March 2005
- The Map Room Turns Two
- Today marks The Map Room’s second anniversary. There have been more than 460 entries since my first; during that time I’ve learned just how much there is out there about which I know nothing, from psychogeography to triangulation to geocaching….
- One Less Bill to Worry About
- When The Map Room made Fimoculous’s list of best blogs of 2003, he said this: 27) The Map Room — I love niche publishing, especially when it’s a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I’d probably pay for…
- Readership Survey
- It’s a dubious way to celebrate this blog’s second anniversary, but I thought it’d be neat to do a reader survey. If you don’t mind answering 20 questions, I’d be grateful if you’d give it a shot. All questions are…
- Maps and Me: A Personal Essay
- I can’t remember the first time I ever saw a map, but I’ve always been transfixed by them. As a child, I studied highway maps on long car trips until I got sick, which unfortunately was never long. When I…
- Social Explorer
- Social Explorer has a large collection of maps derived from U.S. census data. The more you zoom in, the more detail you get: at the top level it’s by state; closer in the maps show counties. Via Jessamyn….
- EOGEO Media Coverage Map
- EOGEO’s world map showing media coverage of various countries reminds me a lot of Global Attention Profiles (see previous entry), except that they’re measuring standard deviations rather than percentages. This is a bit more difficult to grasp intuitively, because a…
- Paris Traffic Conditions
- Sytadin provides real-time traffic data for Paris and its suburbs. Jonathan Hipkiss writes, “This site kept me sane when I lived in Paris and had to commute around the Peripherique daily.” (My condolences.) “It’s updated by the minute and gets…
- Minor Site Changes
- Two minor changes. First, the search form on the left-hand side now searches just The Map Room, not the entire mcwetboy.net domain. (A full web search remains an option.) I didn’t realize until recently that you could narrow a Google…
- Mapping the Philippines; Mapping the Pacific Coast
- Two exhibitions to report on in this entry, nearly half a world apart — but each dealing in some way with mapping the Pacific region in the early modern era. At Manila University in the Philippines until March 31, “Putting…
- Review of Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
- qatsi has a review of Nicholas Crane’s book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. We’ve seen examples of Mr. Crane’s work before: Profile of Tube Map’s Creator; TV Series About Maps; Triangulation Pillars. (Via and cross-posted to Here Be…
- BCER Maps
- My interest in railroads in the Pacific Northwest led me to this site about the British Columbia Electric Railway, an interurban that at its peak stretched across the Fraser Valley. It’s got a page of maps dating from, or showing,…
- Question: Pictures of Jan Jansson and Herman Moll?
- Debbie MacPherson writes, “I’m wondering if you know where I can find a picture of the mapmakers Jan Jansson and Herman Moll for an exhibit I am working on called Places & Spaces. I appreciate any help you could provide.”…
- The Unveiling of Britain
- From the British Library, an online exhibition: The Unveiling of Britain. When the ancient Greeks looked beyond their Mediterranean world, Britain was virtually invisible, lost in the mists of legend. Their view, or lack of it, survived as late as…
- Ireland’s History in Maps
- Ireland’s History in Maps has a genealogical focus; the maps aren’t first rate, but they’re informative. Via Plep….
- Engadget
- My coverage of GPS stuff is paltry at best, but gadget blog Engadget has a dedicated GPS section (RSS feed) that I’ll be keeping an eye on, to learn more about the subject….
- GeoPDF
- GeoPDF looks like the company blog of Layton Graphics, which puts out (pricey) software that adds georeferencing to PDF files. The blog, which started this month, naturally covers their stuff, but also has a few more general map entries. Atom…
- Mapping Hacks
- Mapping Hacks, forthcoming from O’Reilly, isn’t just a book of tips on everything from using mapping sites to using a GPS to building your own maps (see the table of contents), it’s also a blog. I must confess to being…
- Honey, I Geotagged the Kids
- Honey, I Geotagged the Kids: an essay by Douglas Rushkoff on the new collaborative mapping technologies — many of which have been featured here, though I haven’t assigned them their own category yet….
- A PDA Software Roundup
- Rough Guides has released a series of interactive city maps for several mobile platforms, and they’re having a sale (US$20) in March. Via Gadling. Earthcomber allows Palm OS PDA users to annotate maps and share that information with other users….
- The Road Trip Effect
- The Road Trip Effect generates animations for your home movies to indicate your trip. It does so in the classic manner (think Indiana Jones): a plane, ship or car moving across a map and leaving a trail. The site is…
- New Map Tribes
- A couple of new map-related tribes on Tribe.net: Map Creators Unite, which looks like it’s focused on dedicated amateurs rather than GIS professionals; and Surveying, for land surveyors. An older tribe that I missed: Geocaching. They’ve all got RSS feeds….
