March 2008
- Chicago and Latin America
- More maps from the University of Chicago Map Collection have been posted to the Web: Before and After the Fire: Chicago in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Latin American Cities Via MAPS-L. Previously: Chicago…
- Garmin and MapQuest: Send to GPS
- Garmin and MapQuest are up to something. The MapQuest blog says that, “coming in April, we’ll be adding a simple drop-down link to our search results pages that allow you to download destinations or itineraries to your Garmin GPS device,…
- World’s Largest World Atlas
- The ginormous Earth atlas is: 61×46.9 cm (24×18½ inches) 576 pages limited to a print run of 2,000 sold with its own metal stand $4,000 (And hopefully not a premature April Fool’s joke.) Via MAPS-L….
- Five
- Five years ago today, I wrote the first entry on this blog. I started The Map Room because I was unemployed and needed something to focus my interest and attention while I went about the dreary job of job hunting….
- European Commission Probes Nokia-Navteq Merger
- The Nokia-Navteq merger is also the subject of a European Commission probe; the Commission announced Friday that it had “serious doubts” about how the merger would affect competition: Chicago Tribune (via Slashgeo), Reuters (via Engadget). You will recall that the…
- Elisabeth Lecourt
- The art of Elisabeth Lecourt includes clothing made from maps. Bloesem writes, “These clothes are made out of maps from Paris, New York, London and other places, of course you can’t wear them, but hanging them as art on…
- Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square
- Maps: Finding Our Place in the World isn’t the only map exhibition the Walters Art Museum is involved with; Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square is an art exhibition in Mount Vernon Place that “features contemporary art by 10 emerging…
- Chinese Government Goes After Mapping Sites
- Xinhua: “The Chinese government is to crack down on illegal online map and geographical information websites, claiming they threaten state security, said an official of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) on Tuesday.” Crimes perpetrated by evildoers range…
- New York City Public Toilet Map
- The New York City Public Toilet Map lists 250 public restrooms in Manhattan; the wallet-sized map costs $2. As I noted before when discussing Australia’s National Public Toilet Map, this is exactly the sort of thing us weak-bladdered travellers need…
- Blaeu Notes
- A digitized version of Willem and Joan Blaeu’s six-volume Toonneel des Aerdrycks, ofte Nieuwe Atlas (1659), produced for the city of Leiden, is available online from the Leiden Regional Archives; click here for the map viewer. Christie’s is auctioning two…
- Geotagging Your Photos
- A three-part, step-by-step guide to geotagging from Uncornered Market, starting with a Sony GPS-CS1 (see previous entry) and going through a number of software packages to arrive at uploaded photos that have already been geotagged: Concepts and Basics Importing and…
- Solmeta DP-GPS N1
- Over at the Geotagging Flickr group, Michael Kirk has posted a review of still another geotagging accessory for a digital SLR camera, Solmeta’s DP-GPS N1, which works with high-end Nikon and compatible digital SLRs (i.e., D200 and up, Fuji…
- Two More Blogs and a Directory Update
- Two new mapping-related blogs, both kind of technical: Spatial Ed by Ed Katibah, the spatial project manager for Microsoft’s SQL Server (via James). The Thematic Mapping Blog, the stated purpose of which is “to elaborate ideas of how geobrowsers and…
- Mac Software Updates: Geophoto 2, MacGPS Pro 7.6
- Geophoto has reached version 2: MacNN reports that it now features simpler tagging, “now sports closer integration with iLife ‘08 and .Mac Web Galleries, and can import photos from Aperture and Lightroom”; at $25, it’s also half its previous price….
