February 2011
- Two Booboos
- CNN doesn’t know where Queensland is. Google doesn’t know where the Dutch-German border is. At least no one’s going to get invaded over this. (Right?) Via @xxxriainxxx and @spatialanalysis….
- Wyoming (or Colorado)
- “Who’s to say really?” says Complicated Shoes. Via Fuck Yeah Cartography!…
- A Book Roundup
- Via @nyplmaps, I discover that Los Angeles in Maps by Glen Creason was published last October. The Irish Times has a review of If Maps Could Speak, a memoir by the former director of the Irish Ordnance Survey, Richard…
- Lego Cartograms
- The problem with cartograms is that they can be difficult to interpret: distorting a country to be larger or smaller isn’t helpful if you don’t know the size of the country in the first place, or can’t recognize it when…
- Two About Map Projections
- A couple of links about map projections to share with you. Most online maps use the Web Mercator map projection; ESRI Mapping Center explores using the Winkel Tripel projection instead. Earth Observatory debunks a Daily Mail headline saying that half…
- New Blog: Mapping London
- Mapping London is a new blog by James Cheshire and Oliver O’Brien, whose work we’ve seen before. Here’s how James announced it on his own blog: “Oliver O’Brien and I have decided to team up to launch the mappinglondon.co.uk blog…
- How Connected Are the Middle East and North Africa?
- Let’s keep some perspective about Facebook’s influence on the democratic uprisings in the Middle East. An interactive map from CNN looks at the comparative penetration rates of Facebook, the Internet, and mobile phones in North Africa and the Middle East….
- Connecting Christchurch’s Earthquakes
- With this map, Earth Observatory connects the two major earthquakes to hit Christchurch, New Zealand: This map shows the earthquakes that occurred near Christchurch since September 3, 2010. On that day a magnitude 7.1 quake struck to the west…
- Getting Lost in Little Italy and Chinatown
- The Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, reports on efforts to improve navigation guides for tourists in New York’s Little Italy and Chinatown, who apparently are getting themselves lost with current guides. Apparently many kiosk maps are “upside down” —…
- The National Library of Australia’s Maps
- An article in Australian Geographic about the map holdings of the National Library of Australia, and its work to get them digitized and put online. Previously: Australia in Maps….
- The Geography of Cheap Train Tickets
- Dmitry Adamskiy’s Cheap Tickets Map shows that the differences in rail ticket prices in Great Britain don’t always correlate with distance — sometimes it’s cheaper to go farther. I thought only airlines did that. Via Oliver….
- Putting Bath on the Map
- Putting Bath on the Map, an exhibition of maps from a private collection that show Bath, England from the 17th century to the present. “Collectively these maps tell the story of the city’s evolution from the medieval city to the…
- Winter from Space: ‘Cloud Streets’
- An eerily beautiful MODIS image of “cloud streets” across New England and the Maritimes from January 24, 2011. For another pretty image of winter from space, see this view of snow on the Korean peninsula. Previously: The Snowpocalypse from…
- Another OpenStreetMap Book Review
- Oliver O’Brien reviews OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. “The book succeeds in simultaneously being OpenStreetMap for Dummies, OpenStreetMap: The Missing Manual and the O’Reilly OpenStreetMap book…
- The State of OpenStreetMap in Canada
- The news earlier this month that MapQuest had added Canada (among other countries) to its suite of Open MapQuest sites — was something I’d been dreading for some time. I’ve been making contributions to OpenStreetMap’s Canadian maps for a year,…
- Record Melt in Greenland in 2010
- NASA Earth Observatory has a map showing the record melt of Greenland’s ice cap in 2010, during which the melt started earlier and lasted longer than usual. “This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager…
- Map of State Collective Bargaining Rights
- Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo: “With the battle going on in Wisconsin, we wanted to ask: How many states have collective bargaining with public employees’ unions? How many forbid it? Check out our map. It’s pretty revealing.”…
- Solar Flares and Surveying Accuracy
- The Ordnance Survey Blog explains why “space weather” — such as the coronal mass ejection the Sun let loose this week — is bad news for mapmaking: solar flares disrupt navigation satellite accuracy. During a space weather event, sat nav…
- National Broadband Map
- The National Broadband Map, launched yesterday, “is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States.” Not surprisingly, the $200-million project, with 25 million searchable records, shows a clear divide…
- New York Subway Map Quilt
- A whole cloth quilt based on a map of the New York subway system. Karyn’s used a diagrammatic map that confused me for a moment: since the map comes from the New York City Transit Authority, it dates from…
- The Ordnance Survey’s Cartography Team
- The Ordnance Survey Blog has the first of a three-part series that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the OS’s cartography team. The team, says the blog, is “responsible for deriving and maintaining cartographic databases, and providing the finished data…
- Maps and the City
- Marleen’s Maps and the City: a new map blog that might be worth keeping an eye on….
