March 2010
- Seventh Anniversary
- The Map Room is seven years old today. For a blog that was started as a way to learn more about maps, by someone who — at least at the beginning — was, shall we say, more interested than informed,…
- The Grub Street Project
- The Grub Street Project: Topographies of 18th-Century London “aims to map the city and its texts to create both a historically accurate visualization of the city’s commerce and communications, and a record of how its authors and artists portrayed…
- Where 2.0 2010: Day One
- O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference got under way yesterday; Google Earth Blog’s Mickey Mellen and All Points Blog’s Joe Francica wrap up the first day’s events. The conference can be followed on Twitter, as you might expect from a bunch of…
- MapQuest iPhone App Adds Voice Directions
- Apparently there’s still a reason to get the dedicated MapQuest app for the iPhone OS rather than using the mobile-optimized website: version 1.5.1, released this week, includes basic voice directions. It’s still a free app. Previously: MapQuest for Advanced Mobile…
- Updated Directions in Google and Bing Maps
- Yesterday, Google announced draggable public transit directions; the day before, Bing Maps announced walking directions and a number of other features….
- Kevin Van Aelst: Apple Globe
- Kevin Van Aelst photographs “common artifacts and scenes from everyday life, which have been rearranged, assembled, and constructed into various forms, patterns, and illustrations.” His Apple Globe (2007) is of obvious interest to us; see also what he does…
- Factoids About GPS
- Pingdom has a collection of factoids about GPS entitled, oddly enough, Everything you ever wanted to know about GPS. (Yes, but how do they know what I wanted to know?) Via geoparadigm….
- McSweeney’s Does Walking Directions
- McSweeney’s: Realistic Google Maps Walking Directions When in a Different Country, by Zach Jones. If you know McSweeney’s, you already have an idea where this is going….
- Electoral and Other Divides
- Interesting post from The Electoral Map about how regional divisions in election results reflect other (e.g. ethnic) divisions….
- Cities at Night
- Earth Observatory’s Cities at Night features photography of the night side of the Earth taken by orbiting astronauts. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking…
- GPS vs. Paper Maps for Pedestrians
- John McKinney argues that paper maps may have some life left in them; among other things, he cites a Japanese study that found that “people on foot using a GPS device make more errors and take longer to reach their…
- Invented Bodies
- An exhibition that opened this week at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center has a component of interest to antique map enthusiasts. Invented Bodies: Shapely Constructs of the Early Modern runs until June 25. This exhibition explores the many ways that Europeans…
- Engadget Reviews an iPod Touch GPS Cradle
- Engadget reviews Dual Electronics’s GPS cradle for the iPod touch, and wonders whether the $200 cradle, which, as you might expect, adds GPS and navigation, is worth it when there are plenty of standalone GPS navigation systems out there that…
- J. Pat Farrell
- The Escanaba Daily Press reports the death of John Patrick “Pat” Farrell, a former head of the geography department at Northern Michigan University who, in his retirement, ran Maps North, a map store in Marquette, Michigan, with his son….
- Google Street View Needs More Canada
- Considering how small some of the towns are that are already covered in Street View, I would have thought that there wasn’t much left for Google to do. Apparently I’m wrong. Windsor will be redone because its images were taken…
- ‘The Simpsons’ Does GPS
- In last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Homer got a GPS. I think you can figure out how that went. Via GPS Tracklog….
- McDonald’s vs. Other Burger Chains
- Stephen Von Worley has built upon his previous mapping of McDonald’s locations, producing a map that shows where McDonald’s’s dominance is overwhelmed by other burger chains. Collectively, other chains outnumber McD’s two to one; separately, there are regional concentrations…
- Ordnance Survey Data Freely Available in April
- From British prime minister Gordon Brown’s speech today on “Building Britain’s Digital Future,” as prepared: And following the strong support in our recent consultation, I can confirm that from 1st April, we will be making a substantial package of information…
- Mapmobility/MapArt Founders Profiled
- The Toronto Star profiles Hartmut and Rita Schwerdt, who founded the company now known as Mapmobility back in 1978. Mapmobility is apparently the new name of [update: it’s apparently more complicated than that] MapArt, whose road maps of Canadian cities…
- North Is Up, South Is Down
- A brief but interesting article in Yale Alumni Magazine about research conducted by Yale professor Joseph P. Simmons: In a series of studies published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Simmons and a coauthor found that people generally assume it…
- Google Earth Guys
- The shmoo-like Google employees from College Humour’s “Google Street View Guys” video return to image the world for Google Earth from a balloon. (Note: it’s not entirely clean.) Via Google Earth Blog. Previously: Google Street View Guys….
