January 2008
- Google Maps Street View Is Right Behind You
- The Vacationeers take Google Maps Street View a little too far: Via Valleywag. Previously: Real-Time Satellite Imagery: EarthNow vs. The Simpsons; The Truth About Google Earth….
- Cartographic Fakes and Forgeries
- On MapHist, Tony Campbell has announced a major new section of his Map History/History of Cartography site: Cartographic Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles Likely to Deceive. It includes a list of known fakes (unfortunately in Word format), a guide to how…
- Redesign in Progress
- Visitors to The Map Room may have noticed some screwy things going on today. I got it into my head to redesign this site, live. (No safe, out-of-the-way test sites for me, no sir.) The bulk of the work is…
- Schwartz Collection Exhibition Opens Monday
- Seymour I. Schwartz, author of five books on the history of cartography,* is pledging his collection to the University of Virginia, which, in turn, is naming its map room in his honour today. About 50 of those 225 maps…
- Boston-Area Map Exhibitions
- At the Boston Public Library’s Copley Square through June, Boston and Beyond, a collection of bird’s-eye-view maps of Boston and New England from the second half of the 19th century. At Harvard University’s Pusey Library until April 1, Henry F….
- John Bartholomew
- John Bartholomew — who, along with his two brothers, was “the last generation of the Edinburgh cartographic family to run the business of John Bartholomew & Son Ltd.” — has died aged 85, the Edinburgh Evening News reports. The Edinburgh-based…
- Jeff Schmuki
- Pattern Recognition is an exhibition of the work of Jeff Schmuki — “featuring sculptural ceramic works and installations that explore the relationship between cartography, documentary, memory and the natural/manmade landscape” — at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at…
- Navigation and Liability
- Via Spatial Law, an interesting question about GPS navigation and legal liability: if somebody who follows faulty directions from a GPS navigation system gets into an accident, and is held liable for that accident (as has in fact occurred), can…
- WSJ on Navteq and Tele Atlas
- Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on the digital map “duopoly,” Navteq and Tele Atlas — it starts and finishes like so many local profiles of digital map surveying, but the meat of the article is a…
- A Geologic Map in Every School
- The West Texas Geological Society is running a project to put a large geologic map of the United States into every elementary school in Midland and Odessa, Texas — a project apparently based on another in Corpus Christi. Via All…
- Riding While White on the NYC Subway
- Ouch: Riding While White on the NYC Subway, an MTA subway map with minority-neighbourhood stops removed. “This map, though intended for white folks, can be used by people of color who live in the unmarked areas because the last stops…
- Review: Longitude
- Longitude by Dava Sobel Walker and Company, 1995, 2007. Paperback, xiv + 184 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-8027-1529-6 Latitude and longitude are basics of accurate map-making and navigation. In an age of pervasive GPS signals, it’s easy to forget that determining your…
- The Sheldon Tapestry
- The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Gloucestershire is on display at Oxford’s Bodleian Library until February 23; the Library acquired the 16th-century tapestry at auction last year for more than £100,000. “The wool and silk tapestry … is part of a…
- Google Sky Updated, API Supports Astronomy Layers
- I still find the Google Sky interface less appealing than some dedicated planetarium software I’ve tried, but I’m still interested in the most recent updates, including, among other things, imagery from space-based telescopes and imagery layers from 17th-century celestial…
- Our Dumb World Online
- Catholicgauze points out that some content from The Onion’s Our Dumb World (reviewed here) is being put online, a bit more each week, both as a Google Maps mashup and a Google Earth layer; brief bullet-point-sized excerpts in each case….
- Manhattan’s Map Room
- The New York Post has an item on the Map Room (no relation) of the Borough of Manhattan’s Topographic Bureau, which is responsible for the official maps of New York County (largely defunct and contiguous with Manhattan) since 1748; last…
- Festival of Maps: WSJ Review, Newberry Exhibits
- The Wall Street Journal reviews two exhibits from Chicago’s Festival of Maps: the flagship Field Museum exhibit (of course), along with one of two exhibits at the Newberry Library, Ptolemy’s Geography and Renaissance Mapmakers. (Actually, the Newberry claims three exhibits,…
- Which Waldseemüller?
