June 2011
- The End
- Today, after more than eight years and more than 4,000 posts, regular blogging on The Map Room comes to an end. The blog will stay online and the archives will be accessible for as long as I have anything to…
- How GPS Eats Our Brains
- Sometimes great links sit in my to-do list for far too long. This is one of the best: I should have posted it a year and a half ago. Their site isn’t responding right now, but when it gets back…
- Sabine Réthoré
- French artist Sabine Réthoré works with maps and globes from a different perspective. Her globes frequently spin the world on a different axis; in her maps, north is often not up. At right: Lovely Place 1, 2005-2007….
- Nikki Rosato
- Wired’s Underwired blog examines the work of artist Nikki Rosato, who creates human forms by cutting away at maps, leaving only roads and rivers behind. Here’s her artist statement: Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and…
- Mapnificent
- Mapnificent is a neat tool that shows the area that can be reached by walking or public transit from a given point — the idea being that you can figure out, for example, which neighbourhoods would be within a…
- Twitter-Mapping the Japanese Earthquake
- Twitter has a couple of interesting visualizations of tweets, replies and retweets to and from Japan immediately following the March 11 earthquake. “On Twitter, we saw a 500 percent increase in Tweets from Japan as people reached out to friends,…
- Mapping Sea Turtle Nesting Sites
- Earlier this month, GIS and Science reported that a map of green turtle nesting sites by Andrew DiMatteo, cartographer for the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Project, won this year’s International Conservation Mapping Competition. The map was…
- Visualizing Early Washington
- Mark Tully writes with a link to the above video, part of the Visualizing Early Washington DC project, which I’ve seen before but (as has sometimes happened) I never seem to have gotten round to posting it. Here’s a…
- Fantasy Map Roundup
- Author Lev Grossman interviews Roland Chambers, the artist who created the maps for his novels The Magicians and The Magician King (forthcoming). Via io9. Meanwhile, illustrator Mike Schley writes to share a link to maps he produced for children’s…
- The Earth Lit Up at Night
- The Daily Mail has posted a collection of astronaut photos of the Earth at night taken from the International Space Station. Via @spacefuture….
- Mapping Trade Routes from Ship Logs
- David Hopp sent me a note about his new website, CLIWOC Repurposed. “The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) was a project sponsored by the European Union from 2001 through 2003. Meteorological data was extracted from the logbooks…
- New Edition of Ortelius Atlas Maps
- Via MapHist comes word of the publication of the second, revised edition of Marcel van den Broecke’s Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide. “This very practical and informative manual gives an extensive overview and a description of all the…
- Mapping Avalanches from Space
- The European Space Agency has launched a pilot study to see if avalanches can be mapped from space, to determine whether a road has been blocked — handy in remote regions where observation stations are few on the ground and…
- Another Street View Update
- Another Street View update, which Google is calling “our biggest update yet” — no new countries, it seems, but “[n]ew imagery is now available for 13 of our established Street View countries: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania,…
- The New Normal Temperatures
- Whenever I see a weather forecast, it’s usually accompanied by normal temperatures for the day. In NOAA’s case, that normal is calculated from a 30-year average, updated every decade. NOAA just updated those norms, Dan Satterfield reports, and as…
- Royal Canadian Mint’s Toronto Map Coin
- I’ve seen a lot of maps in a lot of places in the eight years I’ve been writing this blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map on a coin. The Royal Canadian Mint is producing a limited-edition…
- Reykjavík Center Map
- One of the more unique interactive city maps I have seen to date is the Reykjavík Center Map, an online map of Iceland’s capital. Yes, it’s a pushpin map, but it uses an isometric projection (which I’ve seen in…
- ESA Releases Map of Arctic Sea Ice
- The European Space Agency has released a map of sea ice thickness in the Arctic based on observations by the CryoSat-2 satellite. “CryoSat measures the height of the sea ice above the water line, known as the freeboard, to…
- Map of the Square and Stationary Earth
- With his 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, Orlando Ferguson made visual his emphatic claim that the earth was flat. One hundred and eighteen years later, one of the last remaining copies is being donated to the…
- There’s No Fish Here
- Drawing on data from this study, David McCandless maps the decline in North Atlantic fish stocks over the past century. “Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or…
- OSM for Beginners: Instructional Videos
- I’m increasingly interested in getting more people to contribute to OpenStreetMap, so I will happily note David Ellam’s instructional videos, which are screencasts that show you, step-by-step, how to use Potlatch to add points of interest, roads and areas. Via…
- Rare Book Feast on a 1953 World Atlas
- Rare Book Feast, a video series “celebrating the timeless beauty of books in the age of digital ephemera” (as Maria Popova puts it), opens with a look at the privately printed World Geo-Graphic Atlas (1953), now a collector’s item….
