January 2009
- Waldseemüller Symposium at LOC in May
- “Exploring Waldseemüller’s World” is a two-day symposium to be held at the Library of Congress on May 14 and 15, 2009. According to the press release, it will “examine Martin Waldseemüller’s cartographic vision and address the complex historical and…
- Gallup’s State of the States
- This week, Gallup released a multipart State of the States series, revealing “state-by-state differences in political party affiliation, religiosity, consumer confidence, and job market conditions based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008” (links added) There are…
- Mapping the Moon
- The story of how National Geographic’s iconic 1969 map of the Moon — the first complete map of the Moon — was made is recounted, with considerable digression, by retired cartographer Richard Furno, who worked on the project, on…
- A Brief Book Roundup
- Briefly noted: GeoWeb Guru has a review of Geography Mark-Up Language: Foundation for the Geo-Web by Ron Lake et al. (via Slashgeo); Google Earth Blog reviews Josie Wernecke’s KML Handbook (previously); Vector One reports on the first A-level GIS…
- iPhoto, Geotagging, GPS and the Mac: A Post-Macworld Roundup
- For our purposes, the big news from Macworld earlier this month was iPhoto ’09’s built-in geotagging. iPhoto is not the first application to support geotagging, but it’s the first to provide a compelling answer to the question of what geotagging…
- Denver Post on ‘On High’
- The Denver Post’s John Meyer reviews the On High: Cartography of Topography exhibition in Golden, Colorado: “if you’re a mountaineer or a map lover, don’t miss it.”…
- Wired on GPS-Enabled Smartphones
- Two articles from the February 2009 issue of Wired look at location-aware applications for smartphones with built-in GPS (or other means of determining location). Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location is a list of…
- ‘Data for Decision’: GIS on Punchcards
- “Data for Decision” is a 1967 National Film Board of Canada film that explains the work of the Canada Geographic Information System — one of the earliest GISes in history, if not the earliest — in analysing the huge…
- Czech President Blasts ‘Entropa’
- The controversy over David Cerny’s “Entropa” exhibit continues. AFP: “Czech President Václav Klaus has asked the government in a letter to ‘publicly disavow’ a controversial EU art exhibit displayed in Brussels that depicts stereotypes of member countries.” I think we…
- Lauren Simone
- An exhibition of Lauren Simone’s art has been going on this month in Portland, Maine. Simone, a local artist, “creates maps from her imagination with ink, tea, and watercolors, marking her boundaries with thread. Her maps discover places you…
- Earth Envi Reviewed
- iPhone Central’s review of the $1 satellite photo application for the iPhone, Earth Envi, suggests that a small mobile device may not be the best location to appreciate satellite imagery. “Truth is, many of pictures you see on Earth Envi…
- Getting Lost with a GPS
- Charles Cooper on his experience getting lost with an in-car GPS: “Garmin sells a simple and reliable device. Unfortunately, it doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility for using your brain. A certain somebody (no names, here) had programmed the device…
- The Mapmakers’ Art: Exhibition in Myrtle Beach
- The Mapmakers’ Art: The Bishop Collection of Antique Maps, 1608-1863 is an exhibition running at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, until March 20. “The collection of 15 maps, donated to the museum…
- Obama’s Inauguration from Orbit
- As usual, I’m just about the last person to mention GeoEye’s high-resolution satellite image of the crowds attending President Obama’s inauguration, less than an hour before he was sworn in. It’s available as a KML layer for Google Earth;…
- Mapping the Inauguration: A Roundup
- Last month, the Armed Services Inauguration Committee revealed to the public a 40×40-foot map used to plan the inauguration (via Vector One); another view is here (thumbnail above; via MapHist). New Google Earth imagery for Washington, D.C. finally de-pixellates…
- Windows Mobile Devices Get Bird’s-Eye View
- Mapperz notes that Virtual Earth’s bird’s-eye view is now available on Windows Mobile 6 devices; this is apparently the URL (I can’t tell; I don’t have a compatible device)….
- David Cerny Defends ‘Entropa’
- At the beginning of this video, artist David Cerny explains his controversial installation piece, “Entropa,” which just debuted, to no considerable uproar, in the European Council building in Brussels. The video is also an opportunity to get a good…
- Hakimzadeh Sentenced to Two Years
- An update on this story: Farhad Hakimzadeh has been sentenced to two years in prison; he had pleaded guilty to 14 counts of theft for taking maps, illustrations and other pages from rare books in the British and Oxford University…
- On High: Cartography of Topography
- At the Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum in Golden, Colorado from January 23 to May 31, an exhibition called On High: Cartography of Topography: The exhibition will explore the ways in which topography has been viewed and mapped throughout history….
- Cross-Stitched Legend of Zelda Map
- Okay, brace yourselves: a cross-stitched map of the video game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Via Boing Boing….
- Great Circles
- About.com’s Amanda Briney has a primer on great circles. A great circle is the shortest distance between two points on a sphere; sailors and aviators use great circles to get the fastest and most efficient route from point A to…
- More on Gerrymandering and Computer-Generated Districts
- A recent Slate article on using computer algorithms to generate fairer, non-gerrymandered electoral districts includes a slideshow of the most gerrymandered congressional electoral districts in America. Via Kottke. Previously: Computer-Generated Electoral Districts Redux….