- What Happened to Neogeography?
- Sean Connin asks what happened to neogeography, a concept that seemed all the rage not so long ago; his answer: that “neogeography” — i.e., web-based mapping tools — has gotten confused and conflated with GIS, which used to be neogeography’s…
- The Independent on ‘Magnificent Maps’
- The Independent has an article about the British Library’s upcoming map exhibition, Magnificent Maps, which opens April 30. The piece quotes British Library map head Peter Barber and makes reference to a number of maps without explicitly saying that they’re…
- Mike Parker’s ‘On the Map’ Begins Monday
- Mike Parker’s radio series on maps, On the Map, begins on Monday the 22nd (not the 23rd as I previously reported) on BBC Radio 4. The list of upcoming episodes gives a sense of what will be covered (for more,…
- A Book Roundup
- Mapping Forestry, Peter Eredics’s book on GIS for the forestry industry, is reviewed in The Forestry Source, the Society of American Foresters’s newsletter. Via ESRI. Michael Trinklein’s Lost States, which I reviewed in July 2008 when it was a print-on-demand…
- MapQuest for Advanced Mobile Browsers
- The MapQuest Blog touts the features of MapQuest’s mobile-optimized website, available without having to download a standalone app (which is, to be sure, still available). “Now more people can get a modern look-and-feel, a friendlier user-experience and new features…
- Moon and Mars Globes on the iPhone and iPod Touch
- On the Planetary Society Blog (one of my favourites), Emily Lakdawalla reviews two apps that put virtual globes of the Moon and Mars on an iPhone or iPod touch: Moon Globe, which is (now) free, and Mars Globe, which is…
- Ordnance Survey Free Data Consultation Period Closes
- Okay, I think I’ve got it now. In two earlier posts — this one and this one — I linked to plain-language rewrites of a consultation paper called Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey, which came out on…
- Eclipse Maps
- There are an awful lot of maps showing the path of solar eclipses. These maps are vital to eclipse chasers, who spend vast sums travelling to places where they can see one, and those slightly less insane who nevertheless…
- Review: The Power of Place
- The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape by Harm de Blij Oxford University Press, 2008. Hardcover, 294 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-536770-6 “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed,” the science-fiction writer William Gibson has…
- USGS Satellite Maps of Post-Quake Port-au-Prince
- The USGS released two satellite maps of the post-earthquake situation in Port-au-Prince last week: one in infrared, one in natural colour. Each is a 200-megabyte PDF. The maps are based on imagery we saw in raw form shortly after…
- Daylight Saving Time
- In this map from Wikimedia Commons (reproduced here under its Creative Commons Licence), blue areas use daylight saving time, orange areas no longer use it, red areas never have….
- Shawcroft on Google’s Bike Directions
- An interview with Google engineer Scott Shawcroft about Google Maps’s new bike directions; the audio is about five minutes long….
