November 2006
- Theft Roundup: Yale Security Measures; European Libraries
- Yale University is considering a series of new library security measures following three (!) reviews set into motion by the Forbes Smiley case, Yale Daily News reports (not Safari-compatible). Among other things, reading rooms will be videotaped and cataloguing and…
- Google Pushpins Explained
- Oh. So that’s how it’s done. Via Matt….
- Nolli Map Prints For Sale
- Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome was the subject of a major web project by the University of Oregon that launched last year; a print of the map is now available for sale through that same web site. Even the…
- Resistant Maps Report
- Régine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art attended the Resistant Maps conference over the weekend, and has a two-part* report here and here. Summary: “It was a small, unaffected and friendly event but it was also one of…
- Historical Atlas of Oklahoma
- The Norman Transcript reports on the publication next month of the fourth edition of the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma; unfortunately (for our purposes), the article focuses on the essays rather than the maps (173 of them), which are dispensed…
- Fisk, Colonialism and Mapmaking
- Robert Fisk’s column in last Saturday’s Independent, complaining about what he saw as France’s self-serving interest in maintaining Lebanese independence, includes the following passage about colonialism and mapmaking: Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for westerners to see these…
- A Blog for ‘London: A Life in Maps’
- There are hardly any posts up yet, but the London: A Life in Maps exhibition now has an accompanying blog. Via MapHist. Previously: London: A Life in Maps — Now Open and Online; Peter Barber on “London: A Life in…
- State Forest Inadvertently Renamed
- Oops. Thanks to a proofreading error, the Brendan T. Byrne State Forest appears as the “Brenda Bryan State Forest” on recently issued AAA maps of New Jersey. Byrne is a former state governor….
- Mapmaking as a Career
- The Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s “On the Job” feature looks at mapmaking as a career and the local GIS job market (which, in Nova Scotia, isn’t huge, but still)….
- Pocket Globes
- I was not previously aware of the existence of pocket globes: made of wood, paper or papier-mâché, from the late 18th and early 19th century, and frequently three inches or less in diameter. More about them at Dream Tree…
- Bushnell GPS Units and Imagery
- I can’t keep up with all the GPS product announcements — too many of them! — so as a general rule I don’t bother trying. But GPS Review’s Tim Flight e-mailed me to point out something interesting about the…
- Upcoming Conferences: AMC, Where 2.0
- February 11-14, 2007: 35th annual conference of the Australian Map Circle, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Via Maps-L. May 29-30, 2007: Where 2.0, San Jose, California. Proposals due January 7. Via O’Reilly Conferences….
- Charpentier’s GeoData Blog
- GeoData Blog is a French-language blog about geospatial data by Christophe Charpentier (who’s spent more than six years working on Cartosphère). Up and running since March, but really taking off in the last two months. Via Catholicgauze….
- London: A Life in Maps — Now Open and Online
- The British Library exhibition, “London: A Life in Maps,” is now open, both in real life and online. The virtual exhibition that Peter Barber referred to is now online as part of the overall London: A Life in Maps web…
- Explorers House
- Catholicgauze has been reading a book that sounds interesting: Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made, by Robert Poole, a former NG executive editor. It’s an insiders’ history of the National Geographic Society, with a focus on the…
- Revue de la BNF’s Cartography Issue
- The most recent issue of the Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France concerns cartography; most of the articles appear to be about early modern maps, though there’s one about the Internet as well. The table of contents, introduction…
- Ask MetaFilter on GPS Data Logging
- Over on Ask Metafilter, a question about real-time GPS data logging has gotten a few answers; the questioner is trying to get at the data (altitude, speed) that is recorded but not necessarily logged by standard software….
- Google Earth Terrain and Imagery Upgrades
- Ogle Earth reports on terrain and imagery upgrades in Google Earth; locations updated include 12 German cities, six British regions, the island of Oahu, and the troubled Sudanese region of Darfur….
