Following this assignment, being tasked to choose a voyage, I went with Alexander Von Humboldt’s American Expedition, which occured from 1799 to 1804. The reason this voyage attracted my attention was because it was in the Americas. I wanted to explore a voyage that either explored North, South, and or both Americas. Therefore when I found Von Humboldt’s expedition of South America, it fit my interests accordingly. On top of that, after looking at the locations that Von Humboldt explored, it peaked my curiosity as he didn’t just go to what can be considered as majors cities. For example, he traveled to Casiquiare, Venezuela which isn’t a specific location rather a region in the Amazon Rainforest. Thus for these reason I decided to go through with Alexander Von Humboldt’s expedition of America.

Looking at how they mapped South America in those times (17th century to early 1800th), it is very obvious how they were still discovering South America as landmark cities that are known today and have been known were not appearing on the map created during those times. When it comes to navigational skill, there isn’t much on the map that indicates or assist a person to navigate through South America, other than the annotation of certain rivers. Lastly, when it comes to the cartographic expertise, I will not go easy on this part. The way that some of the cities were annotated on the map made it a little difficult to locate certain point from that map onto our present day map. The reason for this is as you went towards the coast of any part of that map, names of cities were just aligned with each other, creating this big blend of city names, thus making it more difficult to look for a city.

Now, when it comes to the georeferecing part of this assignment, the way that this helps the public understand these voyages is through visuals. Using ArcGIS and story maps allows any person to view a location on a map (present day map) to give them an idea of where people in old expeditions actually went to. Using the knowledge of where the present day location is, one person can even be encouraged to research the history of that location thus helping understand further what the locations looked like at the time of the expedition. But, these tools can also make it a little difficult to understand what happened during these voyages as well. Let’s say someone isn’t encouraged to go on their own and reseach and areas history, thus going based off of the slides on ArcGIS. This can be an issue if the person who made said presentation isn’t very knowledgeable themselves about what it is that they are writing, spreading said lack of knowledge to others, with others perceiving it as the truth. This can complicate things overall, but can be easily fixed with a little bit of research. For example, here is my story map!

When it comes to the digital tools that were have today, and comparing it with Sara Caputo's description of "tracks on the ocean", it can be understood that said digital tools did change how we understand the world as both digital tools and tracks of the ocean show that there are tracks, patterns or lines in places that seem to not be there, specifically speaking on a map. The only difference is that, Caputo's description of ocean tracks were based off of the experience of sailors who did said travels, while the digital tools information we have is real solid data. This then helps us better understand how us humans develeped over time to interact with our own world and learning how to travel it.