December 2010
- Online Maps as Popular Entertainment
- An article in The New York Times Magazine looks at online maps as popular entertainment: “[T]he really interesting stuff comes not from the massive compilation of information by a giant corporation” — i.e., Google — “but rather from the creative…
- North American English Dialects
- Via Kottke, Rick Aschmann’s incredibly detailed map of North American English dialects — “just a little hobby of mine,” he says. Previously: Atlas of North American English….
- Best-Selling Map Books of 2010
- For the second year running, I’ve compiled a list of The Map Room’s top ten eleven best-selling map books. This list is based on Amazon orders made through this website that were tracked by my Amazon Associates account. Dark and…
- Rainfall in California
- NASA’s Earth Observatory: “This image shows rainfall amounts over California from December 18 to 20, 2010. The heaviest rainfall — more than 200 millimeters or 7.8 inches — appears in dark blue.”…
- Brian Nunnery’s Map Collection
- Brian Nunnery has been doodling maps of imaginary cities since he was in kindergarten. He’s amassed a collection of nearly 500 maps, and he’s been posting them to his website — 20 so far. The maps, says Brian, “evolve steadily…
- ‘Unprecedented’ Topo Maps of the Moon
- Data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) is leading to “the most precise and complete map to date of the moon’s complex, heavily cratered landscape,” NASA said last week. The new LOLA maps are more…
- Atlas of Remote Islands
- Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands is generating a lot of buzz — if nothing else, reviews keep turning up in my Google alerts. Subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will, the short book…
- Global Temperature Changes by Decade
- A series of maps on NASA’s Earth Observatory site, covering every decade since the 1880s, shows how much the world’s temperatures have deviated from the reference period of 1951-1980. Above is the map for 2000 to 2009….
- The London Underground, Under Water
- To illustrate the impact of a four-degree rise in global temperatures and a four-metre rise in sea levels, Practical Action has released a London tube map showing which stations would be underwater. Via io9 and Londonist; thanks also to…
- Texas: A Historical Atlas
- I’m only now finding out about Texas: A Historical Atlas, thanks to this profile of the book’s author, retired history professor A. Ray Stephens, in the Denton Record-Chronicle. The atlas follows up on the Historical Atlas of Texas, published…
- Second Edition of Making Maps Coming Next Year
- This is interesting: a second edition of John Krygier’s guide to map design, Making Maps, is coming out in February or March of next year. I reviewed the first edition way back in March 2006. John Krygier says that…
- OpenStreetMap Manual Reviewed
- Another review of the English edition of the OpenStreetMap manual by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton — OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World — by Directions Magazine’s Adena Schutzberg. Previously: Two Book Reviews….
- Mapping Social Networks
- This map by Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler that shows activity and relationships between various locations around the world. “I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted…
- Two Book Reviews
- Rachel Hewitt’s history of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation, is reviewed in The Independent. Meanwhile, the MapQuest developer blog takes a look at Ramm, Topf and Chilton’s OpenStreetMap. Previously: Map of a Nation: Hewitt’s History of the Ordnance…
- Map of Britain Based on ‘a Network of Human Interactions’
- Researchers tested whether regional boundaries reflected natural human relationships by examining telephone call data in Great Britain. Based on the length and frequency of calls between locations, they were able to create regions based on those networks. From the…
- Atlantic Hurricanes in 2010
- NASA Earth Observatory has a map of hurricane tracks, rainfall and storm intensity for the 2010 season. “This image shows the paths taken by the storms and the rainfall associated with each storm throughout the season. The rainfall measurements…
- PopSci on Commercial vs. ‘Official’ Cartography
- Popular Science pivots from the recent Nicaragua-Costa Rica border dispute to make a point about how digital maps are essentially commercial — rather than governmental or “official” cartography: “The incident raises some interesting issues concerning the future of mapmaking that,…
- Slate’s Interactive Map of Diabetes in the U.S.
- Slate has produced an interactive map of diabetes in America, based on county-by-county estimates from the CDC for the years 2004 to 2008. Via @GOOD. Previously: Diabetes and Obesity in the U.S.; Diabetes Atlas….
- Mapping American Slavery
- Historian Susan Schulten, writing for the New York Times’s online Opinionator feature, examines an 1861 map showing the distribution of the slave population in the southern states of the U.S., based on 1860 census data. This map, an early…
- Street View in Romania
- New to Google Street View: street-level imagery from Romania. Vampire jokes ensue. More at Google Maps Mania….
- Speaking of OpenStreetMap
- Last month, it was announced that OpenStreetMap would be getting its hands on Microsoft’s aerial imagery. (One way to make maps in OSM is to draw on top of aerial imagery. Yahoo’s imagery has been made available for that purpose,…
- The WSJ on OpenStreetMap, Bing, and MapQuest
- The Wall Street Journal takes a look at why OpenStreetMap has been getting attention (and resources) from two large, and very commercial, mapping providers: Bing (Microsoft) and MapQuest (AOL). “For Microsoft and AOL’s MapQuest unit, OpenStreetMap presents an opportunity to…
- Debating the New York Subway Map
- Benjaman Kabak has a detailed report on the panel on the design of the New York subway map held last night at the Museum of the City of New York (previously). Via Mark Ovenden. Update, Dec. 11: Another report on…
- NYT Reviews Katonah Map Exhibition
- Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art, an exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art that I first told you about in September, has been reviewed in the New York Times. “The works in this terrific exhibition offer so many…
- Buell’s 1784 Map Fetches $1.8 Million
- Abel Buell’s 1784 New and Correct Map of North America (see previous entry) went for a lot more than expected at auction: $1.8 million. WestportNow takes a curious look at the auction by profiling the map dealer who lost the…
- Google Adds Bike Maps to Canadian Cities
- It’s been talked about in the Canadian media for some time now, but, as Google LatLong reported yesterday, Google Maps’s bicycling layer for Canadian cities — Calgary, Edmonton, Kelowna, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, Ottawa-Gatineau (including a bike trail out in my…
- Map Blankets
- Pistil SF makes custom map blankets and napkins. The blankets are fleece, the napkins (coming in 2011) are cotton, and the maps are based on OSM data (you tell them what you want mapped). At $175 for the blanket,…
- Blogs and a Book About Maps of the Solar System’s Moons
- Oh look: two blogs about mapping other bodies in the solar system by planetary scientist Paul Schenk: Dr. Schenk’s 3D House of Satellites, about stereo, perspective and topographic maps of moons and dwarf planets (thanks to recent Cassini data,…
- Infinite City: A ‘Fanciful’ Atlas of San Francisco
- San Francisco Public Press covers the launch of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit. “The collection of fanciful maps of the city combines disparate but creatively juxtaposed items such as World War II shipyards and African-American…