- ACME Mapper
- ACME Mapper started out as a front end for TerraServer; it’s now a Google Maps mashup that adds TerraServer data (including USGS topo maps) and NEXRAD weather radar data as additional layers — though these added layers are U.S.-only. Via…
- Resistant Maps
- Geobloggers points to an upcoming conference/exhibition in Genoa, Italy this weekend: Resistant Maps: Artistic Actions in the Interconnected Urban Territory. The representation of territory holds a historical role in the privileges of power. Geographical data has always been in its…
- Google Transit Feed Specification
- If you want your city to be included in Google Transit, point them to the Google Transit Feed Specification, which sets out the format in which the transit data must be encoded. Via Google Blog. Previously: Google Transit Adds Five…
- Bavarian Land Survey Maps
- Die Urpositionsblätter der Landvermessung in Bayern is an online collection of 19th-century topographic maps produced by Bavarian land surveyors. There are more than 900 of these 1:25,000-scale maps, put online by the Bavarian state library. Via BibliOdyssey, which shares…
- Google Earth Data in Google Maps Redux
- You could previously view Google Earth KML files in Google Maps, but, the Google Maps API Blog reports, you can now do a few more things with KML/KMZ files (e.g., image overlays) within the Google Maps interface….
- Cartographies of Travel and Navigation
- A new book from the University of Chicago Press looks interesting: Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, edited by James R. Akerman, a collection of essays about the history of all kinds of transportation-related maps — railroads, roads, nautical and…
- OUP Year in Geography
- Ben Keene, the editor of Oxford University Press’s atlas program, looks at the geographic changes over the past year — new parks, new countries, old cities with new names — that cartographers will have to deal with when they update…
- Review: The Geist Atlas of Canada
- The Geist Atlas of Canada: Meat Maps and Other Strange Cartographies by Melissa Edwards Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006. Softcover, 128 pp. ISBN 1-55152-216-0 Early on in The Map Room’s existence, we learned about a quirky feature emanating from Geist, a…
- Microsoft Mapping Roundup
- Chandu Thota is leaving the Virtual Earth/MapPoint group to join another group within Microsoft. He’s been there four years, during which time we heard about a good deal of his work. For example, some previous entries: Thota on Virtual Earth…
- Ackroyd on Mapping London
- For an exhibition that doesn’t even open until next week, “London: A Life in Maps” is generating all sorts of attention — it’s the launching-off point for this essay on mapping London by Peter Ackroyd in next week’s New Statesman,…
- Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth: Excerpt
- ExtremeTech has published a sample chapter of its book, Hacking Google Maps and Google Earth by Martin C. Brown. The excerpt deals with customizing the map output for a community site (e.g., icons and markers, loading data in from XML),…
- Peter Barber on ‘London: A Life in Maps’
- Peter Barber — Peter Barber! — writes: London: A Life in Maps will be accompanied by a virtual exhibition, available on the BL website, for people who can’t visit. Though the emphasis of the exhibition will be on the great…
- Google Maps Click-to-Call
- Even as Google was announcing a new calling feature on Google Maps, which allows people to enter their phone number on a map-based business search result and have Google connect them to that business for free (even if it’s long…
- Yahoo! Maps Out of Beta; Europe Update
- Our recent discussions of Yahoo! Maps’s features have focused, it must be said, on their new, beta version rather than their older, default version: you have had to choose the new version deliberately. Until today: Yahoo! announces that the beta…
- NFL TV Distribution Maps
- This is interesting, even for a non-football fan like myself: NFL TV distribution maps that show which games get broadcast where, with a discussion of how that gets determined. Via Kottke….