- New York City 311 Map
- New York City’s 311 service, which handles non-emergencies, has a map showing the number of service requests by community board district. You can search by service request category as well. No, I don’t know what’s happening in Manhattan 12 either….
- London Tube Map Exhibition
- An exhibition called Harry Beck and the London Tube Map, which is “based on a local private collection and traces the development of the London Underground map from the 19th Century to the present day,” is running at the Church…
- MapQuest Updates: Walking Directions, Android App
- A couple of recent announcements from MapQuest: walking and transit directions for the desktop/web version (playing catchup here — Google added walking directions in 2008, Bing in 2010 — but playing catchup is better than not playing at all) and…
- Maps in Comics: In Maps & Legends
- In Maps & Legends is a digital comic book series about a fantasy mapmaker who finds herself drawn into a mysterious world she’s been mapping. Kaitlin is a newly single freelance artist who is stuck in the rut of…
- Mapping California as an Island
- The Mapping of California as an Island: An Illustrated Checklist, by Glen McLaughlin with Nancy Mayo, is a cartobibliography that catalogues all known maps that depicted California as an island — 249 in all, along with title pages, frontispieces,…
- The Daily Chart and World Alcohol Consumption
- The map of global obesity (see previous entry) came to us from The Economist’s Daily Chart blog, which “publish[es] a new chart or map every working day.” Yesterday’s entry was a map of world alcohol consumption based on WHO data….
- The United States of Beer
- In response to the Houston Press’s map of the United States of Beer, which was found wanting in terms of the choices of beer for some states, GOOD has produced a map of the United States of GOOD Beer…
- Mapping the Retreat of the British Ice Sheet
- Researchers from the University of Sheffield geography department have created maps showing the pattern and rate of retreat of the British ice sheet during the last Ice Age. From the press release: The unique maps record the pattern and…
- Comments Restored
- The short version: comments are back. They’re powered by Disqus, and you can log in with one of several accounts (e.g., a Facebook, OpenID, Twitter or Yahoo account). The long version would have involved an extended whinge on the complexity…
- Casio Exilim EX-H20G Geotagging Camera
- I was wondering what had happened to Casio’s digital camera with built-in GPS, which had been announced last year at CES and was scheduled to be released last fall (see previous entry). Turns out that in the interim it…
- A GPS Review Roundup
- Links to a number of GPS reviews have been piling up in my files over the past few months, and mentioning them here is long overdue. During that time, GPS Tracklog has had reviews of the Garmin nüvi 2350LMT and…
- Pennsylvania Pocket Maps
- A new addition to Harold Cramer’s Historical Maps of Pennsylvania website: a section on early pocket maps: Briefly, a pocket map is a separately issued, folded map with a cover; they are sometimes also called case maps. Pocket maps have…
- Erin Eby’s Map Prints
- Erin Eby writes, “Like you, I love maps but found that many of them look old and outdated. I’m an Art Director by trade, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own.” She’s…
- Map Cushions
- Cath Young of My Bearded Pigeon designs and sells handmade map cushions featuring maps of many different locations. More at Inhabitat. Via @purplehayz (hat tip to Teresa)….
- Tim Wallace’s Bogus Art Maps
- Tim Wallace’s bogus art maps — maps of the contiguous 48 U.S. states in the style of various artists. Don’t miss the rest of his blog, either. Via @awoodruff….
- NYPL Map Rectifier
- PSFK has a piece on the New York Public Library’s Map Rectifier, ” a tool for digitally aligning (‘rectifying’) historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps.” There’s a how-to video….
- Mapping Global Obesity, 1980-2008
- A map from The Economist charts the growth in male global obesity between 1980 and 2008. It’s based on a study published in the Lancet: more detailed and granular data (and maps) are here. Says The Economist: “Polynesia aside,…
- Rotherham Metropolitan Borough’s Map Movies
- A series of “map movies” from the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council provide cute animations of public transport and exercise-based travel. “The Council has produced several map movies which show bus, cycling and walking routes around the borough,” says the website….
