April 2008
- Missing and Stolen Maps Database
- The Missing and Stolen Maps Database has been announced. In early February 2008, the International Antiquarian Mapsellers Association (IAMA) voted to provide funding for the development and maintenance of a missing and stolen map database. The database is the result…
- County Atlases
- In the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, Diane Dretske writes an essay in praise of county atlases: County atlases were certainly a marketing tool to sell books, but they occurred at just the right time in American history when…
- Raincoat Map from 1939
- Another find from Modern Mechanix, reprinted from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science: “A colorful map of the United States, complete with rivers, mountains, boundary lines, and other geographical features, adorns a novel rain cape recently introduced. Made…
- The Return of Massimo Vignelli
- Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map of the New York subway system, which introduced a Beck-style diagrammatic transit map to the city (and which New Yorkers were not prepared for; the map was controversial and encountered opposition before it was replaced in…
- The Wire Maps of Elizabeth Berrien
- Artist Elizabeth Berrien does wire sculpture; some of her creations are maps. “She’d often felt that the intricate, organic lines of our living planet and its features — continents, great river and mountain ranges — would make a glorious…
- Another Internet Country Code Map
- Here’s another map showing country code top-level Internet domains, available as a 24×36-inch poster. “Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30%…
- Collaborative Mapping in Arizona and Vancouver
- Speaking of collaborative mapping projects, here are a couple of links: Richard Eriksson reports on a meeting of the Vancouver Public Space Network’s Mapping and Wayfinding group. “They are a group of mapping enthusiasts who want to organize collaboratively mapping…
- OpenStreetMap Adds Export Feature
- OpenStreetMap adds an export feature that, as you might expect, goes beyond embedding a map on your site: Want a static map for your blog, without having to spend hours fiddling with JavaScript? No problem - just export in PNG…
- Mapping 2008
- The British Cartographic Society has announced its 2008 annual symposium. Mapping 2008: Making the Most of Maps will take place from September 3 to 6 at the Harben House Conference facility in Newport Pagnell. No site yet; here’s the press…
- Scale Models of Moscow
- Richard sends along links to two separate models of the city of Moscow. First, this one, an exhibition that opened in 1977. It’s more than 400 square feet in size, and has lighting inside the buildings that turn on…
- Cartographic Chronograms
- Our friend Tony Campbell has put together a Web page on cartographic chronograms. But what, you may ask, is a chronogram? In a nutshell, it’s a date encrypted into a sentence or inscription. Tony’s short explanation suffices very well: A…
- 250 Years of Pittsburgh Maps
- A collection of maps of Pittsburgh on the occasion of that city’s 250th anniversary. “This selection of maps and views presents a history of the city and region from [1758] to near the present; some can be seen on…
- The Mapping of Ukraine
- The Mapping of Ukraine: European Cartography and Maps of Early Modern Ukraine, 1550-1799, which opened yesterday at the Ukrainian Museum in New York, “includes 42 original maps published by European mapmakers over a 250-year period. A majority of the maps…
- Map Publishers in Court over Folding Method
- Two map publishers — Compass Maps and GeoCenter publishing group — are in court over an origami-based method of folding maps, The Times reports in a brief article. “Compass Maps say they created the ‘star-fold’ map and developed the brand…
- Map of U.S. Mobile Phone Laws
- From the April issue of Wired, a map showing U.S. state-level laws banning or restricting mobile phone use while behind the wheel….
- Schiaparelli’s Maps of Mars
- Until Mariner 4 photographed craters on Mars in 1965, Earth-bound telescopes were the only way to map the red planet. BibliOdyssey looks at Schiaparelli’s 19th-century maps of Mars, which gave rise to the idea that canals — canali or…
- Per Capita Map of U.S. Carbon Emissions
- The Vulcan Project’s map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions is now available in a per-capita version. Suddenly it looks a lot less like a population density map. Via Andrew Sullivan….
- Iran Accuses Google Earth of Provoking Regional Conflict
- I told you Iran was campaigning against the use of the name “Arabian Gulf”; this time they’re accusing Google Earth managers of “knowingly or unknowingly” provoking conflict in the region. Wow. Illegal and insulting? Via Ogle Earth….
- Errors in Online Maps
- Top Causes Of Errors In Online Mapping Systems: “Causes of internet map errors range from digital mapping methodology, data errors, data interpretation errors, usability errors, and errors in interpreting user queries.” Detailed. Via Slashgeo….
- New Facebook Application: whereyougonnabe?