- The 50,000 Nearest Galaxies
- Yesterday’s APOD was a map of the 50,000 nearest galaxies in infrared light, based on data collected by the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (io9)….
- Google Applies for Chinese Mapping Licence
- Speaking of China, Reuters and ZDNet (among others) report that Google has applied for a licence to continue to operate Google Maps in China. Drip, drip. Via @geospatialnews and @ogleearth. Previously: An Update on Google Maps in China. Update: Ogle…
- National Geographic Criticized for Chinese Names of Tibetan Places
- A few months back, Tibettruth, a website advocating Tibetan independence, blasted National Geographic for changing to Chinese names of Tibetan places and accused them of violating their own policy of being apolitical. “Such an action, taken we must imagine with…
- Disease Maps Reviewed
- Paul Di Filippo reviews Tom Koch’s Disease Maps in the Barnes and Noble Review. “What cannot be overlooked about this book is something incidental but overwhelming: the visual beauty of these maps. Colored and drawn by hand in most…
- Schematic Transit Maps Affect Passengers’ Travel Choices
- More fodder for the long-running argument between geographically accurate subway maps and system diagrams in the style of Beck’s London underground map: a new study suggests that schematic transit maps — and the London tube map in particular — distort…
- Google Drops TomTom in France
- Google continues to replace mapping data from other providers like TomTom (Tele Atlas) with its own data pulled together from multiple services. Most recently it was the turn of France, Monaco and Luxembourg, whose TomTom-derived map has been replaced by…
- Chicago Model City
- Chicago Model City is a 320-square-foot model of downtown Chicago. The models were printed by a 3D printer from digital files. It’s on display at the Chicago Architecture Foundation; free admission. Above, a video of a visit to the…
- Jimapco’s Map Room
- The Albany Times-Union has a story about local map publisher Jimapco. They’ve recently moved into online maps, launching their Map Room website (no relation). “Map Room features colorful, interactive maps of Capital Region features from tax rates to golfing and…
- Early Modern Caricature Maps
- The Boston Globe points to Donna Seger’s blog entry in which she has collected caricature maps from the early modern period. “The shift from conceptual to more realistic cartography in the early modern era is a very evident and important…
- Redesigning the Washington Metro Map
- The Washington Post on the upcoming redesign of the Washington Metro system map: “More than three decades ago, Lance Wyman designed the Metro map’s iconic interlocking colored lines, which have become the symbol of the transit system for millions…
- David Imus in The Oregonian
- Cartographer David Imus is in the news again: The Oregonian has an interview. Imus’s map, The Essential Geography of the United States of America, won the 2010 best of show award from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. Previously: David…
- Garmin Adds Cameras to GPSMAP 62 Series
- Garmin seems to be adding cameras to a lot of its top-line handhelds: now it’s the turn of the GPSMAP 62 series, which will get the five-megapixel-camera-equipped 62sc and 62stc units in the third quarter of 2011. Adding the camera…
- Mapmaking, Map Mashups and Activism
- Nancy Scola on Tech President: “Every time something happens in the world these days, somebody makes a map about it. […] But the growth of the digital mapping space makes it worth considering things from the perspective of the people…
- More Aerial Imagery of Tornado Damage
- Google Maps Mania links to NOAA’s collection of aerial tornado damage imagery from April and May, and has assembled a gallery of before-and-after images of the tornado damage (via)….
- Pentax Announces GPS Unit for Its Digital SLRs
- Pentax already makes a compact digital camera with built-in GPS (see previous entry) so their announcement yesterday of a GPS unit for use with some of their digital SLRs is not too surprising. The $250 O-GPS1 GPS unit works…
- Garmin Announces New eTrex, Rino Units
- Garmin announced new GPS handhelds this week: new eTrex handhelds yesterday (product site) and new Rino handhelds today (product site). Both series have been around for ages: the eTrex series is Garmin’s entry-level handheld GPS receiver; the Rino series combines…
- Review: OpenStreetMap (Ramm, Topf and Chilton)
- OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton UIT Cambridge, 2010. Paperback, 352 pp. ISBN 978-1-906860-11-0 Last year saw the publication in English of two books about OpenStreetMap. This one,…
