June 2006

Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage
The Harvard Crimson’s coverage of Forbes Smiley’s guilty plea naturally focuses on the maps taken from Harvard’s Houghton Library. When last we heard, Harvard was conducting an inventory; according to the article, “Houghton Library discovered that 13 maps were missing…
Three Missing British Maps Still Missing
Forbes Smiley might not be out of the woods yet. Three maps that went missing from the British Library last year (and reported here last September) are still missing. They were not among the maps that Smiley confessed to taking…
Forbes Smiley Case: Martha’s Vineyard Coverage
E. Forbes Smiley III is based in Martha’s Vineyard; local coverage of his case — of his court appearance and guilty plea last week and the case in general — appeared in yesterday’s Martha’s Vineyard Times and today’s Vineyard Gazette….
Book Roundup
Cartography has a review of Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (web site), a collection of 40 essays; my impression is that the contributors come from a design rather than cartographic background. Meanwhile, on atlas(t), Claire has…
Yahoo! International Satellite Imagery
Yahoo! has added high-resolution satellite imagery for a number of “international” (read: non-U.S.) cities. They list a fair number in Mexico, a few in Canada, and several in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Cartography compares the imagery with Google…
MapQuest: Multi-stop Route Builder
All Points Blog reports that MapQuest has released a beta of a new (for them) thing for their directions feature: multi-point route building (press release). See previous entry: More About MapQuest’s Future….
Garmin Mac Compatibility Delayed
Drat. Garmin’s previously announced plans for Mac compatibility across its product lines (see previous entry) have been delayed somewhat: Training Center will come at the end of the year rather than the spring (obviously), with other products to follow. See…
E-mail Subscriptions Now Available
While many of you use RSS to find out when new entries have been posted to this site, others may have no idea what those three little letters mean. Just for you, I’ve just set up e-mail subscriptions via FeedBurner…
Simon Elvins’s “Silent London”
Simon Elvins’s “Silent London”: “Using information the government has collected on noise levels within London, a map has been plotted of the capital’s most silent spaces. The map intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows…
Forbes Smiley Case: Nine Maps of Canada
The National Post’s coverage of the Forbes Smiley affair focuses on the nine early maps of Canada that were recovered after Smiley’s arrest. See previous entries: Breaking News: Forbes Smiley Pleads Guilty; Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents; Hartford Courant: “For…
Hartford Courant: ‘For Map Thief, a World of Deceit’
An excellent story about the denouement of the Forbes Smiley affair by Kim Martineau appeared in yesterday’s Hartford Courant — which, again, has provided the leading coverage on this case. Martineau’s article goes into more detail about the missing maps,…
Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents
Thanks to Tony Campbell, I’ve acquired copies of the following court documents related to Forbes Smiley’s guilty plea last Thursday (see previous entry): The single-count indictment to which Smiley pled guilty (two pages, 28 KB); The full text of the…
Berlin City Map Archive
The Berlin City Map Project puts 26 maps of Berlin, from 1738 to 1989, online. It’s an amateur project; the author uses a flatbed scanner to scan city plans a piece at a time. Images are watermarked. Thanks to peacay…
ESA Earth Observation Images
The European Space Agency has released more than a thousand high-resolution satellite images, most of which were acquired by the Agency’s Earth Observation satellites. Here’s the site for the images; it’s searchable rather than browseable, unfortunately. Via Cartography and…
Breaking News: Forbes Smiley Pleads Guilty
The Associated Press: E. Forbes Smiley III, 50, of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., pleaded guilty to one count of theft of major artwork in connection with the theft of a map from Yale University. He admitted taking a total of 97…
Globe of Sawyer’s Quintaglio
Science fiction writers frequently create maps of the worlds they create for their stories; one of Robert J. Sawyer’s fans turned around and made him a globe from those maps. From his blog: “A fellow named Patrick J. O’Connor,…
Canadian Topo Map Update: CCA Conference Items
Interspersed with Cartography’s coverage of the CCA conference were a couple of tidbits about the government’s decision to get out of the business of paper maps. From this post: Representatives of [Natural Resources Canada] were there to explain their plans…
SXSW Audio: How to Make the Most of Maps
Via Daring Fireball, I stumble across a page of podcasts from the SXSW Interactive conference from last March, and notice that one of them is from a session about maps called “How to Make the Most of Maps.” The description:…
Forbes Smiley in Court Tomorrow
A reminder that Forbes Smiley — the map dealer caught cutting rare maps from books in a Yale University library last year — is due in court tomorrow. From an AP story in the Boston Globe: “Smiley, who pleaded not…
Sarah Trigg
The paintings of Sarah Trigg: “Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts, and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains that are part landscape, part bodyscape.” Mixing the map and medicine metaphors is not…
New Satellite Imagery Comes to Google Maps
Google Maps Mania reports that, as expected, the new high-resolution satellite imagery that came to Google Earth earlier this month has now trickled down to Google Maps….