- Metro Map Designs
- A large collection of official metro maps of cities around the world collected by Webdesigner Depot; it’s interesting to see which maps use a Beck-style diagram and which ones are more geographical. Via Jennifer. Buy Transit Maps of the World…
- Problems with Google’s Bike Directions
- The New York Post finds fault with Google Maps’s bike directions in New York City. The feature, the Post says, “is filled with potentially fatal flaws, including routes that cut across Central Park’s treacherous tranverse roads and steer cyclists to…
- Christoph Niemann: My Way
- Don’t miss illustrator Christoph Niemann’s collection of whimsical map art, using the lines and symbols from a certain familiar online mapping service. Some illustrate the difficulty from getting from certain points A to certain points B, others create an…
- Street View in Hong Kong and Macau
- Along with the British updates I mentioned last night, Street View has also arrived in Hong Kong and Macau, Google Maps Mania reports. (I’d be very interested to see whether Street View comes to the Chinese mainland. But I wouldn’t…
- Geolocation Coming to Facebook
- Geolocation is apparently coming to Facebook next month. “The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their…
- Bicycle Directions on Google Maps
- Google Maps has added bicycle directions, which take into account such things as bike trails and dedicated bike lanes (take when possible), as well as steep uphill slopes and busy thoroughfares (avoid!). It’s explained in some detail on the Official…
- Street View Expands in Britain, Allows Location Editing
- Street View’s coverage of the U.K. is about to expand dramatically. As of Thursday, practically every road in Britain will be included — a total of 238,000 miles (380,000 kilometres). That brings it up to the level found in some…
- 8-Bit New York City
- Brett Camper’s 8-bit map of New York City is geographically accurate (it uses OpenStreetMap data), but renders it like a map of a role-playing or adventure game from an old 8-bit gaming console. Via Kottke….
- Changing the Ordnance Survey
- Here’s the full report by Simply Understand on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data (see previous entry). Via Mapperz. Alternate link….
- A Blog About Maps in Fiction
- (e)space & fiction is a blog about the use of maps “and other spatial machineries” in works of fiction, from novels to movies to comic books. Bilingual, in French and English. Thanks to Paul for the link….
- Crumpled Maps
- Emanuele Pizzolorusso’s Crumpled City Maps are made of Tyvek and are meant to be scrunched up and stuffed rather than folded. (Personally, I would have thought silk, or some other fabric, was more scrunchable than Tyvek — I’m reminded…
- Slate Wants Hand-Drawn Maps
- Slate’s Julia Turner is the latest to put out a call for hand-drawn maps, in a post that is part of her series on signs: The maps we draw for one another also have a certain ephemeral beauty. Each map…
- Bernard Gutsell
- Via MapHist, news of the passing on Thursday of Bernard V. Gutsell (1914-2010), who founded the journal Cartographica in 1965….
- World War I Trench Maps
- Fine Books and Collections magazine has published an article by Jeffrey Murray, former archivist and author of Terra Nostra, about trench maps used by British forces in World War I. In its day, the Great War was the largest…
- Video Game Maps
- Over on Autostraddle, Taylor posts a “love song” to maps in video games. Well, no: no actual singing involved; it is, however, a long, appreciative post on maps found in various video games….
- The Sunday New York Times on Map Books
- Steven Heller’s roundup of map books in the book review section of tomorrow’s New York Times includes some familiar titles, such as Mark Ovenden’s Paris Underground (which I reviewed last November), Frank Jacobs’s Strange Maps, and The Map as Art…
- Awful Canadian Press Story on GPS Smartphones
- I’m really bothered by this Canadian Press story on GPS-equipped smartphones. For one thing, it’s written as though its target audience is populated by idiots, using the breezy, chatty. brainless prose you’d expect from a fashion article. If you’re expecting…
- Time Bandits Map
- Jon Heilman’s replica of the time portal map used in the 1981 Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits is available for sale as a $100 giclée print on 40×24½-inch canvas. Via Boing Boing….
- Relief: Dynamic 3D Interactive Map
- Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group have created Relief, “an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form…
- Simplicity, Complexity, and Subway Maps
- Joe B. has this to say about the differences between the diagrammatic, iconic London Underground map and the hash that has been the maps of the New York subway system: “The simplicity of the London diagram comes in part from…
- Engadget Compares Smartphone Navigation
- Engadget does a head-to-head comparison of three GPS smartphone navigation systems: Google Navigation, Ovi Maps, and VZ Navigator. So which is the nav for you? There’s zero platform overlap here, so if you already have a smartphone in your pocket…
- Wired Tests the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger
- Wired’s Joe Brown tests the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger the only way he can: by getting lost. After eight hours of doing his best to get lost in Tahoe National Forest, he pressed the SOS button; help arrived in…
- Platial Shuts Down
- Platial is shutting down; the site may go dark as early as tomorrow. Instructions on exporting data hosted by Platial have been posted, but the data will be archived at Geocommons. Di-Ann Eisnor explains: We are retiring the site because…
