September 2004

Historic Cities
Historic Cities is an ambitious Israeli project that presents scans of old maps of cities from across Europe, North Africa and the Near East. High-resolution scans of some of the maps, which date back at least as far as the…
posted to Antique Maps, Cities |
Genmaps: Old British Maps
Genmaps is “a site devoted to online images of English, Welsh and Scottish maps from their beginnings to the early 20th Century.” It’s quite a large collection, with maps dating as far back as the 1500s, though some of the…
posted to Antique Maps |
U.S. States Geography Quiz
Another Flash-based geography quiz (see previous entry) has been posted to MetaFilter: this one tests your knowledge of the 48 contiguous states of the continental U.S….
posted to Games & Quizzes |
La terre vue du ciel
La terre vue du ciel is a collection of aerial photography. The photos are uncaptioned and unattributed: you pretty much have to guess what they are, where they’re from and from what altitude they were taken. Via Making Light….
posted to Satellite & Aerial |
David Rumsey Profile
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of David Rumsey, whose eponymous web site hosts a massive digital archive of his even more massive private collection of old maps: 10,000 maps — out of a total collection of 150,000! It’s…
posted to Antique Maps, Books, Maps Online |
Garrett Lectures
If you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, or will be this Friday and Saturday, you might want to check out the two days of cartography lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington: on Friday it’s the Fourth Biennial Virginia…
posted to Cartography |
Rappahannock County Map
Rappahannock County, Virginia has a new road map; the Rappahannock News has the story on how it came to be….
posted to Miscellany |
History of Cartography Project Co-Founder Dies
Last December, I reported on the massive History of Cartography Project, an expensive, comprehensive multivolume series, the first volume of which came out in 1987. The project was founded by J. B. Harley and David Woodward. Harley died in 1991….
posted to Books, History of Cartography, Obituaries |
Boating Software
I don’t think there’s a single area of mapping where software isn’t displacing traditional maps. That goes for navigational charts, too. Motor Boating has a review of recent navigation software for recreational boaters. Some of it’s quite pricey, but let’s…
posted to Nautical, Software |
Cartograms and Map Distortions
Further to my earlier post on proportional election maps, Science News had an article last month about the art of map distortion in general. Using the example of using a map to show the incidence of a particular disease, the…
posted to Cartography |
Prisoner of War Map
Murky posts the story of the map his grandfather kept while a prisoner of war during World War II, along with scans of the map itself. It is a flimsy document, held together with a wing and a prayer, and…
posted to Antique Maps |
MapMemo
Alexander Stengel writes to announce version 1.0 of MapMemo, a free Mac OS X-only application which allows you to associate various files with maps. This means, for example, you could take an image file and link it to a position…
posted to Macintosh |
TV Series About Maps
Now playing on BBC Two: a television program about maps! The Map Man is an eight-episode series that began running on September 16. Each episode — see the program guide in Word format — looks at a specific map and…
posted to Miscellany |
Redesign in Progress
Page layout might be a bit weird for the next day or two as I give The Map Room a bit of a makeover. Your patience, please, if I occasionally break things in the process. Update: I seem to be…
posted to Site News |
Hurricanes and Electoral Results: Coincidence?
Enjoy this map, which compares 2004 hurricane paths to 2000 presidential election results by county in Florida. But don’t take it too seriously, okay? Via Daragh. Update: Snopes debunks, though it hardly seems necessary: The map displayed above is a…
posted to Current Events |
Historic Topo Maps of New England and New York
The University of New Hampshire Library has put online a digital collection of old topo maps of New England and New York. Very high-resolution scans. This online collection of over 1500 USGS topographic maps includes complete geographical coverage of New…
posted to Antique Maps, Topo Maps & Trails |
Profile of Tube Map’s Creator
Last Thursday’s Guardian — they do seem do have a lot of map-related content, don’t they? — had an article about Henry Beck, the creator of the iconic London Underground map that ditched scale and proportionality in favour of clarity….
posted to London, Mass Transit |
London Noise Map
Last year I blogged about a noise map of Paris. Now the concept has jumped the Channel: there’s a noise map of London available, and it looks like there will be more such maps across England. There are two official-looking…
posted to London |
Ordnance Survey Invents Toids, Reticulates Splines
The Ordnance Survey is developing a new mapping system that will have a profound impact on everything from insurance rates to trip planning. The key? Something called a toid, says the Grauniad: The word toid does not yet appear in…
posted to GIS |
Maps of the Islamic World
A University of Pennsylvania professor has posted a collection of scans from historical atlases of the Muslim world. Via Politics, Language and Cultures of the Arab World, via Languagehat….
posted to Historical Maps |
Geography Olympics
Another geography quiz — the Geography Olympics — has been posted at MetaFilter. While I generally stand by the comments I made in this entry back in April 2003, this one at least has a good, Flash-based user interface. Still,…
posted to Games & Quizzes |