More on Naive Geography
More about the concept of “naive geography” — the idea that how ordinary people perceive geography has implications for the design and use of GIS applications. Alan Glennon has, for a GIS class, written two short essays looking at the…
MTMaps
The MTGoogleMaps Movable Type plugin (now at version 4.0) has some competition, kind of: MTMaps, now at version 0.6, which also uses Google Maps. Developer Patrick Calahan writes, “MTMaps is different from other map plugins in that it associates map…
Forbes Smiley Case: Hartford Courant Editorial
The Hartford Courant, which has done most of the front-line reporting on the Forbes Smiley map theft case (see many previous posts in the Map Thefts category), fulminates against the man in an editorial this morning: “To cultural guardians, this…
Atlas of Canada Stamp
The Atlas of Canada (see previous entry) is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Canada Post is issuing a stamp to commemorate the occasion; the 51¢ stamp features geographer James White, a map of Canada, and proportional dividers. It will be…
Approving Street Names
This really doesn’t have anything to do with maps per se, but I think you’ll be interested in it anyway. Last week’s Los Angeles Times had a profile of John Trichak, whose job it is to approve all the proposed…
Where 2.0 Final Roundup
Last one, I promise. Just some links to summing-up posts for Where 2.0. Geography 2.0: Alan Glennon on how his expectations of the conference turned out Mapping Hacks: Jo Walsh sums up the conference O’Reilly Radar: Some of Tim O’Reilly’s…
Lightning Map
Ooo. A map of lightning strikes based on NASA satellite data (more on which here). Via BLDGBLOG. Update, June 20: Frank has made a Google Earth layer out of this map….
Getting Stuck in a Narrow Welsh Laneway
On We Make Money Not Art, Régine rounds up previous stories about drivers in the UK being led astray (into rivers, along cliffs) by their dashboard GPS navigation units. (Or rather, about drivers in the UK allowing themselves to be…
More Forbes Smiley Coverage
More from the Vineyard Gazette on the news that Forbes Smiley may plead guilty on the 22nd. See previous entry: Forbes Smiley to Admit Map Thefts….
Where 2.0: Day Two
Roundups of the second day of the Where 2.0 conference (see previous entry): Anything Geospatial (the day’s posts; Glenn is a machine) Ed Parsons: It’s All About Data … Google Earth Blog: Day Two at Where 2.0 Monkey Bites (the…
Question: Fictional Maps with worldKit?
Tony Straka is looking for a way of creating maps of imaginary places with open-source web mapping tools. He writes, “One thing I have searched for is fictional maps created with one of these programs and I cannot seem to…
Where 2.0: Day One
Reports from across the geospatial blogosphere on day one — yesterday — of the Where 2.0 conference (see previous entry): All Points Blog: “These first sessions are not really about the future of mapping. … Where is about local search…
Google Roundup: Geo Developer Day Recap; Geotagging in Picasa
A look back on Google’s Geo Developer Day on Monday, with some additional links on the subject. For summaries of the event, look at these reports from MacWorld and Search Engine Watch. The Google Maps API Blog discusses the…
Forbes Smiley to Admit Map Thefts
The Hartford Courant: “E. Forbes Smiley III, 50, who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, is due to appear in U.S. District Court in New Haven on June 22 to accept responsibility for a staggering number of thefts, bringing a yearlong FBI…
Yahoo! Local and Maps Blog
The folks behind Yahoo! Local and Maps now have a blog. In their most recent post, they announce they’re lifting restrictions on commercial uses of the mapping API….
More Online Map Reviews
CNet’s review of the major mapping sites — part of an ongoing comparative look at “Web 2.0”-style web applications — concludes that Google Maps has been surpassed by Yahoo! and Microsoft in terms of features, and gives Yahoo! the nod…
Where 2.0 Begins Today
Where 2.0 gets under way today in San Jose and runs through tomorrow. I won’t be there, because travelling to conferences is expensive, but a number of mapping and geospatial bloggers will be, such as Glenn from Anything Geospatial, Ed…
Viele’s Map of Manhattan
For a so-called “remaindered link,” this is an impressive post: Jason Kottke began by linking to a story in today’s New York Times about Egbert Viele’s 1874 map of Manhattan — still used today by civil engineers because it…
iMap
The announcement of version 3.5 drew my attention to iMap, and since I assiduously follow map-related software for the Mac, as you know, I should mention its existence here: it’s apparently an application that lets you generate maps from data…
Google Maps, GPS and Linux
Martyn Davis has written up his experiences getting bike routes onto a GPS-enabled bike computer using Linux command-line applications and a bit of Google Maps. Via MAKE: Blog….
