July 2006
- LibraryThing
- If you use LibraryThing to catalogue your books online, you might want to join the Maps and Atlases group, which I just created there….
- Libraries Suspect Smiley in More Map Thefts
- More from the Hartford Courant on the libraries’ growing belief that Forbes Smiley may not have fessed up to all the maps he stole from them. In a nutshell (and as covered previously here), the libraries’ post-arrest inventories turned up…
- AZ Republic: ‘Mapmaker’s Work Outdated by Time It’s Printed’
- Another story about growth outpacing mapmaking, as the Arizona Republic looks at the Phoenix Metropolitan Street Atlas, published by local map store Wide World of Maps, and its cartographer, Bob Cournoyer, who has to deal with an average of 4,000…
- Ordnance Survey Maps Mashup
- This page overlays out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (circa 1925 to 1945) on the Google Maps interface. Via Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc. See previous entry: Ordnance Survey Overlays on Multimap Aerial Photos….
- NY Times 2006 Election Guide
- The New York Times has a very nice set of interactive maps for the 2006 election races: the choropleth maps are animated, morphing between population-based cartograms and normal U.S. maps; and you can select states based on certain criteria and…
- City Income Donuts
- Bill Rankin’s latest project on Radical Cartography is called City Income Donuts: These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal…
- I Told Them We Already Got One
- Remember how Library and Archives Canada was getting set to bid on a 1562 world map by Forlani, one of the first with “Canada” on the map, that was expected to go for $200,000? Well, heh, funny story: it turns…
- Review: From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow
- From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame by Mark Monmonier University of Chicago Press, 2006. Hardcover, 229 pp. ISBN 0-226-53465-0 When I was living in Edmonton, I heard the story of Chinaman’s Peak. In 1886,…
- A List of Upcoming Conferences
- Some upcoming professional conferences: Maps for the New Nation: Mapping and Cartography of the United States, 1776-1860, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, November 3-4. Perceptions of the World in the Middle Ages a postgraduate colloquium dealing with geographical and…
- More Israel-Lebanon Situation Maps
- Ogle Earth reports on improvements to the Google Earth layer (KMZ format; see previous entry): “It’s kept up with events on both sides of the border, and now comes with folders for individual days. There are also very recent overlays…
- A List of Mac Software
- Via Ogle Earth: GPS Photo Linker is software to save GPS data to a photo. iPhotoToGoogleEarth exports photos to Google Earth. You should have GPS data assigned to the photo data; isn’t it handy that you already have GPS Photo…
- Review: Seeing Through Maps
- Seeing Through Maps by Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser and Bob Abramms ODT, 2006. Softcover, 160 pp. ISBN 1-931057-20-6 It’s really not a difficult concept: there are no “right” and “wrong” cartographic projections. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages,…
- RouteBuddy
- RouteBuddy, a new Mac GPS and mapping application, was announced today (Cartotalk; GPS Review; MacNN; MacWorld; Ogle Earth). It’s a bit of an enigma: at first I wasn’t sure what problem it was trying to solve. After all, there…
- Windows Live Local and Australia
- The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog: “This week we rolled out a new release of Live Local featuring full support for Australia.” Streets, geocoding, directions, business listings and more aerial imagery….
- Google Maps for Mobile Adds Traffic Conditions
- Traffic conditions for 30 U.S. cities — and directions with driving-time estimates based on those conditions — have been added to the mobile version (i.e., for cell phones) of Google Maps. See previous entry: Google Local for Mobile….
