January 2011
- Follow Your World: E-Mail Alerts for Google Imagery Updates
- Follow Your World is a notification service for Google Earth/Google Maps satellite and aerial imagery updates: you can register a location with the service and, if that location gets fresh imagery, it sends you an e-mail alert. Requires a Google…
- Mapping Profanity on Twitter
- Daniel P. Huffman has created a map of profanity on Twitter (original PDF here). It takes a sample of 1.5 million geocoded tweets in March and April 2010 and maps the percentage of words in said tweets that are…
- New York’s Ethnic Mosaic
- The New York Times maps the shifting ethnic mosaic of New York’s neighbourhoods. Via @geoparadigm….
- Typographic Map of London Surnames
- Following hot on the heels of the typographic map of U.S. surnames that he worked on for National Geographic, James Cheshire has announced an interactive typographic map of London surnames. A slider allows you to select between the most,…
- Typographic Map of U.S. Surnames
- Now we know why James Cheshire of Spatial Analysis did a roundup of typographic maps earlier this week (see previous entry): he worked on a typographic map of U.S. surnames that appears in the February 2011 issue of National…
- British Cartographic Society Blog
- The British Cartographic Society has a new blog. Via @worldmapper….
- xkcd: The World According to a Group of Americans
- Today’s xkcd: “The World According to a Group of Americans, Who Turned out to Be Unexpectedly Good at Geography, Derailing Our Attempt to Illustrate Their Country’s Attitude Toward the Rest of the World.”…
- Wendy Gold’s Globes
- Laura L. Sweet looks at globes by Wendy Gold. “The ‘Imagine Nation’ globes are handmade using vintage globes whose geography is no longer accurate. Wendy finds, cuts and creates the art that she then decoupages onto the old globes….
- New York Subway Map as Musical Instrument
- Alexander Chen’s “Conductor” recreates the New York subway map as a musical instrument, with subway lines as pluckable strings. It’s based on Vignelli’s 1972 subway map, which makes sense for this kind of project. It’s a work in progress, and…
- LA Times Reviews Infinite City
- The Los Angeles Times has a review of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. “Infinite City” examines that San Francisco, a physically compact place that contains multitudes, through a series of elegantly rendered maps and cleverly researched…
- Map Projections Applied to Photos
- Seb Perez-Duarte shoots spherical panoramic photographs. In this photoset, he applies cartographic projections to those spherical images (above, for example, is the Mollweide projection). This is easily the most brilliantly unorthodox way I’ve seen yet of demonstrating what map…
- Map Projections: A Working Manual
- John P. Snyder’s Map Projections: A Working Manual (1987) is available online as a PDF from the U.S. Geological Survey. Also via MapHist….
- Mapping Latin America
- Via MapHist, news of a new book coming in April from the University of Chicago Press: Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, who “bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines…
- Defense Department Testing to Affect GPS Signals in Southeastern U.S.
- Engadget passes on a Federal Aviation Administration advisory (PDF) that, due to Defense Department testing, GPS signals may be “unreliable or unavailable” within several hundred miles of a point off the coast of Florida and Georgia for brief periods…
- Flooding in Queensland, Australia
- NASA’s Earth Observatory has a number of high-resolution satellite images of the floods in Queensland, Australia. Nearmap managed to get an even closer look at the flooding, with two-centimetre-resolution imagery taken on January 13 and 14. ABC News (Australia)…
- More Typographic Maps
- Spatial Analysis’s roundup of typographical maps — that is, maps made entirely of textual elements — includes Axis Maps’s typographic map of San Francisco (above) and Stephen Walter’s incredible hand-drawn map of Liverpool. Via @worldmapper. Previously: Typographic Maps of…
- Restoring Ortelius
- A brief item from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts about their work restoring the Leventhal Center’s copy of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Via MapHist….
- An Item on Chinese Online Maps
- Two items of note in this article from the China Daily: first, that China’s official online mapping service, Map World, is now out of beta (I wasn’t aware that it was in beta in the first place); and second, that…
- Somali Piracy Threat Map
- Via @bruces comes a link to this rather well-done map, by Arun Ganesh of the National Institute of Design, Bangalore, showing the extent of Somali pirate attacks over the past five years. (Misspelled “Ethiopia,” though.)…
- 1699 Thornton Map Auctioned
- A 1699 map of northeastern North America by John Thornton discovered in a house in rural Scotland (see previous entry) has been sold at auction for more than three times the expected price — the equivalent of about $320,000 U.S….
- Restoring a 240-Year-Old Map
- The New York Times describes the process of restoring a 240-year-old map that the Brooklyn Historical Society discovered in their possession — a rare 1770 map of New York City by Bernard Ratzer, only three other copies of which were…
- Macworld on iPhone GPS Apps
- Macworld takes a look at 11 iPhone GPS apps, following up on a similar article from a year ago (that I somehow seem to have missed). Compared with last year, Glenn Fleishman writes, Most apps have gone through substantial revisions…
- Google Updates Oblique Imagery
- Google has announced updated or new 45-degree aerial imagery — accessed through the satellite layer in Google Maps — for 10 U.S. cities, and promises that more cities are to come. Previously: Google’s Oblique Imagery Graduates; Bing, Google and MapQuest…
- The Internet in 1972
- From Life’s brief history of computing, a map of the Internet in 1972. Via Gizmodo….
