February 2007
- More Memory Maps
- Jason Kottke is fascinated by memory maps — that is to say, maps drawn entirely from memory. In addition to some sites we’ve seen here before (previous entries below), he presents a couple more for our enjoyment. First, the…
- Google Maps Adds Traffic Conditions
- Google Maps adds traffic conditions for 30 U.S. cities, appearing as another mode beside Map, Satellite and Hybrid: “If your route shows red, you’re looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you’ve…
- Scot J. Wittman
- Still another artist who uses maps as raw materials: Scot J. Wittman. He explains how: I made large facial portraits of these explorers by collaging together tonal variations of the maps of the areas they explored. I then constructed…
- International Polar Year Maps
- The Canadian International Polar Year Internet Map Server maps the research stations, projects and other information associated with the the International Polar Year. The map interface takes a bit of time to load; the data are available as separate…
- Rare 16th-Century Atlas Up for Auction
- Speaking of 16th-century atlases, Sotheby’s is auctioning one off next month as part of the sale of an aristocrat’s library: The work of Yorkshire surveyor Christopher Saxton, printed between 1579 and 1590, is bound in one volume with a rare…
- 1563 Nautical Atlas Discovered in Czech Library
- Czech historians working in the research library in the city of Olomouc stumbled across a copy of a 1563 nautical atlas — only the sixth known to exist — by the Catalan cartographer Jaume Olives, Radio Praha reports. The…
- Ancient Map, Modern Mine
- This pregnant news item just begs for more detail: an Australian gold exploration company is embarking on a $216-million mining project in Egypt that was explored based on a 3,000-year-old pharaonic map that indicated locations of gold sites. Via Map…
- Canadian Campaign for Up-to-Date Topo Maps
- So what is Maps for Canadians doing now that the federal government changed its mind and decided not to stop producing paper topo maps? They’re campaigning to bring our topo maps up to date — and they want people to…
- Standalone GPS Units Are Doomed, Apparently
- The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Benderoff argues that GPS-enabled cellphones will doom standalone GPS units (and the companies that make them). Not that music-enabled phones have doomed iPods or cameraphones have doomed digital cameras — the apostles of convergence devices have…
- NAVTEQ vs. Tele Atlas
- If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll recall that the mapping data for most of the online mapping services, and for the driving directions on GPS navigation systems, invariably comes from one of two map database suppliers:…
- Massive Gallery of Subway Maps
- A large gallery of subway maps that includes cities that you might not know have a subway system. The maps aren’t much to write home about, graphically speaking, and they don’t include light rail systems even when they’re a…
- RAC Canadian Railway Atlas
- The Railway Association of Canada produces maps and atlases of Canadian (and North American) rail lines; I’ve got a 1999 edition of a single-sheet map that covers all Canadian and major U.S. tracks. Some of their maps are available…
- Detroit Through the Years
- I can’t see it because I’m on a Mac and this is a Virtual Earth mashup, but Detroit Through the Years, which displays aerial views of Detroit from 1949 to the present, sounds like a fascinating project. Let me know…
- Scheduled Downtime
- The Map Room and my other sites will be offline for several hours while my hosting provider’s building management performs emergency maintenance; details here and here. The outage is expected to take place Sunday morning between 2:15 EST/7:15 UTC and…
- Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic
- Next Thursday evening at the Scandinavia House in New York City, a talk by map collector William B. Ginsberg about his new book on the area of his expertise, a cartobibliography titled Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic,…
- Soviet Spy Maps For Sale
- Remember those Soviet maps of the UK that Russian spies compiled during the Cold War? Now reprints are being offered for sale, El Reg reports. (This reminds me that my Soviet map of the world is badly torn and needs…
- Generating Flow Maps
- Flow maps show movement from one location to another; migration maps are probably the most commonly encountered example. Researchers at Stanford University have developed a method to generate flow maps by computer; prior to this, they say, most flow…
- Ascent
- Rob Boyer writes to tout his new software application, Ascent: “Ascent is a new application written for the Macintosh that is designed to help cyclists, runners, and hikers train better by displaying, in various ways, their activities uploaded from…
- ‘Do Not Follow Sat Nav’
- Fed up with large trucks getting stuck along a narrow laneway that their navigation systems sent them down, residents of the Hampshire village of Exton asked for, and received, signs warning drivers to disregard their GPS receivers, The Mail…
- Yahoo! Maps Mashups
- Webmapper notes the availability of the first book about the Yahoo mapping APIs, Yahoo! Maps Mashups. “It was about time, especially as the Google Maps API is covered in quite a few books already,” writes Edward. The book’s author,…
- Where 2.0 Registration Now Open
- Registration is now open for the 2007 Where 2.0 conference, which takes place May 29-30 in San Jose, California; this will be the conference’s third year (Ed Parsons, Very Spatial). Entries on last year’s conference: Where 2.0 Begins Today; Where…
- GPS Everywhere: A Solution in Search of a Problem?