Google Maps Update: KML, Geocoder, Enterprise
Also from Google’s Geo Developer Day. In addition to the new version of Google Earth and upgraded imagery for Google Earth (coming soon to Google Maps), an entry in Google’s official blog announces the following major new features of Google…
Breaking News: Google Earth 4.0
News from Google’s Geo Developer Day, reported by Google Earth Blog, Ogle Earth and The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Google Earth version 4.0 (beta) is now available, with a new interface for all platforms. I say “all platforms,” because there is…
Another Review of MapPoint 2006
Another review of MapPoint 2006, this time from Directions: “What were they thinking? Was this product an afterthought? Did Microsoft all of a sudden realize it had not planned for the next version of MapPoint and had to get a…
Basic GIS Coordinates
GIS Monitor has a review of Basic GIS Coordinates, a book which addresses the challenge of trying to apply mathematical coordinate models to an inherently irregularly shaped planet. From Matteo’s review: Basic GIS Coordinates explains the progression of ideas that…
A Walking Map of Ontario
Canadians in general must have maps on the brain; it’s not just me, and it’s not just the Canadian bloggers, cartographers and geospatial pros that keep getting featured on this blog (see, for example, the two previous posts). Otherwise, why…
Terra Nostra; CCA Conference
Cartography notes the upcoming launch, during the Canadian Cartographic Association’s 2006 conference this month, of Jeffrey Murray’s upcoming history of Canadian cartography, Terra Nostra, 1550-1950: The Stories Behind Canada’s Maps. The book sounds quite interesting. So does the conference…
Canada and Open Source GIS
In a Directions article, Kevin Flanders argues that Canada’s disproportionately large contribution to open source GIS projects is a result of federal government funding, which he contrasts with U.S. government contracts to proprietary GIS vendors….
ESRI Blog: Geography Matters
Via James and Glenn, I discover ESRI’s new public (and possibly collaborative) blog about the GIS industry, Geography Matters. Still in its early stages; ought to be interesting to see how it develops….
CloudSat
NASA’s new CloudSat satellite takes cross-section images of cloud interiors, allowing researchers to see cloud formations in 3D. The images are essentially transects rather than maps, but can supplement and inform weather-related satellite imagery the same way as ground…
Onomastics of Geography
Great post by Claire on what she calls the “taxonomy of geographic names” — learn new and useful words like “toponym” (place name), “allonym” (one of two toponyms applied to a single feature, e.g. Istanbul/Constantinople) or “exonym” (place name in…
Caleb D. Hammond, Jr.
The New York Times reports the death on Monday of Caleb D. Hammond, Jr., who from 1948 to 1974 was president of C. S. Hammond & Company, the map publishing house founded by his grandfather. He was 90. You’ll recognize…
Google Earth Imagery Update
Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth report that more areas of the planet now have high-resolution imagery in Google Earth, many of which are low-population areas like South Georgia Island, Siberia, the Australian interior and — wow — the Himalayas….
Downtime
Sorry about the downtime (since yesterday afternoon); I goofed up with the .htaccess file in a way that generated a server error for the entire site, and only realized the problem just now. My bad….
17th-Century London in Google Earth
Old meets new: Google Earth layers for London in 1666 and 1690. Suddenly the purpose behind e_Perimetron becomes clear. Via Things Magazine….
Maps of North Carolina
This is a nice find: a good-sized collection of maps of North Carolina, some dating as far back as the 17th century. The maps were scanned by the state archives; the ones I perused were in quite high resolution. Some…
Indonesian Earthquake Update
Cartography links to more maps and imagery of the Indonesian earthquake, including satellite images here and here, as well as situation maps from ReliefWeb. See previous entries: Indonesian Earthquake; Indonesian Earthquake in Google Earth….
Manhattan Elsewhere
With Manhattan Elsewhere, Jason Kottke updates Bill Rankin’s Errant Isle of Manhattan using Google Maps and Google Earth (Rankin used MapQuest). The idea is to play off the differences in size and density; in both projects, it’s very surprising to…
Forbes Profiles ESRI
For people in the geospatial industry, ESRI is omnipresent; for people outside the industry, ESRI is scarcely on our radar, despite their dominance of the GIS software market. For those of us in the latter category, this Forbes article, profiling…
Satellite Imagery Captures Settlement’s Destruction
While governments fret about losing security at the hands of publicly available, high-resolution satellite imagery, it’s worth remembering that revealing things that governments would rather leave hidden is frequently a very good thing. Last week, the American Association for the…
Indonesian Earthquake in Google Earth
Via Kathryn Cramer, Google Earth overlays for last weekend’s earthquake in Indonesia. See previous entry: Indonesian Earthquake….
e_Perimetron
e_Perimetron is a new quarterly web journal, the focus of which is the application of geospatial technologies to old maps. The first issue, for example, has articles that transform old maps to conform to known coordinates, assign projections to portolans,…
Chicago Neighbourhood Map Update
There’s more to the story of Big Stick’s neighbourhood maps being barred from Chicago Public Schools (see previous entry) than meets the eye, Adena says in Directions: she recounts the map company’s conflicts with local realtors — lawsuits, sponsorships gone…