March 2006
- Terres de Champagne-Ardenne
- BibliOdyssey points to an exhibition of antique maps of the Champagne-Ardenne region of France: Terres de Champagne-Ardenne: Cinq siècles de cartographie (in French, naturally). The exhibition is touring various library locations in that region; the online version’s a bit complicated…
- Maps of Jupiter
- NASA has released maps of Jupiter based on images taken by the Cassini-Huygens probe as it passed by the planet in 2000. Cylindrical and north and south polar projections are available. More from the BBC. Via Slashgeo and La…
- Iraq War Coalition Fatalities
- A dramatic and effective animated Flash map that illustrates casualties suffered by coalition forces in Iraq over time: “The animation runs at ten frames per second — one frame for each day — and a single black dot indicates the…
- Book Review: Making Maps by Krygier and Wood
- Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS by John Krygier and Denis Wood Guilford Press, 2005. Softcover, 303 pp. ISBN 1-59385-200-2 I love this book. It’s just so neat. Although Making Maps is aimed at a GIS…
- SkyVector’s Aeronautical Charts
- I love looking at aeronautical charts even if I have no idea what to do with them; I just think all the detail is neat. So it’s no surprise that I’ve been enjoying playing with the aeronautical charts collected…
- Huffman’s World Language Maps
- Stephen Huffman’s World Language Phyla/Family Mapping page hosts a collection of very large PDFs that show language phyla at the global level and language families at the regional/continental level. The maps are really good, but if you use OS…
- Conference and Meeting Roundup
- A few upcoming meetings to tell you about from both the technical and historical side of mapping: This weekend: The Texas Map Society’s spring meeting takes place from March 31 to April in, I guess, several locations in west Texas….
- Another Profile: Navteq in New York
- Stories about the digital mapping data companies keep coming in; the latest is a CNNMoney.com profile of Navteq in which the streets being profiled are New York’s. It’s from last month, but GPS Review spotted it today. I’m noticing a…
- Triangulations: March 27
- Jeff Thurston’s contribution to the debate over free geodata looks at the question of scale: if you want geospatial data to be free and updated regularly, consider the huge amount of territory that has to be mapped. Wired’s piece,…
- Experts Still Doubt Chinese Map’s Authenticity
- From the English edition of the People’s Daily Online: Experts doubt authenticity of China’s pre-Columbus map. In response to yesterday’s press conference confirming the age of the paper: “The test can only prove that the paper is genuine, but it…
- Cartograms from Worldmapper
- Worldmapper is a collection of cartograms developed using a new algorithm (creating cartograms — “density-equalizing maps” — is extremely complicated; more details here). There are 56 cartograms on the site so far, all global in focus, with more to…
- Chinese Map Controversy: Liu Gang’s Press Conference
- We’ve got coverage of Liu Gang’s press conference regarding his so-called “1418 Map”: BeijingLives has a copy of Liu’s written remarks, wherein he takes on the criticisms point-by-point. Liu: “After going through the ‘holes’ one by one, we should see…
- TeleAtlas in Santa Fe
- Another article on field data collection by the digital mapping data companies, this time from the Santa Fe New Mexican, looking at TeleAtlas’s work scouring the streets of Santa Fe. Via All Points Blog. See previous entries: More on Digital…
- Chinese Map Media Briefing
- Mark your calendars and brace yourselves. On Thursday, Liu Gang, Gavin Menzies and company are holding an invitation-only media briefing in Beijing, where they will announce the carbon-dating test results for Liu Gang’s map, which they believe is a copy…
- Agricultural Atlas of China
- Visualizing China’s Future Agriculture is a new atlas — sample pages, sample maps — that is the result of a decade-long collaborative project of the Oregon State University China Working Group. As the Medford News reports, “It is the first…
- B.C. Base Mapping
- Here’s an article from itbusiness.ca about British Columbia’s Base Mapping and Geomatic Services branch, a part of the provincial government’s Integrated Land Management Bureau. The article covers some of the applications of the branch’s data at a fairly general level….
- Triangulations: March 20
- An article about GPS and geocaching in South Africa points out the extreme markup for GPS devices in that country: they cost twice as much as they do in the U.S.. The proposed INSPIRE directive, which would ostensibly standardize…
- Geographic Atlas of New Zealand
- The Geographic Atlas of New Zealand looks intriguing, even if the site only has one or two tantalizing images and it isn’t in Amazon.com’s catalogue. Damn it, I want more. Via Cartotalk….
- Atlas of North American English
- Via MapHist, I found out about the University of Pennsylvania’s Telsur Project, which maps the variations in English dialect and pronunciation across North America, and is behind the (hella-expensive) Atlas of North American English. See previous entry: Atlas of Language…
- Smallest. Map. Ever.