- Windows Live Toolbar Mapping Features
- Microsoft’s new Windows Live toolbar (IE 6 on Windows only, naturally) has a couple of mapping features of note, the Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog reports, namely, the ability to compile a list of addresses from a web page and…
- Licence Plate Map
- I was at my local map store over the weekend, and of course they had a good selection of map-related tchotchkes — umbrellas, 3D jigsaw puzzles, squeeze-ball globes. In that vein, this map of the U.S. hand-made from state…
- GIS on OS X
- Peter Rukavina explores GIS applications for Mac OS X: “The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS. … Suddenly it seems that…
- Online Map Review Roundup
- The Dallas Morning News reviews the big four mapping sites: “It takes awhile to get the hang of the software giant’s relatively new Windows Live Local service, but it’s a powerful tool. Google and Yahoo Inc. make strong showings, and…
- Status/Outage Updates
- My hosting provider has had a serious spate of outages and other technical difficulties lately. Rather than post every last incidence of the site going down, I’ve decided to post such reports to my WordPress.com account; check there for updates…
- Stolen Harvard Maps to Be Returned in September
- From today’s Boston Globe: “Eight maps purloined from the Houghton Library at Harvard University will be returned to the institution in September, when E. Forbes Smiley III is sentenced for their thefts, according to a US Justice Department spokesman.” See…
- New(ish) Mapping Blogs
- Map GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World Maps is a relatively new general-interest mapping blog with an emphasis on British topics and a really unwieldy name. GIS Dirtbag is probably the closest thing the mapping blogosphere has to…
- Java World Maps Projection Page
- Henry Bottomley’s Java world maps projection page dynamically redraws a map of the world based on your choice of projection and other parameters. You can also apply the projections to other layers (topographic Earth, Earth at night, Moon, Mars,…
- Israel-Lebanon: Visualizing Scale
- People who’ve been to Israel or Lebanon invariably impress upon you just how small the region is — something that those of us living in ginormous countries find hard to grasp. Andy Carvin has created a video that fades…
- Google Maps API Update; GZoom
- Revision 2.59 of the Google Maps API adds four new features, including speed improvements, custom cursors, and an accuracy attribute for the geocoder, the Google Maps API Official Blog reports. Meanwhile, Andre Louis writes to tell us about his project,…
- An Israel-Lebanon Roundup
- A black-and-white graphic from the Globe and Mail (direct link to image). A map-intensive Flash presentation from the Guardian. A Google Earth layer (KMZ format) showing the attacks on both sides — now, of course, it can be viewed…
- Yale’s Missing Maps
- After Forbes Smiley was caught in the act of stealing maps from Yale’s Beinecke Library last year, the university began an inventory of its map holdings to discover, comprehensively, what was missing. Precluded by federal authorities from making the list…
- MAPublisher 7.0
- Version 7.0 of MAPublisher, a set of plugins for creating publication-quality maps in Adobe Illustrator, was announced yesterday. Via Cartography. See previous entry: MAPublisher 6.0….
- Agnese’s Portolan Atlas
- I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned portolan charts on The Map Room yet. In that vein, don’t miss peacay’s big post on BibliOdyssey about Battista Agnese’s sixteenth-century Portolan Atlas, scans of which are available on several sites….
- Question: Nonexistent Towns
- Kirk Woerner asks a question that might have an obvious answer, but it’s an interesting one: On some maps (both online and offline) there are “towns” that do not exist. What are these and why are they on maps? Are…
- Sailwx.info: Mapping the Oceans
- Sailwx.info’s real-time map of ship locations (based on data from the Voluntary Observing Ships program) has been getting a lot of play on the web lately — I first saw it on La Cartoteca — but the site has a…
- EFFIS
- Add the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) to your list of fire mapping sites: the default view shows the forest fire risk, but there are other layers that show previously burned areas. Via La Cartoteca and Vector One….
- More Israel-Lebanon Mapping
- The BBC’s map of the strikes, and the combat theatre generally. Via Catholicgauze. See previous entries: The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets; The Israel-Lebanon Situation….
- Thomas Guides, Navteq on KPCC
- On Friday the 7th, there was an item on mapping on Patt Morrison’s afternoon show on 89.3 KPCC, a public radio station based in Pasadena, California. On deck were representatives from Thomas Brothers Maps and Navteq; much of the focus…
- The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets
- To help us visualize how far into Israel Hezbollah’s rockets, based in southern Lebanon, can strike, our friend Kathryn Cramer has put together a useful graphic using Photoshop and Google Earth….
- Sporadic Outages
- Short outages during the past two days — a result of my hosting provider having all sorts of trouble happen to them (more here). With any luck, I’ll have some new entries for you tomorrow….
- The Impossible Map
- Hidden amongst the 50 animated short films put online by Canada’s National Film Board (via Boing Boing) is a 10-minute educational film about cartographic projections from 1947: The Impossible Map. Directed by Evelyn Lambart, the film uses grapefruit peels…
- The Israel-Lebanon Situation
- The New York Times’s map of Israel and Lebanon, highlighting the attacks in both countries, is an excellent piece of work. You don’t normally expect newspapers’ maps to be this interactive, but there you are. Thanks to Cyrus for the…
- The U.S. Naval Observatory’s Celestial Atlases
- Highlights of this page about the collection of the U.S. Naval Observatory include scans from several celestial atlases, including Bayer’s Uranometria (1661), Flamsteed’s Atlas céleste (1774), and Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822). Via MetaFilter….
- The Long Tail of Mapping Redux
- Adena Schutzberg’s column on the “long tail” and its applicability to mapping is interesting in that it mentions the long tail coming up in discussion, but not necessarily where; it might be seen as a response to Joe Francica’s column…
- EarthDesk 3.5
- I last mentioned EarthDesk, a program that puts a real-time image of the Earth (showing, for example, day/night and cloud cover) on your desktop background, in March 2004; since then, it’s graduated to version 3.5 and is now compatible with…
- SoC Summer School 2006
- From Steve Chilton: “Keele University is welcoming the Society of Cartographers for the 42nd Annual Summer School. It will be the usual eclectic and stimulating mixture of lectures, workshops, demonstrations, visits, social activities — quiz, dinner and opportunities to network.”…
- Les voyages extraordinaires de Jules Verne
- Garmt de Vries’s Jules Verne Collection has several pages of interest to us: The Maps from the Voyages Extraordinaires, a collection of scans from the original (French) editions of Jules Verne’s novel (Verne apparently didn’t invent a geography for…
- Mumbai Bomb Blasts
- A few web pages place the locations of yesterday’s bomb blasts in Mumbai, India (which you may know as Bombay) on Google Maps: there is this one (via Matt) and “>this one (via Ogle Earth); the latter is a KML…
- Fire!