- Yesterday, Peter Batty announced a new social-networking application that operates within Facebook: whereyougonnabe? In beta (naturally), this app lets you map your current and future activities and see what (and where) your friends are doing at the same time. The…
- Another Book Review Roundup
- WorldChanging has a review of An Atlas of Radical Cartography — and it’s by Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art. “An Atlas is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking and original publications i’ve read in a long long…
- About That All Points Blog/Daily Kos Thing
- Apologies in advance for the inside baseball, but in light of the fracas that has developed over All Points Blog’s link to a map-related story on Daily Kos, a partisan Democratic blog, let me say the following: I saw the…
- Historic Aerial Photography
- Historic Aerials “provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.” Covers a good chunk of the U.S., with…
- Kaguya’s Lunar Topo Maps
- JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has announced a lunar map generated by the Kaguya (Selene) probe: “Using the Laser Altimeter (LALT) aboard the Lunar Explorer KAGUYA, JAXA acquired data covering the entire Moon’s surface and produced a topographical…
- TomTom-Tele Atlas Update
- All Points Blog has a roundup of the seemingly contradictory news stories about the TomTom-Tele Atlas merger and the European Commission. Previously: EU Formally Objects to TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal; EU Investigates TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal….
- The Media and Google Earth’s Satellite Imagery
- What drives Glenn nuts about media coverage of Google Earth “is that most of these ‘writers’ refer to the imagery as being ‘Google’s’ as if a big bird is circling the Earth capturing high-res imagery almost daily. Hey man, the…
- Yahoo Updates Imagery
- I will have something on the Microsoft Live Maps/Virtual Earth update presently (once I go through all the material, and there’s a lot to go through). In the meantime, though, Yahoo Maps hasn’t been idle either, with a huge imagery…
- DeLorme Profiled
- Another profile of map publisher (and now GPS maker) DeLorme, this time from the Bangor Daily News’s Bill Graves. DeLorme got its start mapping Maine, so no surprise that the Maine media likes to cover the company’s history: local success…
- AutoCarto 2008
- AutoCarto 2008, the Cartography and Geographic Information Society’s international research symposium on computer-based cartography, takes place September 8 to 11, 2008 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. “CaGIS invites cartographers, geographers, geospatial analysts, GIScientists, and others conducting research on the cutting edge…
- Foreclosure Heat Maps
- Greg writes to mention that the housing-search site HotPads also has a foreclosure heat maps layer. From the site: “HotPads Foreclosure Heat Maps portray the markets hit hardest by the recent housing crisis and the increased foreclosure rates. These foreclosure…
- New Location for Map Projection Gallery
- Paul Anderson writes to inform us that his Gallery of Map Projections (see previous entry) has moved to a new server hosted by the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is the…
- Mapping High School Graduation Rates
- Andy Anderson wrote to point to an older (2006) item from Education Week that is nonetheless worth a look: Mapping Out High School Graduation. From the article: “The EPE Research Center mapped 2002-03 graduation rates for public school districts…
- Washington Post Reviews ‘Maps: Finding Our Place in the World’
- In Baltimore Festival of Maps news (note that I’ve given it — along with two earlier large exhibitions — a separate subcategory), the Washington Post reviews the Walters Art Museum’s iteration of Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. The…
- The Office
- GPS Review has a clip from an episode of (the U.S. version of) The Office that satirizes the news stories about GPS-navigation-related accidents….
- Absolut Nonsense
- You’ve probably heard about this by now. An Absolut Vodka ad in Mexico has stirred up a furor in the United States. The ad, which depicts a pre-1836 map of Mexico that includes territories since lost to Texas independence…
- Map of U.S. Carbon Emissions
- The Vulcan Project, which quantifies North American carbon dioxide emissions, has released maps that shows U.S. CO2 emissions at 100-kilometre resolution — far more detailed than previous efforts. The maps are also updated more frequently. Their most notable finding…
- Where’s the Water?
- Chad follows up on his previous post about Google’s contour lines (previous entry) with one that notes one important shortcoming of online maps: almost none of them show where the water is. To be sure, major rivers and lakes are…
- Google and Disputed Place Names
- How does a global mapping provider like Google deal with disputed map names? (Think, for example, of Iran’s campaign in favour of the Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf, or South Korea’s on behalf of the East Sea instead…
- Géoportail API
- Géoportail, the mapping site of France’s Institut géographique national, is getting an API this month, Renaud Euvrard reports (in French). Two APIs, actually — regular and pro versions — with a 3D API slated for the summer. (Géoportail’s coverage is…
- A List Apart: ‘Take Control of Your Maps’
- On A List Apart, an online magazine about web design by and for web designers (who can be an obsessively exacting lot), Paul Smith has an article about going beyond the Google Maps API (or presumably others) for a site’s…
- Google Transit in Chicago
- Google Transit comes to Chicago….
