January 2007
- What Virtual Earth Bugs Do You Want Fixed?
- The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog is asking for users’ top five bugs they’d like fixed: “List your most nagging bugs. Tell us about the usability issue that bites you everyday. Or the feature of the site that if tweaked…
- Mapping Economic Activity
- The G-Econ project maps the world’s economic activity on a one-degree grid. Animations for the entire globe are available, as are maps of individual countries and data sets. The country maps reveal an unsurprising correlation between economic activity and…
- DeLorme’s Early History
- A look at map publisher DeLorme, particularly its origins in the 1970s when it got its start making maps of Maine’s private lands (maps of which were woefully out of date at that point), in yesterday’s Central Maine Morning Sentinel….
- More Map Art
- The artists Dinesh links to in his MetaFilter post on map art are ones I’ve linked to before, but among the comments are a few examples of maps in art that I hadn’t encountered yet: Heidi Neilson’s map collages;…
- It Burns! It Burns Us!
- Chad suggests that maybe Microsoft Paint isn’t the best tool to draw a map with….
- The Quebec-Labrador Border
- GeoCarta notes the news that a boundary dispute between the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador has flared up over Quebec wildlife maps that show part of Labrador as belonging to Quebec. This is not new. The Quebec-Labrador…
- Training Center for the Mac Now Available
- As promised (see previous entry), the Mac OS X version of Garmin’s Training Center software is now available. (See also GPS Tracklog, TUAW.)…
- Forbes Smiley and Cortés’s Map
- If you had thought you’d heard the last about Forbes Smiley — who is currently serving a three-and-a-half-year federal sentence after having admitted to stealing nearly 100 maps from various libraries — then you were mistaken. The Hartford Courant’s Kim…
- Poll: 20% Think Map Reading Is a Redundant Skill
- About 20 per cent of respondents to a Nickelodeon survey of adults and children think that map reading is a redundant skill, the New York Daily News reports, putting map reading in the same category as spelling and using a…
- The Analog GPS
- The Analog GPS: “Take your batteries and slavish dependence on other high-tech flummery and heave it overboard. With this device, you can pinpoint your location anywhere on earth and not be reliant on dodgy bits of information being projected…
- A Book Roundup
- Much book-related news has been accumulating over here; past time I shared it. Surveying, Mapping and GIS reviews Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a book about John Harrison, who discovered how to determine longitude. I think I need to read this book….
- Introduction to Neogeography
- High Earth Orbit’s Andrew Turner has written Introduction to Neogeography, a short e-book, published as part of O’Reilly’s “Short Cuts” series and available as a PDF file for $8. It’s a guide to the new mapping technologies that are…
- Two Blogs I Missed
- Two more blogs to tell you about, though they’ve been around long enough that I should have spotted them sooner. I linked to a page on High Earth Orbit’s site before, but since then Andrew Turner has added a blog…
- Guettard’s Mineralogical Atlas
- BibliOdyssey’s latest map-related find is Jean-Étienne Guettard’s Atlas et description minéralogiques de la France (1780), digitized and available online at the University of Strasbourg, where, peacay notes, “maps start on page 223 … the full maps at the site…
- High-Resolution Satellite Photos of Europe in Google Earth
- Stefan broke the news this morning that Spot Image’s 2.5-meter-per-pixel imagery had been added to Google Earth; this is apparently a substantial improvement over the 15-meter-per-pixel base layer. More from Spot Image itself; the countries affected include Belgium, France, Belgium,…
- Around and Around and Around and Around
- Google gets a bit confused on the road to North Brunswick, New Jersey, Valleywag reports. Update, 1/23: Google has corrected the directions, but Chad has screenshots if you missed it….
