April 2007
- The Geospatial Web
- The Geospatial Web: How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society is a collection of essays about new geospatial technology — Google Earth, georeferenced feeds, the usual stuff we’ve been talking about — and…
- Google Earth’s Source Images
- From last year, a brief article on Google’s Librarian Central on the sources of Google Earth imagery. We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth’s surface:…
- San Francisco Emotion Map
- We first heard about Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project last November, when I blogged about the Greenwich Emotion Map. Now Nold is in San Francisco for a five-week stint, measuring the emotional responses to various locations in the city, the…
- Maps of Paris, 1716-1887
- A collection of maps of Paris for an art history course, scanned from slides (so they could be a little sharper; 8-bit only). The maps date from 1716 to 1887. Via Plep….
- Virtual Earth API Version 5.0
- Version 5.0 of the Virtual Earth API went live today; features include new and/or improved shape layer classes and customizable keyboard and mouse events. Mashups will need to upgrade to the new API to use the new features….
- RenaLId
- RenaLId, which I referred to earlier today, is a French blog by Renaud Euvrard; it’s been focusing mainly on online maps, with an understandable amount of recent coverage of the French presidential elections. (I can’t explain the caps in the…
- Virtual Earth Imagery Updated Monthly
- Virtual Earth imagery updates are apparently a monthly thing now: here’s news of the latest, which includes updates for Italy, France, Mexico, Canada and the U.S., including more U.S. bird’s-eye imagery….
- French First-Round Presidential Election Results
- Results of the first round of the French presidential elections are usually presented by département. The official results, from the French Interior Ministry, are available here as well as via a Google Earth layer, about which see RenaLId. (Change Layers…
- Philip Burden and The Mapping of North America
- British map dealer Philip Burden — his company is Clive A. Burden Ltd., named for his late father — is in the U.S. on a book tour; the second volume of his massive (and expensive!) bibliographic reference, The Mapping of…
- Eddie Jabbour’s New York Subway Map
- After posting the entry about the new Madrid Metro map, it occurred to me that familiarity may be as important as good design: a new map design will almost certainly encounter resistance from users of the current design if the…
- Google Maps Updates in Asia, Eastern Europe
- Reports from Google Maps Mania and Google Karten that city and road data for several more countries have been added to, or upgraded in, Google Maps. In Europe, which first got streets a year ago, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and…
- A New and Controversial Madrid Metro Map
- Rafa Sañudo has designed a new map (3.1-MB PDF) of the rapidly expanding Madrid Metro (Wikipedia), but some residents, especially train enthusiasts, are upset with the new design, the Times reports. They much prefer the old map (123-KB PDF),…
- Yahoo India Maps
- Mapperz discovers that Yahoo India has maps (or possibly that Yahoo Maps has India). I am bemused to see that India’s borders are exactly where the Indian government says they ought to be. Street data does not extend beyond those…
- London’s Kerning
- London’s Kerning is a map of London done in type — you have to step back from the large (153 cm × 101.5 cm), limited-edition poster to recognize the city. Interesting. Via Kottke; more at Moon River….
- Real-Time Satellite Imagery: EarthNow vs. The Simpsons
- Live, accessible satellite imagery is a pipe dream, but EarthNow is probably as close as we’ll ever get: it’s not live, but (updated; see below) it is real-time — just delayed a few hours. It’s essentially a Java applet…
- U.S. Map Copyright Litigation, 1789-1998
- J. B. Post’s page on U.S. map copyright litigation covers more than two centuries of case law. The earliest is Blunt v. Patten, an 1828 case involving a nautical survey; the latest is Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Amsterdam, a 1997…
- GeoThought by Peter Batty
- Former Intergraph CTO Peter Batty now has a blog: GeoThought. Via All Points Blog and Anything Geospatial….
- A GPS News Roundup: Car Navigation Security, Robust Surface Navigation, Solar Flares
- Security experts — who, to be fair, have an interest in crying wolf — warn that hackers can use off-the-shelf equipment to send messages to car navigation systems using the FM channel for traffic and weather data. Remember: if your…
- More Firefox Mapping Extensions
- Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes another look at Firefox mapping extensions — all 16 of them, ranging from geotagged photos to online map viewing. Previously: Firefox Mapping Extensions….
- Waldseemüller Map Stamp Issued
- Deutsche Post, the German post office, has issued a stamp in honour of the 500th anniversary of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world — this is the map, you may remember, that first named the New World “America.”…
- Major Field Museum Exhibition Announced (Again)
- For a map exhibition that doesn’t even open until November, the Field Museum’s Maps: Finding Our Place in the World is sure getting a lot of advance publicity — I first reported on it last September. But organizers believe the…
- Maps Must Be Cleared by the Survey of India
- This opinion piece in The Telegraph of Calcutta discusses the increasingly irrelevant requirement that the Survey of India — that bastion of government efficiency — clear all maps of India before they’re published in that country. Because someone might see…
- National Geographic Cartography Award Winner
- The National Geographic Society sponsors several awards for cartography students through cartographic societies. 2007’s winner of the National Geographic Award in Mapping, awarded to undergraduate and Master’s-level students through the Association of American Geographers, is Cassie Hansen of the University…
- Atlantic Neptune Auctioned for C$900,000
- Canadian newspapers are reporting that the collection of Canadiana up for auction this week (see previous entry) went for the equivalent of $1.5 million (Canadian) — the Atlantic Neptune itself selling for the equivalent of around $900,000. (The article…
- The Book of Curiosities
- The Book of Curiosities, an 11th-century Egyptian manuscript now scanned and available online at the Bodleian Library’s web site, contains, among other things, the first rectangular map of the world as well as many other maps of the region….
