May 2011
- Fantasy Maps and Role-Playing Games
- Scott Taylor’s essay about fantasy maps on the Black Gate website is actually about maps of fantasy role-playing games — they’re not the same. Via MapHist….
- Mapping Pedestrian Deaths in the U.S.
- Transportation for America’s report on preventable pedestrian deaths includes this online map showing almost all the pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. (the ones with location data, at least) from 2001 to 2009. Via Bob Ashley….
- Mapping Measles in Europe
- The Guardian maps measles cases across Europe. There are more of them lately, thanks to fewer children being administered the MMR vaccine….
- An iOS Roundup
- I’ve done a lousy job trying to keep up with all the map- and navigation-related stuff coming out for the iOS platform (i.e., iPhone, iPad, iPod touch). There’s just too much out there. (Someone could do a whole blog about…
- Spanish Elections Map
- A really good map of election results in Spain since 1987. The developers explain: “We were contacted by the Spanish national television station RTVE to create a visualization tool allowing users to understand the 2011 Spanish electoral results in the…
- India Censors The Economist’s Kashmir Map
- Copies of the latest issue of The Economist distributed in India have been censored: a map showing the disputed status of Kashmir has been covered over by a white sticker in some 30,000 copies, BBC News reports. I knew the…
- Tornado-Generating Storms Seen from Space
- Animations generated from GOES-13 satellite imagery of the supercell thunderstorms from the past week, including the storm that generated the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri on May 22: here and here. Via Phil Plait….
- Map of Magellan’s Voyage Discovered
- An item on Australian current affairs program 7.30 about the discovery by map dealer Frederik Muller of a 16th-century map describing Magellan’s voyages: Lorenz Fries’s Tabula moderna alterius hemispherius. Muller is giving a presentation on the Fries map at Southern…
- Grímsvötn
- Another year, another Icelandic volcano with a difficult-to-pronounce name. Here’s Earth Observatory’s satellite image of Grímsvötn’s ash cloud (above) and Ogle Earth’s post about visualizing said ash cloud in Google Earth. Here’s an ESA article on the ash plume…
- Antique Map Bedding
- Linda Zellmer passes on a link to bedsheets styled like antique maps from Cuddledown….
- A Question on Low-Cost Map Restoration
- Jonathan Longobardi writes: I recently came upon an 1776 map of New York Island that came from an atlas that accompanied the first edition of John Marshall’s The Life of George Washington published in 1807. It is truly a beautiful…
- Garmin Announces Montana Series
- Garmin has announced the Montana series of GPS receivers, which seems to be an attempt to make an all-round, all-in one, GPS unit — i.e., it can be used on the trail as much as it can be used…
- PostGIS in Action in Print, Reviewed
- I’ve been hearing about PostGIS in Action for a couple of years now, so I’m surprised that it only came out (in print form, at least) last month. Richard Marsden reviews it on Geoweb Guru: “This is the first…
- Ordnance Survey Announces Colour-Blind Map Style
- The Ordnance Survey Blog has announced a colour scheme that accomodates people with colour vision deficiency (CVD) — i.e., colour-blindness. “Rather than creating separate colour schemes for those with various forms of CVD and those without, we were working…
- Map Hat
- Admit it: you want one of these. Via Boing Boing….
- Comparing Canadian Federal Election Results
- Michael Gregotski writes, “On one of your posts you asked if anyone else had any maps from the [Canadian] election. Here’s an application I put together that compares the 2011, 2008 and 2004 results (I skipped the 2006 election becasue…
- Library of Congress Conference on Civil War Mapping
- Tomorrow at the Library of Congress: Re-Imagining the U.S. Civil War: Reconnaissance, Surveying and Cartography, a one-day conference on Civil War mapping. Free to attend and open to the public, but a reservation is required to attend. (Don’t know whether…
- Southeast U.S. Tornado Tracks
- It’s amazing how clear the damage from tornadoes appears in satellite imagery. Above, an ASTER visible-infrared image of a tornado’s path near Tuscaloosa, Alabama: “In the picture, captured just days after the storm, pink represents vegetation and aqua is…
- Because Atlases Should Be Bigger than You
- If the 18½×24-inch, $4,000, limited-edition Earth atlas wasn’t exclusive or enormous enough for you, how about the six-foot-by-four-and-a-half-foot, 264-pound, $100,000, 31-copy platinum edition? Klencke’s got some competition, I see. Coverage in the spring 2011 issue of ArcNews. Previously: World’s Largest…
- 2012 Olympic Torch Relay Map
- BBC News’s map of the 2012 Olympic torch relay route doesn’t actually include the route, just the places the relay will be passing through; I imagine the exact route is to be determined. Via @HodderGeography….