- Janne Aukia’s World of Adjectives
- Links to typographic maps of one sort or another — and it turns out that there is more than one sort — continue to come out of the woodwork, in numbers sufficient to warrant their own category. The latest…
- Map Museum Opens in La Jolla, California
- The San Diego Union-Tribune covers this week’s opening of the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla, California, which displays the private map collection — about 500 items — of Mike Stone. The museum is open by appointment until regular…
- Cameras with GPS from Canon and Pentax
- A couple of compact digital cameras with built-in GPS have been announced at the CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show in Japan this week: Canon’s PowerShot SX230 HS ($350) and Pentax’s Optio WG-1 GPS (pictured; also in black), which…
- Coffee Map of Ethiopia
- Art Sex: “One of my favorites. I love coffee and so I painted with it, staining watercolor paper and creating a map of Ethiopia.” Nicely done. Via Fuck Yeah Cartography!…
- Death by GPS
- Via many sources, this harrowing Sacromento Bee article about the dangers of relying on GPS navigation in Death Valley. It’s already cost some tourists — already woefully unprepared for the conditions — their lives. Increasingly, park rangers say tourists are…
- Andy Proehl’s Typographic Maps
- The typographic maps keep coming. Andy Proehl writes to share a link to a set of typographic maps he’s been working on in his off hours. “I have a bunch more in mind and am working towards a complete…
- UK Crime Map
- Last week, the British government launched an online crime map that offered street-level crime statistics. The website promptly crashed from the onslaught of visitors, which hit 18 million per hour at one point. News coverage: BBC News, The Guardian; The…
- The Water Cycle, Animated
- Interesting animation from NASA showing three elements of the water cycle on a global scale. “The three animations of atmospheric phenomena were created using data from the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for…
- Typographic Maps and Map Typography
- On the Making Maps blog, John Krygier adds to the increasing volume of posts on typographic maps, but also has a few things to say about map typography — i.e., how text is used on maps — including some excerpts…
- Mapping Central Park’s 19,630 Trees
- This preposterously detailed map of New York’s Central Park took two years to survey and includes every trail, building, monument, recreational area and waterway in the park. It also includes every single tree — all 19,630 of them. (See the…
- More on the Miami International Map Fair
- Earlier this week I made reference to the Miami International Map Fair; here’s a short news item about the Fair from the Latin American Herald Tribune. Previously: Miami International Map Fair 2009; Miami International Map Fair….
- Stephen Walter
- I mentioned Stephen Walter’s detailed hand-drawn typographic maps of Liverpool (and London — which made the Magnificent Maps exhibit) all too briefly in this entry. Fortunately, the Guardian had a profile of him this week: apparently Berlin is his…
- Flip That Map!
- The 1699 map of North America by John Thornton that sold for something like £200,000 at auction last month is back on the market: the buyer, Daniel Crouch, is bringing the map to the Miami International Map Fair this weekend,…
- Daniel Huffman and His River Maps
- Daniel Huffman, author of the Cartastrophe blog about bad map design and — more recently — the map of profanity on Twitter, not only has a new blog called somethingaboutmaps, but his most recent mapping project is a series…
- Mapping the Protests in Egypt
- The New York Times’s interactive map tracks each day of the protests in Cairo. Esri’s Egypt Events Map “pulls in social media related to the protests that have occurred in Egypt since January 25, 2011” — which is to say,…
- National Geographic Giant Traveling Maps
- On paper, the idea of National Geographic’s Giant Traveling Maps seems almost ludicrous. These are truly giant maps — 26 feet by 33 to 35 feet (8m by 10-10.7 m) — that ship folded and rolled in tubes 10 to…
- Mapping Scientific Collaboration
- Inspired by Paul Butler’s Facebook visualization, Olivier Beauchesne has constructed something similar based on a database of scientific collaboration: “From this data, I extracted and aggregated scientific collaboration between cities all over the world. For example, if a UCLA…
- The Snowpocalypse from Space
- Here’s a look at today’s snowstorm that hit much of North America, taken at 1445 UTC by one of NASA’s GOES satellites. Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project. NASA’s Earth Observatory has more views of this weather system, including this animation…
- Auctioned Buell Map to Be Displayed at Library of Congress
- An update on the story of the copy of Abel Buell’s 1784 map of North America that was auctioned off by the New Jersey Historical Society — to no small amount of controversy — last December. The map was…
- The Map Room Moves and Upgrades
- The Map Room has a new address: it’s now at maproomblog.com. I figured that after nearly eight years and four thousand entries, this little blog has earned itself the right to its own domain name. All links to old addresses…