- They’re putting GPS in everything nowadays, the Boston Globe reports, and it’s not necessarily out of a pressing need to do so — it’s getting cheap enough to include that gadget makers simply include it and (presumably) figure out what…
- Local Logging Maps
- Though only in fits and starts so far, I’ve been slowly working my way through the maps in my local archives’ collection. We have what you might expect: a mixed bag of local topo and cadastral maps, both current and…
- Portland LIDAR Survey
- A $1-million project to map the terrain of Portland, Oregon will take place over the next few weeks, the Oregonian reports. The aerial LIDAR survey is intended to create a hyper-accurate terrain map that will be particularly useful in…
- Municipal Data in a Text File
- Not a map per se, but interesting and possibly useful: a 3-megabyte text file that contains ” a list of all towns, administrative divisions and agglomerations with their current population, their English name (if not equal to the international name)…
- MapHead
- Nat Case writes, “I’ve recently started a blog on the ontology of maps (and other stuff that comes to mind). I’m a cartographer, head of production for Hedberg Maps and this blog is an outgrowth of 15+ years of talking…
- Topo Maps of Mars
- It’s a bit presumptuous to call them “hiker’s maps,” as the European Space Agency does in its announcement, but the Mars Express scientists have generated several sample topographic maps of the Iani Chaos region of Mars, in an exercise…
- Garmin and Vista
- Garmin has released a list of issues with its software running on Windows Vista: Garmin Blog, GPS Review….
- World Wind 1.4
- World Wind 1.4 is now out: it’s Windows-only and requires .Net 2.0; Chad says the cross-platform Java version is expected around May. Previously: World Wind Update….
- A Google Maps Roundup
- Last week, Google launched Google Maps Australia, adding driving directions, business listings and mobile devices support to preexisting maps. (Previously: Australia, New Zealand Geocoding in Google Maps; Google Maps Adds Streets for Australia and New Zealand.) Last month, Google added…
- Turn the Map Over
- My friend Robert, who’s the president of the local historical society, stopped by this afternoon with an interesting find — something he salvaged from a pile of junk that the town hall was about to throw out. It was…
- Modern Cartographer, Hand-Drawn Maps
- KVOA, a Tucson, Arizona television station, has the story of a Flagstaff cartographer, Alex DiNatale, who has reverted to drawing maps by hand, in the style of late 19th-century surveyors’ maps: “This is like a lost art,” DiNatale said. “It’s…
- Rucker Agee Map Collection
- The Birmingham Public Library’s Rucker Agee Map Collection contains, as you would expect, a number of old maps of Alabama, surrounding states like Mississsippi, Georgia and Florida, the U.S., and North America, but there are also world maps and…
- Il regno tutto di Candia
- Peacay stumbled across a relatively new addition to Princeton’s digital collections, Il regno tutto di Candia. Abstract: “This work was published in Venice in 1651, three years after the Ottomans first tried to occupy the island of Crete, Venice’s…
- Nina Katchadourian
- Nina Katchadourian is another artist who uses the physical material of maps in her work, whether rearranged, dissected or put onto slides. She’s also labelled clumps of moss that look like maps. Via Platial News and Neogeography….
- Toyota’s Customized Map Updates
- Just how hard is it to update the maps on in-dash GPS navigation systems? The fact that Toyota’s announcement — that it has developed a way to simplify and speed up the process by only updating the maps relevant to…
- James’s Adventures in Online Mapping and Real Estate
- It’s one thing to talk about online mapping tools in the abstract, or to play around with them a little bit, but quite another to use them to achieve a specific goal. James Fee’s recent experience using a few different…
- Cartogram of England’s Population
- Olly Benson wrote in to mention that he’d done a cartogram showing the population of England by county. “Each block on the map represents 10,000 people living in that county — so London, with a population of just over…
- Interstate Highway Diagram
- Chris Yates has created a Beck-style diagram of the Interstate highway network — simplified, of course, so not every highway is listed. Interesting to see how the grid works: this is something my younger self, armed with an out-of-date…
- Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage
- The second Joint International Workshop on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage will take place on May 18 and 19 in Athens; hosted by the ICA’s Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage working group, the conference is about all matters digital, from…
- Jughandles and Other Unconventional Intersections
- I’m sure you’ll forgive me a brief digression into road geekery. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article about how MapQuest et al. fail to display regionally unique intersection geometries, such as frontage roads, jughandles (at right),…
- Evil Maposaurus!
- For the last couple of weeks, Garmin’s blog has been hyping the company’s forthcoming Super Bowl ad, with an extended music video and behind the scenes clips. With the Super Bowl now over, the ad itself is now finally available:…
- Collecting Road Maps: Richard Horwitz
- Though I don’t collect them per se, I’ve always been a big fan of old road maps, so I enjoyed reading Ephemera’s interview with Richard Horwitz — he’s a past president of the Road Map Collectors Association, he owns…
- Allen Carroll Profiled
- The Washington Post had a brief profile of the National Geographic Society’s chief cartographer, Allen Carroll, earlier this week; if you think it reads a little funny, note that this was published in the paper’s children’s section. Via GeoCarta and…
- More Mac Geotagging Utilities
- An awful lot of geotagging utilities for the Mac (adding metadata to a file is probably not a difficult programming task). Here are two more, from the same company: PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor; they’re practically identical except that the latter adds…
- The Piri Reis Map of 1513
- The story of the Piri Reis map is the story of how a perfectly innocent 16th-century navigational chart can end up, through no fault of its own, at the centre of a crackpot theory about our planet’s ancient history. Our…
- Renewable Energy Atlas of Alaska
- Three-quarters of Alaska’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels, mostly natural gas; the Renewable Energy Atlas of Alaska (26 MB, PDF) identifies potential sources of energy from renewable sources in the state, such as wind, hydro and tidal power…
- Interesting Fishery Maps, Awful Interface
- It’s a pity that the Atlas of Tuna and Billfish Catches, from the UN’s Fish and Agriculture Organization, has such a terrible user interface — it’s a textbook case of mystery meat navigation — but, if you can stomach navigating…