- The Map: Navigating the Present
- I don’t imagine many of my readers are able to make it to the rather northerly Swedish city of Umeå in the next month or so, but in the event that you are, Umeå University’s Bildmuseet (art museum) has…
- Thomas Harriot: First to Map the Moon?
- Englishman Thomas Harriot may have beaten Galileo to the punch. According to an article in February’s Astronomy and Geophysics, Harriot may have been the first known person to observe the Moon through a telescope — and, more importantly for us…
- Magellan Sale Complete, Magellan Product Line to Continue
- MiTAC has completed its purchase of Magellan’s consumer products line, which will continue to exist as a brand separate from MiTAC’s existing Mio line. Previously: Magellan Sells Consumer Products Division to MiTAC….
- The Big Picture Meets Earth Observatory
- I’m a huge fan of The Big Picture; today’s entry features some “standout photographs” from NASA’s Earth Observatory site, which I’ve mentioned before but which bears mentioning again. Above, volcanic rock in Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia, taken by…
- New Year’s Globe Stays Up
- A globe used in the New Year’s festivities in Northampton, Massachusetts will be kept up for another six months and may well be a permanent fixture (and tourist attraction), The Republican reports. The six-foot, 300-pound globe has 350 computer-controlled LED…
- Google Maps Transit Layer
- Google has announced a transit layer for Google Maps. Stations have been visible before; this layer adds the lines. It’s available for a total of 58 cities so far; I imagine Londoners used to the Beck diagram will have…
- Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago
- An exhibition of maps from the Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago project, which solicits contributions from participants who sketch out their personal map of Chicago on a blank outline map, will take place tomorrow between 5:00 and…
- European Stereotypes in EU Installation Piece
- To commemorate the Czech Republic’s six-month turn at the EU presidency, an art installation piece portraying maps of European countries by their stereotypes has been installed in the European Council building. “France’s map is emblazoned with the word GREVE! (French…
- Cartocacoethes
- “Cartocacoethes” is, apparently, the uncontrollable urge to see maps everywhere, in everything. It’s a flavour of apophenia, which is the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless or random data (e.g., canals on Mars). A well-known version of apophenia is…
- Rebecca Riley
- Rebecca Riley writes to let us know that a show of her recent map paintings is taking place at the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery in New York. 75 Mile Radius runs from January 13 to March 2. The subject of…
- AA Survey Reveals How Britons Use GPS on the Road
- A survey of its members by the British Automobile Association (AA) revealed some interesting attitudes towards car-based GPS navigation devices (which in the U.K. are referred to as “satnav”). Some highlights: 61 percent agreed that their GPS had prevented them…
- British Students Fined for Collecting GPS Data in Xinjiang
- In October, a group of British graduate students was fined by the Chinese authorities for illegal map-making activity, the Daily Telegraph reports. (See also AFP coverage: Google, Yahoo; AFP reports three students, the Telegraph only two.) The students were researching…
- Milky Way Tube Map
- Samuel Arbesman has done a map of the Milky Way in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map. “I have attempted to actually make this map as accurate as possible, where each line corresponds to an arm of…
- Communes of France
- Via The Where Blog (which needs to clean up its comments), an interesting find on the Communes of France Wikipedia entry: a user-generated map of every commune in France. (The French commune is equivalent, more or less, to a…
- Mapping Snow Cover
- On a day like today, with a whole pile of snow waiting outside for me to shovel, Leszek’s link to the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, which at this time of year provides all kinds of snow-related information,…
- Map Quilts by Leah Evans
- Textile artist Leah Evans makes hand-sewn map quilts. The maps themselves “are not consciously based on specific places,” she writes. “For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes.” At right: “Development.” More at Designboom; via…
- Mapping the Gaza Conflict
- UNOSAT situation maps (via Ogle Earth; Stefan has created an image overlay for use in Google Earth). A map of where the Gaza rockets have been landing in Israel, viewable either in Google Maps or Google Earth (via Catholicgauze)….
- Global Map of Accessibility
- A map released by the European Commission and the World Bank models the accessibility (and isolation) of various parts of the world. It’s a heat map that shows the travel time to major cities (here defined as 50,000 or…
- The Atlas of True Names Interview
- Catholicgauze has a (very brief) interview with the (unnamed) cartographer behind the Atlas of True Names, which I told you about last month. Of particular interest is the following statement on future products: “We continue quite soon with the French,…
- The Divided States of America
- Those pissed off by the redrawn map of the Middle East may appreciate the implicit payback in the following. A Russian academic is ardently predicting that the U.S. will break apart from internal pressures in 2010, with six pieces…
- The Rise of User-Generated Mapping
- “The public often saw the end product of the map creation process, but was largely limited to scribbling on paper when it came to creating maps of its own. Beginning in 2005, this paradigm turned upside down.” Sean Gorman’s article…
- Heart-Shaped Map
- Korean design firm Zero per Zero has done some interesting things with urban transit maps; in addition to subway maps of Seoul, Osaka and Tokyo that look like Beck diagrams through a fisheye lens, they’ve done a rather unique…