- Which Waldseemüller map is “America’s birth certificate” (i.e., the first map to label the New World as “America”)? Is it the one the last copy of which is now on display at the Library of Congress? Or, as the…
- Review: Our Dumb World
- Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth by The Onion Little, Brown, 2007. Hardcover, 245 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-316-08142-5 As I mentioned before, Our Dumb World is The Onion’s take on the sort of atlas exemplified by the old National…
- An Atlas of Radical Cartography
- The editors of An Atlas of Radical Cartography wrote in to promote their book. “An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition;…
- William Kentridge’s Tapestries
- At the Philadelphia Museum of Art until April 6, an exhibition of tapestries by the major South African artist, William Kentridge. The Porter tapestries “stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction…
- Garmin’s ‘Bobcat’ and a Mac Software Update
- On the Garmin blog, Chet tantalizes us with coy references to Mac-compatible hardware and software, especially a software product code-named “Bobcat,” to be announced this week at Macworld (Gizmodo). Garmin’s been behind on its now two-year-old promise to provide Mac…
- Mapping the Solar System: Mercury and Titan
- It wasn’t so long ago that our world maps had parts that were either left empty or left to conjecture. “Here be dragons.” We haven’t had to worry about unmapped, unknown parts of the Earth — terra incognita — for…
- Turners Falls High School and the U.S. Community Atlas
- The Springfield Republican reports on a GIS project conducted by students of Turners Falls High School, which is part of ESRI’s U.S. Community Atlas program. The students produced a number of maps of the towns of Gill, Montague and…
- Maps of Vienna
- Maps of Vienna from the city’s government. The city’s architectural, archeological, artistic and cultural history is presented through a map-based interface (which unfortunately does not work in Safari). Clicking on points of interest brings up incredibly detailed information: the…
- A Book Roundup
- An unusual book forthcoming from Hes & de Graaf: Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons: The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Title-Page. “Over the time period covered by the present publication — roughly from the 1470s to the 1870s…
- V&A: Mapping the Imagination
- At the Victoria and Albert Museum until April 27, Mapping the Imagination “includes maps made to inform or to entertain, maps enhanced by imaginative embellishments, maps that show imaginary places, and works in which artists have adapted map iconography to…
- You Are Here, Hon
- You Are Here, Hon is a new map blog by someone going by the name of Her Majesty of Maps. With names like that, this could turn out to be interesting….
- Blank Maps Collection
- This collection of blank and outline maps looks useful: the maps are available in GIF, EPS and PDF format, and they’re freely available under a Creative Commons licence. And there seem to be an awful lot of them. Via…
- Mark Webber
- Mark Webber’s art includes city maps built from tyographical fragments, arranged in ways that both shape and label the map. At right, Amsterdam; he’s also done New York and London. Thanks to John Deen for the link….
- Nancy Goodman Lawrence
- The art of Nancy Goodman Lawrence uses the stuff of maps in collages: “Maps are a huge resource for my work, less for their literal representations than the endless possibilities they offer in rendering the geography of the human…
- Washington Post on the Festival of Maps
- Today’s edition of the Washington Post reviews the Festival of Maps in Chicago, and in the process mentions that the vaunted Field Museum exhibit will be on display in a Baltimore museum come March. Hold the phone: this sucker’s going…
- Landon Mackenzie
- Houbart’s Hope, an exhibition by the Vancouver-based Landon Mackenzie, opens this Thursday at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery in Montreal. “In Houbart’s Hope Mackenzie combines her interests in landscape, cartography and neuroscience. Although abstract in appearance, vestiges…
- Berrini Exhibition in San Francisco
- New work by Francesca Berrini (see previous entry) is on display at the Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, SF Station reports: “Part designer, part surrealist cartographer, Portland-based Francesca Berrini creates fantastical geographies from maps that have…
- Toronto’s Language Quilt
- The greater Toronto area’s multicultural nature is vividly brought out by the Toronto Star’s extraordinary “language quilt” map (19.5 MB PDF), which shows the most dominant second language in a given census tract. (In 95 percent of the cases,…
- Mapping the Iowa Caucus Results
- There are many ways to map the results of the 2008 Democratic and Republican Iowa caucuses. Google’s map shows county outlines colour-coded to indicate the winning candidate, but does not show detailed results. Politico’s interactive map gives you county-by-county results…
- Why Paper Maps Are Still Produced
- Vector One asks why so many paper map products are still produced: Paper maps are still produced for a number of reasons. The primary reason that this is the case is due to the fact that paper maps are associated…
- The Discovery of France
- Last week, the National Post website ran a three-part excerpt of Graham Robb’s new book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. Of interest to us is the second part, an amusing…
- Challenger Map Update
- Melissa writes, “Since you bring it up, here’s an update on the Challenger Map” — which, you will recall, has been in storage since 1997. From yesterday’s Vancouver Sun: Now efforts are about to begin to restore the 196-piece…
- B.C. Living Map Moves
- The large, 12×22-metre Living Map, a showpiece of the apparently defunct “B.C. Experience” exhibition in Victoria, British Columbia, is being moved to an agriculturally themed tourist attraction in nearby Saanich. (This map should not be confused with the older…
- More on ‘Exploring the Early Americas’
- The Library of Congress exhibit, Exploring the Early Americas, featuring the last surviving copy of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, was reviewed by the Washington Post last week. Previously: Waldseemüller Map Exhibit Opens Thursday….
- Boston Public Library’s Stolen Maps Returned
- The denouement of the Forbes Smiley affair, at least as far as the Boston Public Library is concerned, is covered in today’s Boston Globe: “More than 30 rare, antique maps stolen from the Boston Public Library by a Martha’s Vineyard…