- Two More Blogs
- Stefan has discovered two brand-spanking-new blogs that have started up this very month: the Google Earth Hacks blog accompanies the site of the same name; MapWrapper.com is a GIS blog with an interest in earth sciences and remote sensing. Previously:…
- Virtual Earth Bird’s Eye Imagery for Europe
- New bird’s-eye imagery for Virtual Earth, this time covering more than 100 European cities — mostly in Italy, France and Germany, but also the Netherlands, Spain, and one city in Norway. (Though technically we should also say Monaco, since Monte…
- Israel and the Holy Land, Past and Present
- I’m overdue in presenting a couple of links regarding maps of Israel and/or the “Holy Land,” which terms may or may not be interchangeable, but you get the general idea as to area. Holy Land Maps is an online…
- The Other Shaded Relief Site
- The Shaded Relief world map should not be confused with Tom Patterson’s Shaded Relief site (previously); instead, it’s a Google Maps mashup with a custom layer. “We have created a custom layer using SRTM30+ and SRTM90 DEMs and used VMAP0…
- Broer Map Library Update
- Dave Broer of the Broer Map Library writes: I wanted to contact you and thank you for the write ups that you have done in the past regarding my attempts at making a world-class online historic map collection available to…
- Map of Extreme Flood Events
- An interesting Flash-based map of places affected by “extreme flood events” since 1985 (with incomplete or missing data from some years) from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, which tracks such things. Via Vector One….
- Microsoft Streets & Trips Reviewed
- Chad has a brief review of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 and its accompanying GPS unit: “I think it is very well worth it. … All and all I am impressed with the software and the GPS unit. They…
- Correcting Directions
- Dave Winer discovers a better route than the directions suggested by Google Maps, and wonders: “So — when does mapping become a two-way app? I’d be willing to tell their software that I have a better route, it’s one that…
- Why Is the Return Rate for GPS Receivers So High?
- DigiTimes, which reports on Taiwanese electronics manufacturers, reports that Wal-Mart may be thinking about dropping GPS receivers due to a high return rate — 40 per cent at Wal-Mart, 25 per cent elsewhere. (Wal-Mart, unlike Best Buy, doesn’t charge a…
- About Ricoh’s GPS Camera
- James and Dan are enthusiastic about Ricoh’s release of the 500SE GPS-ready digital camera, but I’m not sure how groundbreaking this is. (By which I mean that I’m confused and seek enlightenment; I’m not speaking rhetorically.) For one thing, it’s…
- Susan Stockwell
- Susan Stockwell’s art makes frequent use of maps, either as raw material and as the shape of her final product. Examples of the former include dresses made of maps; examples of the latter include a map of India stitched…
- New Zealander’s Campaign to Correct Geographic Names
- A retired public servant in Wellington, New Zealand is on a campaign to correct spelling mistakes in New Zealand place names, the New Zealand Herald reports. He’s made a total of 60 submissions to the Geographic Board pointing out errors…
- Great Salt Lake Bathymetric Maps
- GeoCarta reports that the second of two bathymetric maps of Utah’s Great Salt Lake has been released by the USGS. Both maps are available online (north part, south part) and available for download as substantial 150-dpi PDF files; Matt…
- MAPCO
- MAPCO — Map and Plan Collection Online — is, as you might expect, an online collection of maps: it’s relatively small at the moment, with more promised, with maps of London, Britain and Australia, mostly from the 19th century. The…
- L.A. Homeless Map
- The Downtown Homeless Map tracks the number of homeless people in downtown Los Angeles; yesterday it received a revamp: Today we’ve put online a new version of the maps, using a radically different methodology for showing the data. Instead…
- Driftwood Map
- From the fascinating blog Modern Mechanix, which reprints items from old popular science magazines, this item on Inuit mapping from the September 1933 issue of Popular Science: The text: “An Eskimo, who had never before seen a map, has just…
- Five of 2006’s Top 10 Most Expensive Books Were Atlases
- A Forbes article on the 10 most expensive books of 2006 (in the context of rare book auctions) makes this notable observation: “The top 10 list for 2006 includes a surprising number of atlases — five, including three versions…
- A Profile of a One-Man Cartography Company
- The Northwest Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, has a profile of local cartographer Tom Wilcockson, whose one-man company, Mapcraft, specializes in custom cartography work. Each project takes him between two weeks and a month to complete, so this is cartography…
- DePaul Exhibition: Imperial Cartographies
- At the art museum in DePaul University’s Richardson Library (in Chicago) until March 18, an exhibit called Imperial Cartographies: Power, Strategy, and Scientific Discovery, which, according to the DePaulia article, “will trace how the world views power and geopolitics, the…
- Africa South
- “I have produced a relief map of my part of the world using SRTM30 in Global Mapper — it is my first attempt at published cartography,” writes Chris Berens of South Africa. It’s an interesting map that eschews national…
- Question: GPS Software for India?
