December 2007
- A News Roundup and a Programming Note
- A few links to news stories to tide you over during the holidays: The Montreal Gazette on OpenStreetMap The Chicago Tribune on map collecting The Times rambles about the technology behind in-car navigation devices I’ll be off for about a…
- Oil Reserves Cartogram
- A cartogram showing the world’s oil reserves: the larger the country, the more oil it has. The Arabian peninsula is understandably enormous; see also Nigeria and Venezuela. Not sure how this map works, since both Canada and Russia are…
- Yahoo Adds Draggable Driving Directions
- Yahoo follows Google’s lead, adding user-adjustable driving directions with a click-and-drag interface. Now that I’ve this feature for a while, I now consider it essential, especially when you have some sense of what the best route will be for at…
- Roger Tomlinson: The Father of GIS
- Today’s Globe and Mail has a profile of Roger Tomlinson, whose work with the Canadian government in the 1960s to develop the first national computerized GIS system has apparently earned him the title of “the father of GIS.”…
- Defining a Map
- How many definitions of the word “map” have there been? According to this page, at least 321. Via a discussion on MapHist….
- CSM on the Festival of Maps, Map Art and Books
- A piece in last Friday’s Christian Science Monitor looks at the Festival of Maps through the lens of map art, referencing our friend Nikolas Schiller, the special map art issue of Cartographic Perspectives, the book accompanying the Field Museum exhibition,…
- New Paula Scher Exhibition
- Paula Scher (see previous entry) returns to the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York with an exhibition of new works. According to the gallery, “Scher expands on her highly acclaimed Maps series to create her most engaging work yet,…
- Waldseemüller Map Exhibit Opens Thursday
- The long-anticipated exhibit of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map — you know, the first one to name the New World “America” — opens this Thursday at the Library of Congress. The sole surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map, which has…
- New York Times on GPS Navigation Accidents
- Sure, stories about drivers getting into trouble because they blindly obey their GPS navigation stories are fun, but, as I mentioned in a previous entry, you can’t help but wonder about the bigger picture — i.e., why is this happening?…
- Festival of Maps Reviews
- Brendan Crain writes, “I have seen a few posts on The Map Room about the Festival of Maps here in Chicago. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been attending and reviewing the shows around town. Here’s a…
- Tabula Peutingeriana: One Day Only
- Nearly seven metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, the Tabula Peutingeriana is a 13th-century monk’s copy of a much older map of the Roman road network. This fascinating map stretches from Portugal to India — and stretch is…
- Festival of Maps: Field Museum Roundup
- More about the Field Museum’s exhibit, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World: Antiques and the Arts Online has a rundown (via Map the Universe); Chicago Public Radio has audio from the first of a series of lectures taking place…
- TOPO! Hacker
- TOPO! Hacker is a relatively new, unofficial blog about messing around with National Geographic’s TOPO! software. Via GPS Tracklog….
- EU Investigates TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal
- With Garmin out of the picture, you’d think that TomTom’s proposed takeover of Tele Atlas would be free of further complications, but no: European Union regulators are investigating the deal over competitive concerns; they’re expected to rule by next April….
- War Museum Refuses to Fix Mapping Error
- Two and a half years ago, Bill Schroeder found a mapping error on a globe at the new Canadian War Museum. The globe depicted the Boer War, and labelled Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) as Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia). He’s been…