- BLDGBLOG’s been having fun with images from NASA’s Earth Observatory again (see previous entry), linking to this collection of MODIS images of Africa during 2005, showing the occurrence of fires deliberately set by people as part of their agricultural…
- Health Maps Roundup
- Quickly, a few maps on health-related subjects, in all their choropleth glory: An animated map of obesity in America, tracking state-by-state obesity rates from 1985 to 2004. Via Boing Boing. Via Cartography, atlases published by the American Cancer Society, available…
- GPSBabel
- GPSBabel is a free (donationware) utility that converts GPS data from one format to another. (It doesn’t convert map data, but such things as waypoints and routes.) Useful, I would imagine, if you’re trying to get ostensibly incompatible hardware and…
- Cartographic Perspectives: Maps and Art
- What is map art? While I’ve posted a few entries on the subject of maps and art, it’s not something I’ve really stopped to think about. An artist’s work or installation incorporates maps. Good enough for me: post it. But…
- Map of Paved Surfaces
- NASA’s Earth Observatory reports on a new satellite-imagery-based mapping — the example is of the Washington-Baltimore area — that shows how much “impervious surface” there is in the area: “These space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces, such as…
- William C. Wonders Map Collection
- I did not, alas, pay much attention to the William C. Wonders Map Collection at the University of Alberta when I was studying there (unfortunately, Ph.D. studies in modern French history didn’t allow for mucking around much with maps), but…
- NY Times: Navteq in New York
- The New York Times adds to the pile of coverage about digital mapping data providers with this piece about Navteq’s field surveyors, tagging along as they survey a part of Queens. Since Navteq and TeleAtlas don’t sell directly to consumers,…
- Kim Dingle
- Kim Dingle, Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers, 1990: Via Kottke….
- Ogle Earth Turns One
- Another mapping blog celebrates its first anniversary: this time it’s Ogle Earth. Congratulations, Stefan. (812 posts in one year? Yow.)…
- Mark Monmonier Does NPR
- Mark Monmonier appeared on NPR’s “Here and Now” yesterday to promote his new book about controversial place names, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. The interview, which you can listen to with RealPlayer,…
- Map Mashups: ‘The Fool’s Gold of Web 2.0’
- On ZDNet, Phil Wainewright dismisses “Web 2.0” mashups — especially map mashups — as “fool’s gold”: they don’t integrate any data that wasn’t semantically easy to integrate in the first place (i.e., it’s not exactly rocket science to put geotagged…
- Caught Mapping (1940)
- Caught Mapping is a nine-minute film, made in 1940, about how the road maps of the time were made — and, more importantly, revised, with a fair bit on field surveyors. I was surprised that the film reported that…
- Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?
- Much discussion about Forbes Smiley’s purported cooperation and the appropriateness of his upcoming sentence on MapHist, where Tony Campbell, referring to the news stories that maps from Harvard and the British Library are still missing, is starting to notice a…
- The Long Tail of Mapping?
- I don’t think Joe Francica’s article, The Long Tail of Mapping, quite grasps what the concept of the “long tail” is all about. As I understood it, the “long tail” — as first expounded in Chris Anderson’s Wired article in…
- Why Are GPS Maps Out of Date?
- GPS Review tackles a basic question, but a frequent one nonetheless: why are the maps in GPS navigation units out of date? The same question could, and doubtless has, been asked about all consumer mapping products — online maps included….
- NYPL Map Room on CBS Sunday Morning
- The New York Public Library’s map room — the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, rather — and its chief, Alice Hudson, were apparently on the CBS Sunday Morning show yesterday, according to a posting on MAPS-L. See the…
- History of Cartography Tutorial
- A tutorial on the history of cartography from professors at the University of Passau. A slide-based general overview, originally in German but translated into several other languages including English; some sections aren’t yet complete. It ends too soon: in the…
- New Edition of Seeing Through Maps
- A new edition of Seeing Through Maps, by Denis Wood, Ward Kaiser and Bob Abramms, is now available. It’s the second edition of the book; the first edition, still available on Amazon.com, came out in 2001. This edition, however,…
- The Living Map
- Cartography draws our attention to the Living Map, a huge, three-dimensional map of British Columbia now on display as part of the “B.C. Experience” exhibition that just opened in Victoria’s Crystal Garden. The 40-foot-by-74-foot map even models the curvature…