- Baltimore Festival of Maps on YouTube
- The Baltimore Festival of Maps has a YouTube channel, which has a few short clips (less than two minutes each) about the Walters Art Museum’s keystone exhibition, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. They’re nicely done; here, for example,…
- Mary Meader
- The New York Times: “Mary Meader, who as a spunky new bride in the 1930s took off on a 35,000-mile journey to advance geographic knowledge by making unprecedented aerial photographs of South America and Africa, died Sunday in Kalamazoo, Mich….
- More About Restoring the World’s Fair Map
- The New York Times has more about the continuing efforts to restore at least part of the so-called Texaco Map, the terrazo map from the 1964-65 World’s Fair; see also this related blog entry about the return of a missing…
- Montana Man Arrested for WWU Map Thefts
- Two years ago, I reported that a number of government documents in a Western Washington University library had been vandalized; at least 648 maps and coloured plates had been torn from at least 108 volumes in the United States…
- The World According to Newspapers
- For a school dissertation (PDF), Nicolas Kayser-Bril has generated cartograms that “show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief in 2007” — countries that received more coverage appear larger in these cartograms: see the original (in French) and the…
- The Singles Map
- Richard Florida’s singles map of the United States, which charts which metropolitan areas have a surplus of single men and women, first appeared in the Boston Globe; it’s been getting a bit of buzz around the blogosphere. If it…
- EarthBrowser
- EarthBrowser is a virtual globe application I hadn’t encountered before. It’s $24 shareware and runs on Mac and Windows, but the current buzz is about the next version, version 3, which uses the Adobe Air cross-platform framework. The beta…
- Inflated Views
- Don’t miss Cartophilia’s blog entry on inflated views — maps where one portion is distorted in size to reflect its self-importance — for example, a New Yorker’s, or California’s, or Texas’s, view of the United States or the world….
- Introductions to GIS and GPS
- GIS: An Overview is a very basic introduction, but it seems to me that that sort of thing is necessary. Via About.com Geography. PC World’s How to Buy a GPS Device is slanted very heavily towards car-mounted GPS navigation systems,…
- Contour Lines and Other Stories: A Google Roundup
- Contour lines have been added to Google Maps’s terrain map layer, which adds its their usefulness (especially, for example, in a mountain context). But it has some way to go before it’s a suitable replacement for a topo map;…
- Blaeu Globes Fetch €800,000
- Remember those two Blaeu globes I was telling you about — the ones that belonged to the royal family of Liechtenstein and were being auctioned by Christie’s? They were bought, by a private collection, for €800,000. Via Map the Universe….
- Mapping the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
- A sobering collection of choropleth maps from the U.S. Federal Reserve that illustrate the subprime mortgage crisis. From the press release: The maps, which are maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will display regional variation in the…
- Topography of Titan
- The Planetary Society Blog reports: On Monday, with no fanfare, JPL posted the first detailed topographic map of part of Titan. I suppose the map doesn’t strictly qualify as a pretty picture, but it is a tremendously important data…
- The Salish Sea
- A Seattle Times column on how national boundaries obscure reality — i.e., how Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca are a single body of water: “Go to any store and look for a map depicting…
- New Jersey State Atlas
- I learned about the New Jersey State Atlas, a Google Maps mashup of New Jersey state data, on MetaFilter Projects, where its creater, John J. Reiser, posted it. Here’s how he introduced it: Originally a product of “hey, what…
- Shanghai in 3D
- It doesn’t work in Safari and the text is only in Chinese, but this eerily cartoon-like, three-dimensional map of Shanghai is still worth a look. (I think I just had a Sim City flashback.) Via MetaFilter, where one commenter…
- A Book Review Roundup
- Cartophilia has a brief review of Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, Vincent Virga’s book featuring maps from the Library of Congress. Vector One reviews John Blake’s Charts of War: The Maps and Charts That Have Informed and Illustrated War at Sea. Buy…
- April Fool’s and Online Maps
- Roundups of April Foolery related to Google Maps and Google Earth are available at Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania. X-ray and thermal imagery, copyrighted landscapes, and smiley faces abound. And how is this not an April Fool’s joke?…
- An Update: Garmin, MapQuest and Google
- MapQuest’s announcement about partnering with Garmin jumped the gun somewhat; Garmin’s announcement says that the send-to-GPS feature is available with Google Maps as of today, but MapQuest only as of April 15. Announced earlier than Google, but available later. Rich…
- Cambridge Map Room Reopens
- The Cambridge University Library’s Map Department has reopened in its newly refurbished map room (no relation). Via MapHist. Previously: Cambridge Map Department Will Be Renovated….