- Earle writes, “I live in San Francisco and am planning a trip to NW India. At home I use a Garmin GPS sensor attached to a PC laptop with Windows XP operating system. Do you know of map software for…
- Karelia
- Languagehat has stumbled across a bilingual map of the Karelian Isthmus — the parcel of land northwest of St. Petersburg between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga that was annexed by the USSR during the Winter War of 1939-1940….
- Recent Obituaries
- The deaths of the following people associated with cartography were reported recently: Tom Devine (1927-2006) spent 32 years working as a cartographer for the USGS; he was a mountain climber and stereographic photographer in his off-hours. Via Maps-L. Bradford Washburn…
- Mapping Happiness
- I don’t pretend to understand anything about psychology, but there is apparently a line of research into “subjective well-being” — which is, I guess, how people measure their own long-term happiness. And enough research has apparently been done to map…
- The State of the Map
- OpenStreetMap’s first conference — The State of the Map — will take place July 14-15, 2007 at Manchester University, according to the OpenGeoData blog. Conference organizing is taking place on a wiki page. Previously: Yahoo! Imagery on OpenStreetMap….
- 16th-20th Century Maps of Africa
- Northwestern University has scanned and uploaded a collection of 113 maps of Africa, dating from 1530 to 1915. The map collection is a part of the university’s Herskovitz Library, named after the scholar who founded the African Studies program…
- Spelling Errors Persist on Devizes Tourist Map
- The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald: “A tourist map of Devizes which is littered with spelling mistakes is still on display more than two years after they were pointed out.” Oops — they were supposed to be changed more than a…
- Two Reactivated Map Blogs
- I’m pleased to see the return of two blogs I’d given up for dead: Roger Hart’s GeoCarta and Antal Guszlev’s Térképes Egoblog (in Hungarian). Back in the directory with you both….
- Old Stockholm in Google Earth
- Maps of Stockholm from 1625 to 1922 are available as downloadable Google Earth layers; the file sizes can be quite substantial. It’s of interest to me that Google Earth is being deployed as a platform to distribute scans of…
- Microsoft Inks Deal for Improved Imagery
- And the satellite imagery arms race continues. Via James comes news of a deal between Microsoft and GlobeXplorer that will add more than a million square kilometres of high-resolution imagery to Virtual Earth….
- Hawaii Map Library Reopens
- The Honolulu Advertiser reports on the reopening of a local university’s map library after a devastating flood in 2004 destroyed most of the collection: “More than two years after flood waters damaged or destroyed more than 250,000 maps and…
- Geophoto: Mac Geotagging Software
- Also at Macworld, a new geotagging and photomapping application called Geophoto was announced: it apparently integrates with iPhoto on the one hand and Flickr and photo RSS feeds on the other, allowing you to both assign coordinates to your photos…
- iPhone Includes Google Maps
- During his Macworld keynote presentation today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone, Apple’s mobile phone that doubles as an iPod and Internet communicator. One of the features announced for this phone — which won’t be shipping until…
- Google Earth 4 Out of Beta
- Google Earth 4.0 — or, to be precise, version 4.0.2722 — is now out of beta, Frank and Stefan report. The version 4.0 beta was first released last June….
