your map” so that the direction you’re facing is “up” on the map. Seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do to make the map agree with your surroundings.
Yes. When learning map skills, the first thing you do is orient the map, which means that north on the map should be oriented to north in the physical environment. The purpose, as I understand it, is to make it easier to identify landmarks that will help in determining your location. I guess it’s probably a lot more useful in rural or wilderness settings, where you don’t have the luxury of things like street signs and other markers as you would in an urban setting.
Orienting the map in the direction of travel is characteristic of people who have more difficulty than average with math and spatial processing. Dyscalculia. However that doesn’t mean that everyone who does this, has that issue.
There’s nothing right or wrong about either doing it or not doing it.
Can we go at least a day on the dope without someone mentioning dyscalculia? Please?
Anyway, no, I don’t turn the map. There’s no reason to do that. I can turn it in my head. If I turn the map, I’ll lose track of which way is north or south. People that advocate turning the map claim that it makes the environment “match”, but that’s not the case. To me, if I’m headed down the map, then things on the right of the map should be on my left side. That’s natural. It’s unnatural to be headed south and have things in reality match the things on the map.
And its unatural to have things in reality match things on the map?! That sounds pretty senseless to me.
I’m pretty good with logic/math, pretty good at navigation, very visually oriented, and spend many many hours using maps so I generally don’t need to due any rotating. Every now and then things will get very confusing for various reasons and some rotating and head scratching will be involved.
But I don’t see any problem with doing it (beside the difficulty of reading upside down).
I’m one of those people who can’t turn things around in my head, but I also took orienteering in Girl Scouts and learned to turn the map to line up with the direction you’re facing.
Of course I do. I can turn the map around in my head, but since my roadmap thankfully isn’t carved into a stone tablet, I don’t have to. I’m way more likely to make mistakes if I’m trying to navigate unfamiliar territory off a map and do the mental rotation. I can estimate my rate of travel and fuel consumption in my head, too. But since there are pretty little dials in the dashboard, I just use those. It’s easier.
There’s a reason that GPS devices always rotate the image to show you the map in the direction you’re going.
It’s not just turning things around (i.e., translating the map grid to physical space)–it’s also being able to keep track of north, south, east and west in your head, even when you’re going in a lot in different directions. Many people can’t (or don’t try to) keep in their head the cardinal directions of their present physical space. These are the people who will get on an outdoor Metro line that’s going in the exact opposite direction of their destination, simply because the names on the signs seem to indicate that’s where to go. (It’s understandable in an underground station, but I’m talking about outdoors.) They’re the people who–in the middle of a conversation about a distant place–will indicate it by pointing their finger in the opposition direction. For example, in a conversation taking place in L.A., they’ll say, “Back in Texas, things are different…” as they point to the Pacific Ocean.
They’re also the people who navigate by using only “left” and “right,” (instead of “north,” “south,” etc.) and who therefore often get lost when for whatever reason they approach a turn from the opposite direction, and yet still use “left” or “right” as though they were absolute terms.
I learned that, too, and it makes total sense to do that in the wilderness, in the middle of the day when the sun is high, and there aren’t any things like streets, and instead there are hills, etc.
Turning the map upside down makes sense if that helps you to navigate (just as GPS systems do it), but a with a paper map that just makes all the print information more difficult to read (the GPS system screen inverts the print for you through the magic of digital technology), so with paper, I leave it alone. The important thing is to be consistent.
I don’t need to rotate the map, since I can do it in my head, but so long as the map is small enough to make it practical, rotating it makes things easier. This is especially so if it’s a natural environment, without nice neatly-laid-out artificial roads.
And I am a spatially-compromised woman. But I learned to read maps when I was quite young (in part by being involved in orienteering for a while) so I’m used to map-reading. I think I’d get confused if I turned a map upside down, because it’s just not…right.
I orient the map so I can read the writing. In most cases that tends to be north, though I always check the compass on the map to confirm that. I can read upside down but find it’s easier to flip the geography in my head then the writing.
If I’m looking at a map like a sight seeing map that tend to focus on points of interest rather then accuracy. I tend to spin around to make the map match to what I can see.
Hmm. The only one I’ve used extensively is the Google Maps one on my phone, and I can’t seem to find a way to have it show you the map with north always being up. There is a way to show the whole route as a north up map, but you can’t zoom in or out, so it’s not really a helpful map for turn by turn directions. All the other ones I’ve seen were in other people’s cars, so I never tried to change the settings. They all seemed to default to “current direction is up”.