- Computer-Generated Electoral Districts
- An American Scientist article from 1996 discusses the ways in which computer algorithms might improve — or at least depoliticize — how electoral district boundaries are drawn. Taking North Carolina’s congressional districts as an example, the author, Brian Hayes,…
- BPL’s List of Missing Maps
- The Boston Public Library has released a list of maps classified as missing from the Leventhal Map Center. According to yesterday’s press release, the list has been released now that Forbes Smiley has been sentenced. [T]he Boston Public Library is…
- Another Virtual Earth 3D Roundup
- Links regarding the Virtual Earth 3D launch last week have been piling up in my files; time once more to clear out the queue and share them with you. Brian Flood takes a good look at some of Virtual Earth…
- Edinburgh Time-Gun Map
- The Time-Gun Map of Edinburgh, published in 1861, overlays concentric circles to show “the time taken for the sound of the one o’clock gun to travel from Edinburgh Castle to different parts of Edinburgh and Leith.” Being able to calculate…
- More About ‘London: A Life in Maps’
- The Telegraph has more about “London: A Life in Maps,” the upcoming exhibit at the British Library (see previous entry). It opens on the 24th. Via MapHist….
- Allan Doyle: ‘Georectifying My Mental Map’
- Allan Doyle on the “life-changing” impact of a GPS: “I don’t know about you, but my mental map of greater Boston has been simplified to an abstraction that borders on the scary. Of course, I didn’t realize that until I…
- Petroliana: The New York Times on Old Road Maps
- An article in yesterday’s New York Times about collecting old road maps and other assorted gas-station paraphernalia — “petroliana.” Profiles John Margolies, the co-author of Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map, who gave a recent presentation…
- Garmin Store Opening in Chicago
- Engadget covers this weekend’s opening of Garmin’s flagship retail store in Chicago, with plenty of photos to stimulate those who would find an upscale store dedicated to GPS products stimulating. Also points to Garmin’s corporate blog, which I don’t think…
- Greenwich Emotion Map
- The Greenwich Emotion Map was created by people walking around the community wearing devices that measured galvanic skin response; the compiled results suggest a collective emotional response to each location. Maps are available in Flash, PDF (20 MB) and…
- Google Earth Roundup: Automator, Rumsey
- A couple of Google Earth items that made me happy. First, via Ogle Earth, the Google Earth Automator Pack, a (still-in-development) collection of Automator actions for the Macintosh version of Google Earth. Second, maps from the David Rumsey collection are…
- Google Maps Africa Update
- Google Maps has added highway and street data for some African localities, Google Karten and Google Maps Mania report. They report Johannesburg and Cairo with street-level maps; I checked Algiers and it’s got them too. Other localities have major routes…
- Mediocre Media Mid-Term Mapping
- It will probably be a while before the really interesting maps of the 2006 U.S. mid-term elections begin manifesting themselves. In the meantime, we must make do with some surprisingly basic choropleth maps for the Senate and gubernatorial races,…
- Yahoo! Maps Road Data Upgrade
- Europe, at least, “now has roads, and rivers and normal map stuff like that” in Yahoo! Maps, Rev Dan Catt reports….
- Ordnance Survey Loses Subsidy
- The Guardian reports that the British government has decided to end a subsidy to the Ordnance Survey. The subsidy appears to have had two purposes: one, to ease the OS’s transition from a state-run agency to what is referred to…
- The Atlantic Neptune
- The Atlantic Neptune, “a magnificent four-volume atlas of sea charts and views of the east coast of North America, published during the American Revolutionary War by Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres (1722-1824),” has been scanned and put online by…
- 2006 Mid-term Election Map Roundup
- The Library of Congress has a map of the congressional districts for 2006. Via MapHist. Much attention is being paid to Ottawa County, Michigan, for providing maps of real-time election results through its GIS and County Clerk offices. IE only,…
- Virtual Earth for Japan
- In other Virtual Earth news, a localized version for Japan was also launched yesterday, replete with geocoding, yellow pages, road maps and satellite imagery….