- Look Now Look All Around
- Dawn Gavin writes in to tell us about an exhibition she’s curating at the Maryland State Art Council’s James Backas Gallery, in conjunction with the Baltimore Festival of Maps: Look Now Look All Around. Inherent within the construction of…
- Her Majesty of Maps Meets the Festival of Maps
- Her Majesty of Maps reacts to Maps: Finding Our Place in the World: After all the anticipation and waiting, I was afraid the exhibit wouldn’t live up to my expectations. But it did. The exhibit totally blew my mind. Looking…
- ‘Flying Cameras Map America for War’: Aerial Photography in 1939
- “Flying Cameras Map America for War”, an article from the May 1939 issue of Popular Science, has been reprinted on the always-fascinating Modern Mechanix blog. The article looks at the state of the art with respect to aerial photography just…
- MapQuest Traffic
- MapQuest has added current traffic conditions for more than 100 metropolitan areas; more details and a list of the cities covered are available here. Digital Earth Blog has an early review: “A quick glance seems to show that they…
- A Map of Dione and a Planetary Gazetteer
- The Planetary Society’s blog reports that the International Astronomical Union has approved new names for features on Saturn’s moon Dione, and provides an equatorial map with the new names added to spaceprobe imagery. But what also caught my attention…
- Google Maps Street View and Privacy, Redux
- An article in the San Antonio Express-News about the privacy implications of Google Maps Street View — there was a flurry of media coverage about this last year, so they’re definitely playing catchup — and the means available to get…
- Site Notes: Facebook and Feedburner
- As an experiment, I’ve set up a Facebook page for this site. On a similarly crass and commercial note, I’ve set up a network on Feedburner for map blogs. Map bloggers who use Feedburner to produce their RSS feeds who…
- Shaded Relief World Map and Flex Projector
- Tom Patterson of Shaded Relief wrote in to announce his new project, a physical map of the world. As was the case with his relief map of the United States, it’s free and freely available in several formats, including…
- Baltimore’s Festival of Maps Now Open
- More from the Baltimore Sun on the Baltimore Festival of Maps, which opened today. If you couldn’t make it to the Chicago Festival, this is your last chance to see Maps: Finding Our Place in the World; according to the…
- Map Art Exhibitions: The Map Show, Elise Wagner
- At the Rockland Center for the Arts in West Nyack, New York, until April 8, The Map Show, an exhibition featuring several contemporary artists. The New York Times has a review: The show presents the work of eight artists…
- Market Share
- In January, Hitwise reported on the relative market shares of the online map sites. MapQuest continued to lead with more than 50 percent of the market, with Google Maps second at 22 percent, and Yahoo and Microsoft trailing. But,…
- ‘A New Golden Age of Cartography’
- “A new golden age of cartography has suddenly dawned, everywhere. We can all be map-makers now, navigating across a landscape of ideas that the cartographers of the past could never have imagined,” writes Ben Macintyre in his Times column. “Where…
- Rural Complaints About Redrawn Electoral Maps
- When electoral boundaries are redrawn in Canada, two things are certain: one, rural areas will lose seats as a result of their declining population and urban areas will concomitantly gain seats; and two, rural representatives will complain mightily about it,…
- Google Sky on the Web
- I suppose a web-based standalone version of Google Sky was inevitable, once the Google Maps API supported it, and now it’s here. Highlights include infrared, microwave and historical-map layers with opacity controls and a series of image collections from…
- Baltimore’s Festival of Maps
- Baltimore’s Festival of Maps opens Sunday and runs through June 8. One epicentre will be the Walters Art Museum, which will host Maps: Finding Our Place in the World and three other exhibitions, including one on Hubble telescope imagery that…
- Bizarre Sights in Google Street View
- The Times has the 10 most bizarre sights in Google Street View; Valleywag has the pictures….
- Another Challenger Map Update
- Don Young writes to tell us about the Challenger Map’s new website, which means that my old links are now broken. “This is a renewed site from the Challenger Map Foundation updating the status of the map and the…
- Google Maps Astronomy Mashups?
- Mike Pegg notes that despite the fact that it’s been a few months since the Google Maps API supported Moon, Mars and Sky, “we have not been inundated with Google Maps mash-ups that have taken advantage of these new astronomical…
- MapQuest Platform: Free Edition
- MapQuest has relaunched its mapping APIs, calling them the MapQuest Platform: Free Edition. I’m not exactly sure how this works: MapQuest has had a free API along with commercial partnerships; I don’t know if this is meant to replace both,…
- The Atlas of Early Printing
- The Atlas of Early Printing “depicts the spread of printing through Europe in the fifty years following the European refinement of the tools and process to make impressions from movable type cast in metal” (i.e., 1450-1500). Via Very Spatial….