- NJ Historical Society Criticized for Selling Map
- The New Jersey Historical Society is catching flak for auctioning off its copy of Abel Buell’s 1784 map of North America last month, the Star-Ledger reports. Apparently selling items to pay for operations — or, in the case of the…
- Eve Bailey
- Eve Bailey’s recent drawings are, she says, “inspired by the similarities between the infrastructure systems of cities and the human anatomy. I am specifically interested by the organic nature of architectural renderings. The iconography used for urban planning intersects…
- Haiti One Year Later
- Google: It’s been one year since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, and governments and NGOs are continuing to respond, many using high-resolution images of the area. To support these efforts, we’ve updated our aerial imagery in Google Earth of…
- TomTom on Smartphones and Standalone GPS Devices, Redux
- The last time we heard from Tom Murray, TomTom’s senior vice president of market development, he said that GPS-enabled smartphones had “no market impact” on the sales of standalone GPS navigation devices. It’s been six months. In a chat with…
- Gassée on Turn-by-Turn Directions
- Computer industry veteran Jean-Louis Gassée has some thoughts on the future of in-car navigation, based on his experiences on a road trip from Paris to Bilbao, in which the differences between a Pioneer navigation unit, a TomTom iPhone app, and…
- In the Crosshairs
- A map was at the centre of a major news story in the United States this week. Within hours of the news that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (among others, to be sure) had been shot at a constituency meeting in…
- Weekly World News: Atlantis Found in Google Maps!
- Only the Weekly World News could bring you the story that the lost city of Atlantis has been found on Google Maps. “The photo taken by Google Maps is most definitely the Lost City of Atlantis,” said Yale Mythologist Anthony…
- Aerosols in Earth’s Atmosphere
- NASA’s Earth Observatory has this map of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere, based on MODIS data from August 2010. “Dust storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, and salt spray from the winds over the ocean are the most common and abundant producers…
- Armelle Caron
- French artist Armelle Caron uses maps in a couple of ways. First, have a look at her organized city maps, executed between 2005 and 2008, in which city blocks are taken apart and organized into neat rows. She does…
- Brain Pickings on Map Books
- Brain Pickings’s 7 Must-Read Books on Maps is heavy on the art side of the map book world, and includes some very familiar titles. Via @cartografie….
- Northern and Southern Sudan
- Speaking of Africa, BBC News has put together a page of maps of Sudan that illustrate the differences between northern and southern Sudan. Southern Sudan is at the moment voting on whether to declare independence from the north. Via @HodderGeography….
- Africa’s Ethnic and Linguistic Divisions
- A New York Times map of Africa’s ethnic and linguistic groups, representing “only the broadest ethnic and language groupings,” shows how much they differ from national boundaries (which the newly independent nations accepted as a necessary expedient in 1963)….
- Urban Geofiction: Maps of Made-Up Cities
- Here’s another great website about maps of places that only exist in the minds of the mapmakers. Urban Geofiction is a collection of maps of imaginary cities by divers hands. Some maps are hand-drawn, some are produced to such…
- De Wit’s Stedenboek
- A digital copy of Frederick de Wit’s rare Stedenboek — a 17th-century collection of city maps of the Netherlands — is now available on the website of the National Library of the Netherlands; BibliOdyssey posts some highlights from the…
- The World BBQ
- Yes, the World BBQ is “a symbol of human consumption of natural resources”; yes, it’s a metaphor for rising global temperatures. But we still think it’s cool (if you’ll pardon the ironic pun), and we want one. Via Make….
- Map of the Week Blog
- The Toronto Star’s Map of the Week blog went dark last July, but another Map of the Week blog has been trucking along since 2005 2007 . Via @awoodruff….
- Railway Network Maps of Tokyo and Other Asian Cities
- James Bunting wrote in with a link to this map of the Greater Tokyo railway network; the user’s Flickr account has other railway network maps showing the systems of other Asian cities, now and in 2020. (No indication whether…
- New Space for the BPL’s Leventhal Center
- The Boston Globe on the Boston Public Library’s $1.8-million makeover that will create a new repository and exhibition space for the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. “Details being considered include a large digital globe with touch-screen features; a ‘pop-up’ table…
- Michael Zeiler’s Solar Eclipse Map Website
- Michael Zeiler, GIS professional by day, eclipse mapper by night — last April I blogged about his map of solar eclipses from 2010 to 2050 — is back with a whole website dedicated to solar eclipse maps. The site,…
- Carto: A French Magazine About Maps
- Actual magazines about maps are rare on the ground (and on the newsstand) so it was interesting to see this report on Here Be Dragons about a bimonthly French magazine, Carto: Le monde en cartes, three issues of which…