- Scientists at Cal Tech (their site) have manipulated strands of DNA to create, among other things, a map of the Americas that is only a few hundred nanometres across. That’s smaller than human hair or bacteria; in cartographic terms, that’s…
- Triangulations: March 15
- Boing Boing reports that the archive of silly Tube maps (previously mentioned here) has gotten into a spot of legal trouble and has been taken offline. As a followup on this question, have a look at Stefan’s post about…
- Google Mars
- Google Mars: in the same vein as Google Moon (see previous entry); with visual-spectrum, infrared and elevation imagery. Here’s Google’s FAQ. Via Cartography, amongst many others. (Update: Announcement on the Google Blog.) Also, as Stefan notes, a Mars layer is…
- Triangulations: March 13
- The Batch Geocoding Blog has a comparison of the Google, MapQuest and Yahoo! mapping APIs; it’s a quick outline of what the author sees as the pros and cons of each. Via Very Spatial. Alex Stengel says MapMemo 2.5…
- WWU Collection Vandalized
- A developing story on the MAPS-L mailing list. Last month, a librarian at Western Washington University reported that a number of government documents had been vandalized. The plates had been removed with a razor (the modus operandi of map thieves)….
- Updates: Movable Type 3.2, Site Design
- I just finished upgrading to Movable Type 3.2; if you’re reading this, it presumably went well. But there’s always a chance of a bug somewhere that needs fixing, so if you experience some wonky behaviour on this site, that might…
- Triangulations: March 10
- (I’m going to try calling these link roundups “Triangulations” and see how that goes.) Via GPS Tracklog, the difference between Garmin’s and Magellan’s topo maps. The National Geographic Society is planning a “mega-map” of the Sonoran Desert region. “It will…
- Congressional District Maps
- The U.S. National Atlas has maps of the congressional districts of the current session of Congress, both as previewable GIFs and printable PDFs. Both state and individual district maps are available. As Brad, who submitted this link, points out, it’s…
- Question: Topo Maps in Google Earth?
- Evan Roberts asks, Why do you think Google hasn’t integrated USGS topographic quads as a layer in Google Earth? Not enough of a demand? Not relevant to its business model? Don’t want to step on the toes of GPS partners?…
- MapQuest (Finally) Has an API
- MapQuest finally has an API: they’re calling it the OpenAPI, it’s in beta, it was announced yesterday at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference, and (naturally) it has a blog (via Spatially Adjusted). From what I gather — see Mapping Hacks and…
- Category Changes
- I’ve been meaning to reorganize the entry categories for some time, and I’ve taken a first step this morning: “Web Tools,” which mainly covered Google, Mapquest et al., is now Online Maps; “Hacks” is now a subcategory of Online Maps…
- Exhibition Roundup: Fort Worth, Texas; Hannibal, Missouri
- Patterns of Progress, an exhibition of Texas bird’s-eye-view maps — previously covered here — is now running at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas until May 28. More than sixty highly detailed and oversized prints in this special…
- More Reviews of Peter Barber’s Map Book
- The Map Book, edited by Peter Barber, continues to get attention. It was reviewed by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last month: “Barber’s chronological format is easy to browse, fascinating when read in sequence. Each righthand page is a full-color reproduction, usually…
- James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps
- Commercial artist James Niehues is responsible for a large number of panoramic ski resort maps — those bird’s-eye-view illustrations showing all the runs. A lot of them are available on his web site: there are galleries for eastern U.S., western…
- Virtual Earth at Street Level
- Virtual Earth is working on adding street-level images; it’s only a preview so far (viewable here; works in Firefox but not Safari) and only for San Francisco and Seattle. It’s basically the same as the A9 imagery that made the…
- USGS Astrogeology Research Program
- Via La Cartoteca, I discover images and maps from the USGS’s Astrogeology Research Program: a collection of imagery, GIS data, and map products (e.g., globes for sale) for other planets and moons from our Solar System….
- Fake Tilt-Shift Photography with Photoshop
- SF, the model city, uploaded by mathowie. Barbieri’s stunning photography, which I posted about in January, uses an expensive tilt-shift lens to make aerial photography look like photos of models rather than the real thing. But you can fake the…
- Atlas of Alberta Railways
- The Atlas of Alberta Railways is a collection of historical maps showing the development of railroad lines in Alberta (and western Canada); there are more than 200 maps available through a surprisingly good Flash interface. This is not a collection…
- Anagram Maps, Other Tube Maps
- The anagram map of the London Underground I mentioned last month has since been hit with a cease-and-desist by Transport for London. In response, and in an act of solidarity, someone else created an anagram map of the Toronto subway…