- Google Street View Images of Military Bases Removed
- Reuters (via the Washington Post): “Google Inc. has complied with a request by the Pentagon to remove some online images from its street-level map service because they pose a security threat to U.S. military bases, military and company officials said…
- FireEagle
- FireEagle is a new Yahoo service. (In beta, of course.) It’s a user-geolocation service with privacy controls that can tie into other applications; think of it as a Twitter for geographic coordinates. It’s one of those things, like RSS, whose…
- Geotagging Photos on the Mac
- If, like me, you’re a Mac user with an interest in geotagging, you must drop everything right now and read Bruce McKenzie’s guide to geotagging photos on the Mac; a more comprehensive guide to the subject I can’t imagine. Via…
- Yahoo Maps Updated
- New updates and upgrades to Yahoo Maps include neighbourhood data, improved international coverage, and optimized map tiles (smaller files, less time to load). Update, March 17: Richard discovers that, at least in Ottawa, “the neighbourhoods are, as far as I…
- Inset Maps
- The ESRI Mapping Center has some guidelines for the design of inset maps….
- Topographic Map Symbols
- Topographic map symbols for historic topographic maps: “Presented here is a collection of symbols used on USGS Topographic Maps printed from the late 1890s. The styles of the symbols have changed dramatically since this time, and the beginning of their…
- Australia in Maps
- We’ve seen books come out that were based on the map holdings of the Library of Congress, Library and Archives Canada, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; now it’s the turn of the National Library of Australia. The…
- Review: Transit Maps of the World
- Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden Penguin, 2007. Paperback, 144 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-14-311265-5 Billed on its cover as “the world’s first collection of every urban train map on Earth,” this is, in fact, the second revised edition of…
- Reactions to WorldWide Telescope
- To begin with, here is the video of the TED talk introducing WorldWide Telescope: Reactions, many of which make explicit comparisons to Google Sky: Bad Astronomy: “This does look very cool. It’s much like Google Sky, but from Microsoft’s direction….
- Meander Redux
- MacNN reviews Meander, a Mac software application that, since we last saw it, has reached version 2.1.2 and has moved to another Web site and publisher. From the review: “In essence, Meander is a basic photo-editing program with a section…
- A Facebook Mapping Application that Doesn’t Suck
- The mapping applications for Facebook that appeared after the social-networking site opened up its API to developers generally sucked, in my opinion: they were rather lame user-plotted maps that didn’t do anything with data from your social network, which…
- An Apple/Mac Roundup
- I’ve had a few items cluttering up my to-do list that relate to Apple, the Mac and Mac software, and the iPhone/iPod since Macworld; time to stop procrastinating. iPhones and iPods. The iPhone’s mapping application got a major upgrade at…
- ‘The New Cartographers’
- In These Times has a wide-ranging article on “the new cartographers” — i.e., the popular use of new mapping technologies. For some, mapping has become a vibrant new language—a way to interpret the world, find like-minded folks and make fresh,…
- A Revised Wainwright Update
- When last we heard about Chris Jesty’s revision of Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, nearly three years ago, volume one (of seven) was just about to be published. Now five volumes have been published, the Cumberland News…
- India Stamps Publications’ ‘Incorrect’ Maps at the Border
- The Sunday Express on how the delivery of foreign publications in India is delayed if they have the temerity to publish a map of India that does not conform to the officially recognized boundaries: Every edition which carries a map…
- Google Static Maps API
- Google has released a “static maps” API: using an image URL, you can generate a map image without using JavaScript, which can be useful in certain circumstances where slow page loads, or JavaScript compatibility, are an issue. Documentation here. Note…
- U.S. Atlas of Renewable Resources
- Very Spatial points to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s U.S. Atlas of Renewable Resources. Sue writes: “The atlas (which is still under development) includes a web mapping interface that show the geographic distribution of wind, biomass, geothermal and solar…
- Geotagging Icon Update
- An update on this entry: the proposed geotagging icon now has a new design (it’s red) and a new home page. Via La Cartoteca….
- Monmonier on Mapmaking Mistakes
- On today’s edition of Weekend America, professor and writer Mark Monmonier is interviewed about mapping errors, beginning with GPS navigation errors — blame the maps, not the GPS signals — and moving on to what, the interviewer asks, the three…
- EU Formally Objects to TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal
- Reuters reports that the European Commission has sent a statement of objections to TomTom over its proposed takeover of Tele Atlas. This is not an outright rejection; TomTom now has until May 5 to offer additional remedies to assuage EU…
- Mapping the Moon’s South Pole
- The Moon’s polar regions are not easily observed from the Earth (or from non-polar Lunar orbit), but NASA has obtained high-resolution radar maps of the Moon’s south pole by using the Goldstone Solar System Radar in the Mojave Desert. The…