- London Cycle Map Wins GeoVation Award
- Cycle Lifestyle’s London Cycle Map a bicycle map of London designed by Simon Parker in the style of Beck’s tube map, is one of six winners of the 2011 GeoVation challenge. The award came with £6,000 in funding. Here’s…
- Mapping the Early/Distant Universe
- Wired Science on astronomers’ efforts to map the distant (and young) universe. “Previous versions plotted the locations of galaxies within 7 billion light-years of Earth. The new version, however, charts clouds of hydrogen in a swath between 10 billion and…
- Twelve Maps of the 2011 Canadian Federal Election Results
- A user on SkyscraperPage Forum has produced a dozen maps of the results of the 2011 Canadian federal election, including maps showing each party’s popular vote by riding and maps that show what the results would have looked like…
- Landsat Data Available through ArcGIS Online
- Esri reports that Landsat data dating back to 1972 is now available through ArcGIS Online….
- Mercator Revisited
- A conference taking place next spring in Belgium: Mercator Revisited: Cartography in the Age of Discovery runs from April 25 to 28, 2012, in Sint-Niklass, to mark Mercator’s 500th birthday. “The conference focuses on the place of cartography in general…
- The Map Reader
- Martin Dodge writes to let us know about The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, a collection of essays he co-edited with Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. “The volume excerpts over 50 key pieces of scholarly…
- Imagining a Rapid Transit Network for Ottawa and Gatineau
- Adam Bentley’s map of an imagined future rapid transit network for Ottawa and Gatineau has apparently generated a lot of online buzz; on Spacing Ottawa, he discusses the map’s inception and reception….
- Ken Jennings’s Map Book Is Coming in September
- We knew that Jeopardy force of nature Ken Jennings was working on a book about maps; now we know that the book, entitled Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, will be coming in September. Publishers Weekly has…
- The New York Times’s Natural Disaster Map
- At the end of last month, the New York Times published a map called Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster, measuring the risk to 379 U.S. metro areas from hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes. Matt Rosenberg doesn’t like…
- St. Augustine Map Exhibition: Five Centuries of Florida Maps
- The St. Augustine Record reports on a local map exhibition. Five Centuries of Our Coast: A Visual History of the Nation’s Oldest City, on now at the St. Augustine Historical Society’s Oldest House Museum Complex, “goes from a hand-drawn map…
- Alien Loves Predator’s New York Movie Map
- Alien Loves Predator’s New York Movie Map: “This is an illustrated 18″x24″ map of the history of films set in New York — more specifically, all the movies I could cram into a tiny 12-square-mile chunk of Manhattan. There’s…
- Cartography from the Age of Exploration
- Cartography from the Age of Exploration is an exhibition now running at the University of Florida’s Grinter Gallery until August 20. “This exhibition celebrates the 80th Anniversary of the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies with a collection…
- What Do You Call Proposed Streets on Maps?
- Whelden Merritt has a question: I am searching for a term or a name for fraudulent entries on maps and I don’t mean map traps as attempts to protect copyright. What I mean is proposed streets and subdivisions that seem…
- U.S. Food Stamp Usage by State
- A choropleth map from the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog showing the state-by-state rate of food stamp usage in the United States: it’s worst in Mississippi and Oregon, at 20.6 percent and 20 percent respectively. Via Google Maps…
- Railway Maps of the World Now Available
- Mark Ovenden reports that his new book, Railway Maps of the World, is now available; there’s an interview with him about the book on National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog. Previously: Railway Maps of the World. Update, May 7: A…
- Mapping the 2011 Canadian Federal Election Results
- Elections Canada, the agency that runs federal elections in this country, has posted its usual large PDF map of the preliminary results of Monday’s election. As always, maps of past elections are also available. (Previously: Elections Canada’s Big Elections…
- The Geospatial Revolution Project, Episode Four
- The fourth and final episode of the Geospatial Revolution Project is now live; it covers the use of geospatial technology to study and deal with climate change, drought, famine and disease, looks at the Map Kibera project as an…
- Early American Cartographies
- Via MapHist comes word of Early American Cartographies, a collection edited by Martin Brückner; its 14 essays will “examine indigenous and European peoples’ creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited.” Available in…
- Esri’s Storytelling with Maps Contest
- Esri’s Storytelling with Maps competition invites entrants to “[t]ell us your story and submit your best web map or mobile app that informs, educates, and engages the audience about a topic or event”; the map or app must have been…
- Osama Bin Laden’s Compound
- Using Google Earth or Google Maps to spot the compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan in which Osama Bin Laden was hiding (until, um, yesterday) is, it turns out, a bit problematic, since the compound is more recent than the available satellite…
- 16th-Century Maps vs. 21st-Century Satellite Images
- On The Atlantic’s website, a slideshow comparing modern-day satellite images of cities with city maps from the 1572 Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. It’s not as effective as you might think: the atlas plates haven’t been georeferenced (some…