- Virtual Earth 3D Roundup
- Reactions to, and follow-up stories about, yesterday’s announcement of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D thingy (previously): The AP story focuses on the Microsoft vs. Google implications of this release (via MapHist). In that vein, Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog says,…
- The Top-Down View
- Between high-rise buildings and easily accessible satellite imagery, buildings’ roofs are getting a second look — not just by casual viewers dinking around with Google Earth, but by architects, the L.A. Times reports. Sometimes the impact of new mapping…
- Virtual Earth 3D
- CNet reports the launch of Virtual Earth 3D, a component of Live Search that integrates three-dimensional models of 15 U.S. cities (so far) into search results — a flyover/Flight Simulator view, I suppose. Comes with virtual billboards for advertising. Microsoft’s…
- 50 Maps at the Austrian National Library
- The Austrian National Library has put online 50 maps from its collection, spanning five centuries. Sorted by century (from the 15th to the 19th) and with one of those zoom interfaces. Text and interface in German only. Thanks to…
- GPS for Cyclists, Runners
- Not every GPS receiver has driving directions; not every GPS user needs them. There are, in fact, plenty of GPS receivers for other users, and have been for years; you just don’t hear about them as much. Recently, GPS Tracklog…
- DIY Globes, Paper and Metal
- Via Make: Blog, DIY map fold-outs that you print, cut, and fold into a polyhedron. Mark Wilson used one to make a unique, rhombicuboctahedral gift wrapper (shown here). Or, if your tastes run to metal rather than paper, and…
- Flight Patterns
- Aaron Koblin took FAA flight data and made some flashy animations out of the flight paths. Via atlas(t)….
- Antique Map Price Record
- The Antique Map Price Record is a CD-ROM-based reference tool that bills itself as more than just a listing of map prices (at auction, for example); it also contains reference images and bibilographical material, according to the publisher, who also…
- The Onion Does Maps
- The Onion Radio News: Local Father Fails to Forcibly Re-Fold Map….
- Gary Lunn Responds
- Today I received the following letter, dated October 30, from the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources, Gary Lunn, in response to my letter asking him to overturn the decision to stop producing paper topographic maps. You will recall that shortly…
- Top Ten Non-Google Map Mashups
- From Lifehacker, a top-ten list of map mashups that aren’t based on Google Maps. Thanks to Joel Riggs for the link….
- MapKit
- Platial has introduced MapKit, which integrates their service, built atop the Google Maps API, into your web page or blog (though there seem to be issues with certain blogging engines, including WordPress and Blogger). It looks profoundly easy to…
- The Marquette Map Isn’t a Hoax?
- Carl Weber’s thesis that the Marquette Map is a hoax received a rough reception at a history conference last month: apparently, many historians aren’t buying his claims or his evidence, suggesting that they can be refuted “in about five…
- NY Times on Geotagging
- A good article on geotagging in today’s New York Times that could stand as a general introduction to the subject: it explains how geodata can be assigned to photos, discusses the photo-sharing services that support it, and mentions a few…
- New Features in New Google Earth Beta
- A new beta of Google Earth 4 adds previously pay-for features (drawing paths and polygons) to the free version, brings altitude to image overlays (critical for weather, among other things) and includes other refinements, Google Earth Blog reports. See previous…
- Firefox Mapping Extensions
- Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes a look at some mapping-related Firefox extensions: All Your Maps Are Belong to Us, which converts URLs for other mapping sites to Google Maps; GMiF, which embeds a Google Map on a Flickr photo page…
- New, Free Physical Map of the United States
- Tom Patterson — whom we know from his Shaded Relief site — wrote to announce an excellent relief map of the United States that he made from SRTM and other data and released to the public domain. (Methodology here.)…
- Map Snapper
- The Map Snapper project seems an awfully complicated way to generate local information and mobile maps, particularly since most of this stuff is available over wireless networks anyway. Essentially: take a photo of a map with a cameraphone, send…
- Paleogeography and Google Earth
- Missed this earlier. Google Earth’s time animation feature is now part of the free version, and Google Earth user Valery Hronusov has taken global paleogeographic data put out by geology professor Ron Blakey — whom we last met thanks…