- Historic Pittsburgh Map Collection
- Historic Pittsburgh is a site featuring documents, maps and books from the University of Pittsburgh and other Pittsburgh-area collections. Their Map Collections section has four large series of map scans available: Geodetic and topographic survey maps for Pittsburgh between…
- Japan Earthquake Information
- The Japan Meteorological Agency’s Earthquake Information page maps recent seismic events, marking the epicentre and indicating regional seismic intensity by colour. There was, for example, a magnitude-4.3 earthquake on Honshu about nine hours ago. Via La Cartoteca. Previously: East African…
- Nicolay Rutter to Be Auctioned This Week
- A copy of the first accurate map of Scotland — a “rutter,” a book of sailing directions — is to be auctioned this week in Edinburgh, BBC News and The Scotsman report. The “Nicolay rutter” is a 1583 copy…
- GPS, Geotagging Automator Actions for the Mac
- For Mac users, some Automator actions to tell you about: GPS Automator Actions (which require GPSBabel) is a collection of scripts that automate downloading data from, and uploading to, a GPS unit and converting file formats; GeoTagging Automator Action…
- World Wind Update
- Like ArcGIS Explorer (previously), NASA World Wind is another application to which I’ve been giving short shrift, a consequence of my Mac-only household. And the Java version that would run on Mac OS X and Linux that was scheduled…
- The Truth About Google Earth
- A funny little video about Google Earth from Tais Toi Donc: Via Urban Cartography. Previously: Ground-level Google Maps….
- Royal Mail Delivers Letter with Only a Map for an Address
- Holy crap. A Welsh man sent a letter to a friend in Cornwall with no address or even the name of a town on the envelope — just a map with an arrow labelled “somewhere here” — and it…
- Manhattan, a Poem and Map
- “Manhattan,” by Howard Horowitz, first appeared in the New York Times on August 30, 1997: it was a poem in the shape of Manhattan Island, about Manhattan, with references to various neighbourhoods and landmarks in the appropriate locations. It’s…
- Georgia Towns Back on the Map
- Georgia’s Department of Transportation has backed off. The Associated Press: “the 488 communities wiped from this year’s version of the state highway map will be restored, the Georgia Department of Transportation said Wednesday.” Previously: CSM on Georgia Map Controversy; Georgia…
- Roadnav
- Roadnav is open-source navigation software meant to be run on an in-car computer connected to a GPS; it runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. “Roadnav can obtain a car’s present location from a GPS unit, plot street…
- ArcGIS Explorer Reviewed
- I’ve been following the news about ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI’s putative response to virtual globe software like Google Earth, since it was first announced (James Fee, for example, has blogged about it a lot), but I haven’t blogged about it…
- Garmin: Still Working on Mac Software
- Macworld: “Garmin’s recent announcement of new Mac software for runners, bikers and other outdoor sports enthusiasts has led some Mac users to wonder where the rest of their promised Mac software is. Garmin says they’re still working on it, though…
- Ask MetaFilter on U.S. Geographic Literacy
- An interesting question posted to Ask MetaFilter last night: “It’s a cliché about people from the USA that they are ignorant of geography. Not just world geography but their own as well. … So, is there some explanation in the…
- Marie Tharp and Plate Tectonics
- The New York Times Magazine’s year-end retrospective on deaths of notable people in 2006 includes a profile of Marie Tharp, the oceanographic cartographer who died earlier this year (see previous entry). David Tiley places her career struggles in context:…
- Analogue Art Map
- Analogue Art Map is a group that uses non-digital technology (e.g., pen and paper) to map inherently digital things — MUDs, social networks and so forth. “[T]he group seeks to both record and generate connections between creative individuals and the…
- Sea of Japan, East Sea, Sea of Korea
- You may be familiar with the Korean campaign to change the international name of the Sea of Japan to the “East Sea.” It’s an aggressive campaign — even I got e-mail about it (see previous entry) — but one that…