- Relief Globes
- This has to be seen to be believed. James Lin writes to tell us about the Relief Globe Company: “Alan Folmsbee, a former Sun Microsystems engineer, has set up his own globe company with massive vertical exaggeration: 250× for the…
- Hipkiss’s Scanned Old Maps
- Jonathan Hipkiss writes to tell us about his massive collection of maps scanned from old books, many of which date from the 1800s, all of which are scanned at 600 dpi, which is quite high-resolution. I have a growing collection…
- Two Ways to Geocode Your Blog
- “Geocoding” is adding latitude/longitude data to something to indicate its physical location — for example, geocoding a digital photograph so you can pinpoint where it was taken, or geocoding your blog so that people can know where you’re blogging from….
- Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654
- Online at the National Library of Scotland: “The first Atlas of Scotland, containing 49 engraved maps and 154 pages of descriptive text, translated from Latin into English for the first time.” Via Plep. See previous entries: Pont’s Maps of Scotland;…
- Mapping the Swiss Political Landscape
- This map of the Swiss political landscape scarcely resembles a map of Switzerland (see previous entry); instead, it plots various Swiss cities and regions on political axes — left to right, liberal to conservative — and with colours showing voting…
- A Post-Invasion Map of Baghdad
- Swissinfo has a story about a Swiss cartographer who’s put out a post-occupation, up-to-date map of Baghdad. The map is an update of a 2002 edition, but now includes such landmarks as bombed-out infrastructure and other changes since the invasion….
- A Talk on Renaissance Mapping
- Next Wednesday at the Washington University in St. Louis, a talk by history professor Christine R. Johnson titled “The Art & Science of Renaissance Mapping: Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.” At the end of the 16th century, Europe was remaking…
- Question: Wall Map of Lost or Mythical Places?
- Jimmy Bloom writes, “I have several encyclopedias and dictionaries of imaginary, lost and misplaced islands, continents etc., but am wondering if someone has produced a wall map of such things suitable for framing and mounting.”…
- Question: About Old Paris Metro Maps
- David Kim asks, “I was wondering how valuable old Paris subway maps are, in general (if such a question can even be answered)? I am talking about the 1937 map of the Metro you had on your site a while…
- Hacking Google Maps
- Further to my earlier post, it turns out that there’s already plenty of work under way on hacking Google Maps. Engadget has a how-to on adding your own annotations to Google Maps — it requires Firefox and a plugin, though….
- Question: Wall-sized London Tube Map?
- Don Sattler writes, “I’m in London on vacation and would love to purchase a large map of the tube system to hang on my office wall. I can’t seem to find one. Do you know of any shops that might…
- London Underground on MetaFilter
- Tube map fanatics should not miss the ultimate MetaFilter post on the London Underground. Some stuff you may have seen before, even here, but it’s all in one spot, see?…
- Guillermo Kuitca
- An exhibition of the art of Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser & Wirth, London: The main gallery space features Everything, 2004, an impressive four-panel painting which interpolates fragments of American road maps. The enigmatic veined surface invites the viewer for closer…
- Google Maps and Web Services
- Infoworld’s Jon Udell has a couple of columns (February 18, March 4) pointing out that Google Maps’s open data formats — XML is a wonderful thing — can allow all sorts of web services to be built around it. For…
- Outline Maps
- Sometimes it’s all about knowing what your search term is. I wanted to do some species range maps for one of my other projects. Since I’m not wise in the ways of cartography, and because Illustrator would be serious overkill…
- Digital Navigation for Kayakers
- Sea Kayaker magazine has an extensive guide to digital navigation — i.e., using a GPS, digitized maps and mapping software — in its February 2005 issue. Via Gadling….
- More on Comments
- The details of my efforts to get comments working on this blog after the upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 are set out on my personal blog, if you’re truly interested. But insofar as how commenting will work from here on…
- Comment Snafus
- Comments aren’t working the way they should. You can still comment if you’re willing to put up with additional hurdles and error messages, but there’s something up with the TypeKey authentication: my test comments get sent to the approval queue…
- Boston GIS Office and Atlas
- The Boston Phoenix has an interview with the manager of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Office of Digital Cartography and GIS, Carolyn Bennett; the discussion ranges from GIS in general, to the nature of the Office’s work, to one of their…
- Map Folksonomies
- New feature. Map Folksonomies now has its own page; it used to be on the left-hand sidebar. This page links to mapping-related tags used on sites that use tags. So far that means del.icio.us, Flickr, and MetaFilter (including the Ask…
- Georgia Navigator
- This site provides real-time traffic conditions for the state of Georgia. In addition to the maps showing accidents, construction activity or trip times, you can get current accidents as a list, view traffic cameras and even what’s on those big…
- Comments and Moderation
- All right, I think it’s working now. Comments on this site now use TypeKey authentication. If you have a TypeKey identity, you can post a comment and it will show up immediately; otherwise, it will be held in a queue…
- Upgrade in Progress
- I’ve just upgraded the blogging software that powers The Map Room to Movable Type 3.15. This site may not work as expected as I try to work out the kinks. Commenting in particular might be problematic. Patience in the meantime….