- Wal-Mart Countries of Origin
- This is a cartogram that shows from which countries Wal-Mart gets its products. China and the U.S. predominate; Europe and Africa, not so much. Via Kottke….
- Aerial Imagery on a GPS
- Tim likes the idea of aerial photography on a GPS unit, which is now starting to become available: it adds a layer of information that you might otherwise miss with topo maps — he cites vegetation as an example….
- Army Mapmaking in the Field
- Via GeoCarta, an article about army mapmaking in Iraq, where it now takes a day for the team to create a customized, mission-specific map on a plotter; when it was done by hand, it could take as much as a…
- Virginia Tech
- For your reference, the Washington Post’s map of the shootings at Virginia Tech. Via MetaFilter. See also Virginia Tech’s campus maps. Update, 4/17 at 9:30 AM: The Baltimore Sun’s map is a Google Maps mashup. Via Very Spatial. Update #2,…
- Maps and Wikis
- A couple of extensions that allow wiki developers to add Google Maps to their wiki installations — at least, insofar as I can figure it, if they’re using MediaWiki: Extension: Google Maps and Google Maps Widget. Oddly enough, I’ve been…
- Annotated Bibliography on the History of Cartography
- I’ve been spending some time reading through Matthew Edney’s annotated bibliography of scholarly literature on the history of cartography; a new revision went online at the Coordinates web site last week. The list is bigger than some of my comprehensive…
- Another David Rumsey Collection Update
- Time again to report that another thousand or so maps have been added to the David Rumsey map collection. Highlights include 19th-century U.S. statistical atlases and a magnificent 1929 Italian world atlas. Via MapHist. The collection is usually updated like…
- Rare Book Auction Features Copy of Atlantic Neptune
- The rare book collection of the late Frank Streeter goes up for auction next Monday at Christie’s in New York; among the significant early Canadiana highlighted by this Canadian wire-service article about the auction is a copy of the…
- 3D Buildings in Google Maps
- Building outlines for some U.S. cities arrived in Google Maps a couple of months ago; now Stefan reports that the 3D buildings layer from Google Earth has been repurposed for Google Maps, as semi-transparent, oblique building shapes at the…
- The Low Profile of Microsoft’s Mapping Effort
- Why does Microsoft’s online mapping service get so little attention compared with Google’s? Peter Laudati thinks it’s because it’s gone through so many name changes, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Local to whatever they’re calling it now — he…
- Maps of Austria-Hungary and Central Europe circa 1910
- This Hungarian site has a large collection of maps from the Third Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary. The maps, which were published around 1910, are at 1:200,000 scale; they cover much of central and eastern Europe, not just the…
- Matt Fox’s Google Earth Library
- Matt Fox, whose work we’ve seen before, has started a new blog about Google Earth content — Google Earth Library — which already has a ferocious amount of material posted. Via Google Earth Blog….
- Virtual 3D Maps for the Blind
- I’ve run across several methods to provide maps for the visually impaired, and each is completely different from the other. The latest, Scientific American reports, is a virtual, three-dimensional map that is navigated using force-feedback gloves; the twist is that…
- Mapping Popular Locations in Online Maps
- In a workshop paper called How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps (PDF), Danyel Fisher of Microsoft Research describes how he generated a heat map based on the server logs for Virtual Earth’s image tiles. The brighter…
- Google’s My Maps: A Roundup
- O’Reilly Radar notes the fact that the maps are not only shareable, but searchable. Free GeoTools tests the accuracy of position markers generated in My Maps when they’re imported, as KML, into Google Earth: the test location was off by…
- Google’s My Maps: KML Can Be Used in Mashups
- Something about Google’s My Maps thing that they don’t mention in the user guide: the fact that these maps are available in KML means not only that they can be viewed in Google Earth, but also that they can also…
- Mapping African Exploration
- At Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections from April 15 to October 21, an exhibition of African maps called To the Mountains of the Moon: Mapping African Exploration, 1541-1880: The library exhibition will feature some…
- Google Maps Adds My Maps Feature
- Clearly I go to bed too early. Late last night, Google Maps added a new feature called “My Maps,” which seems to be Google’s response to the collections feature in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth/Windows Live Local/Live Maps. In a nutshell, it’s…
- GeoGratis: Free Canadian Topo Data
- Further to the previous report that the government of Canada would make digital topographic data available for free: here is the official announcement and here is the site where you can download that data. It’s called GeoGratis — cute. Via…
- New Version of Live Maps
- A new iteration of Live Maps — which appears to be the latest name of Virtual Earth or Windows Live Local or whatever Microsoft comes up with next; this’ll be the third name in as many years — was announced…
- April Fool: Revelations Stun Map Historians (Again)
- This didn’t turn up on MapHist until April 2, but I think there’s an even chance that you’ll enjoy it all the same. It’s a riff on Peter Trickett’s claim that the Portuguese discovered Australia, and it apparently comes to…
- London Pedestrian Map
- The London Pedestrian Routemap is a work in progress the aim of which “is to encourage walking in London. It does this by providing a simple, memorable picture of key walking routes in the Capital. At present there is…
- Google Updates New Orleans Imagery
- Google has updated its New Orleans imagery in response to the outcry over its decision — made last September — to update that imagery with higher-quality images that were unfortunately, and impolitically, before Hurricane Katrina. The Official Google Blog: [I]n…
- SF Chronicle on Google Earth
- A major feature on Google Earth from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, on the front page of the opinion section. Quotes Frank from Google Earth Blog and everything. Covers all the usual bases, from privacy implications to the way it empowers…
