August 2007
- A View of Prague for the Blind
- I’ve been encountering items on maps for the blind for some time now, and I’m fascinated by the fact that each map I encounter is done differently — there are quite a few approaches to the problem of providing visual,…
- NYC Subway Maps on an iPhone
- Yes, the iPhone has Google Maps on it, but Khoi Vinh feels the need to carry along a mobile version of the official New York Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on his iPhone. His solution is what he calls…
- That Miss Teen USA Map Question Meme
- Lauren Caitlin Upton’s embarrassing moment at the Miss Teen USA pageant (see previous entry) has taken on a life of its own, as her garbled response to a question about cartographic literacy has become the latest Internet meme. And, since…
- Trap Street Found
- Oh, look: Owen found a trap street — a fictitious street inserted by a mapmaker to trap plagiarists. A cul-de-sac present in the 2000 edition of an Oxford map disappears in the 2005 edition; Owen investigates on the ground and…
- Baffling Welsh No-GPS Sign
- Sky News: “New signs are warning motorists to ignore their sat-navs on narrow Welsh lanes — but drivers may have a tricky time working out the symbols on the design.” You think? Four signs have been erected in a…
- Miss Teen South Carolina on Geographic Literacy
- This is painful to watch: Via Gawker….
- Cars Crash into University of Georgia Map Library
- The University of Georgia’s Map Library seems to be a favourite target of wayward (and inebriated) drivers: it was hit last September (there are photos) and, less spectacularly, earlier this month. Via MAPS-L, where the University’s map librarian reported…
- Maps Stolen from Spain’s National Library
- A 1482 edition of the Cosmographia held by Spain’s National Library has been vandalized, El Mundo reports. Two maps were removed despite the Library’s security measures: the volumes are kept in a room accessible only by cardholders. There are…
- Sky in Google Earth
- Google Earth 4.2 was released overnight. Perhaps you’ve heard about one of its new features — and I don’t mean support for KML 2.2. Sky in Google Earth: click on the Sky button and the program transforms itself from an…
- Google Maps Now Embeddable in Web Pages
- Google Maps are now embeddable as HTML in blog posts and other web pages. (If you’re familiar with embedded YouTube videos, it works exactly the same way.) This includes map layers (such as My Maps or a KML file)….
- Chocolate Maps
- You’ll like this one. A Denver-based company, Art Coco, makes chocolate maps. They’ve been doing it since 1989, when they started out making chocolate topographic maps. Impulse buyers take note: they’re not shipping at the moment due to the…
- Waldo Tobler
- Waldo Tobler, according to his Wikipedia entry, coined the first law of geography in 1970: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” Now a retired geography professor at the University of…
- Ortelius: Forthcoming Mac Mapping Software
- Philip Riggs writes to mention a new Macintosh mapping application currently under development. It’s called Ortelius (after the sixteenth-century cartographer). From the web site: It is a dedicated map-making illustration program that knows geography. Instead of building maps from…
- Street View: City Updates and Its 1907 Equivalent
- Four more cities in Google Maps Street View: Houston, Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego. Cute: Google Maps Street View Circa 1907 — or, rather, a sample of Rand McNally’s photo auto-maps, which apparently predated road maps….
- GPS Loggers and the Mac
- “The state of the union between inexpensive GPS loggers and the Mac is not so good,” Richard writes in a post looking at the state of Macintosh compatibility and support — both current and potential — for four GPS loggers….
- Illinois Official Highway Map
- Free, official road maps seem to be an endangered species. Via MAPS-L, a press release from Illinois’s Department of Transportation announcing that, for the second year running, their Official Highway Map would be available free of charge thanks to…
- Under the Southern Cross
- Te Taki o Autahi — Under the Southern Cross is a conference taking place in Wellington, New Zealand on February 10-13, 2008. “The conference will focus on the cartography of the Southern Hemisphere, with four main streams: Polynesian navigation and…
- Another Geotagging Roundup
- Free Geography Tools had a seven-part geotagging series last month beginning with this post; it covered a number of Windows applications that I wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of. Richard Akerman has a couple of relevant posts on his Science…
- MAGERT Map Collection Security Guidelines
- Draft guidelines for map collection security (PDF) are now available from MAGERT’s Task Force on Library Security for Cartographic Resources; they’re seeking comment by September 15. See also the conference report (PDF) from the ALA meeting. Via MAPS-L….
- Two Thousand
- This is the two thousandth post I have made to The Map Room. It’s taken me a while to get here: four years, four months, and a few extra days. When I started this blog, I was interested in maps,…
- Macworld on GPS and the Mac
- An article about using GPS with a Mac from the current (September 2007) issue of Macworld. If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you will know that this is a subject dear to my heart. The article is brief…
- A Third of Britain Can’t Read a Map
- One third of British motorists cannot read a basic road map, according to a survey of 1,000 adults undertaken by an insurance company. Over a third of motorists struggled to read a four-figure grid reference and a staggering 83 per…
- Custom Globes and Contested Geographies
- You’re no doubt familiar with the controversies about what gets depicted on a map: disputed territories, disputed names (e.g. Persian Gulf vs. Arabian Gulf, Sea of Japan vs. East Sea). Here’s an interesting article from the International Herald Tribune that…
- Keeping It Safe, Keeping It Available
- In the July 2007 issue of the Library Student Journal, an article by Joel Kovarsky discusses security and theft-prevention measures in library special collections, and the challenges of keeping rare materials both safe and available. As you might expect, Joel…
- The Rebirth of the Sterling Map Collection
- When Forbes Smiley was caught red-handed three years ago, it was at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but it was the map collection at the nearby Sterling Memorial Library — and the state of disrepair of its catalogue…
- Google Maps: Ad Layer, Geocoding, Rush Hour Traffic
- A few items about Google Maps, some of which of interest to developers, others to everyone. An ad layer for Google Maps (see previous entry) is described as “ready for early testers”; at some point it will be unleashed for…
