The Map Room

William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, published in 1912, is apparently a cult classic, with the usual fan-generated materials, including, notably (else why I would I mention?), maps. Jeff Patterson writes to point us to this page, which he describes as “[p]art of a site dedicated to William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, this page has what appear to be fan drawn maps of the land in question. The interesting part is the variety of skill and approach in rendering the maps.”

This illustration of the human body as a road map — veins and arteries appear as expressways, for example — seems to be a very, very neat medical illustration exercise (via Kottke and Muxway).

A 1632 map of Canada by Samuel de Champlain and a satellite image of the country are featured on the back of the new Canadian $100 bill, which went into circulation today (CBC).

And while I’m at it — boy, do my obsessions ever spill out on this site — here’s the system map for the modern-day Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. Map details are in PDF format and show stations and track mileage. (Related: CN Rail Maps.)

An extensive web site about the Great Northern Railway in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley includes reproductions of 1890s-era maps of railroads in the Pacific Northwest and early twentieth-century maps of the Fraser Valley region.

Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into a map in a web-ready format. (Thanks again, Huw.)

“[D]atabases of all types of crime, plotted on detailed local maps, have become a powerful new crime-fighting tool,” says a BBC report on the use of mapping technology by police in Britain. One example given: tracking arson by teens in the Midlands. (Thanks, Huw.)

Lost in Seattle is an experiment I’d like to see repeated everywhere. It’s a clickable map of downtown Seattle that shows street-level businesses. I’ve seen this kind of detail on some maps, particularly of downtown commercial areas, but this is a good online implementation. A mobile version would be killer. (via Muxway)

This is fascinating: a collection of hand-drawn maps — the sort that people giving someone directions scribble down on a scrap of paper or napkin.

i collect personal maps people draw. one’s memory and perception of a place is very personal, so each is a reflection, however small or large, of how the individual connects to their environment: knowing, organizing, and understanding it.

(via The Byrdhouse)

Subway systems of the world, presented at scale (via Kottke). I only know Paris’s system personally (see previous entries: Paris Metro, Maps as Mnemonic Aid — My Trip to Paris in 1997), and it looks like surface trams, but not buses or regional commuter lines, have been included; it looks like commuter rail may have been included for other cities, which look bigger or at least more spread out. The dividing line between “commuter rail” and “subway” is pretty arbitrary anyway. Mutter, mutter, nitpick.

Stephen King’s official web site has a map of Maine that includes the fictional towns — like Castle Rock and Derry — from his works. It’s a popup from the Miscellany page.

Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 (at the Library of Congress as Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869) has maps, including digital scans of a number of original maps from that period. (via Plep)

I’ve posted enough maps of London here that I was sure that I had posted Greenwood’s Map of London, 1827 before, but apparently not. So here you go: an interactive version that allows you to click on individual panels to zoom closer. (via Plep)

MacMinute reported updates to desktop mapping and GPS software for the Macintosh yesterday: EarthDesk 2.5, which generates a realtime map of the Earth on your desktop; and MacGPS 5.0, third-party software for using (normally Windows-only) GPS receivers with a Mac. (See previous entry: Mac Mapping Software.)

Space Imaging presents what they call the top ten Ikonos satellite images for 2003 (via MetaFilter). And there’s some more neat stuff in their gallery (also via MetaFilter).

Non-profit community groups do not have the same research resources that governments and corporate entities do. As far as mapping and GIS data is concerned, the New York Public Interest Research Group is trying to change that with its Community Mapping Assistance Project. The project’s director, Steven Romalewski, wrote me a few days ago:

NYPIRG’s Community Mapping Assistance Project (a team of six people, part of a nonprofit organization) uses GIS to help other nonprofits achieve their missions. We’ve helped more than 300 groups since 1997, but recently have shifted our focus to online mapping services… .

For us, our mapping sites all part and parcel of an effort to “democratize” data and provide powerful new tools with a community-based focus. Each site uses GIS technologies that few other nonprofits have tapped into, but that government agencies and the private sector have used to great effect. The websites use government data in in new and innovative ways, often to provide services that most government agencies would never provide. And they give local neighborhoods and individuals a window on their world that would’ve been daunting, at best, and maybe impossible for the average citizen or block association to obtain. The sites have helped level the “playing field” in New York to a great extent, so public agencies and large companies don’t have a monopoly on information.

For links to some interesting sites that have been assisted by the project, I’ll point you to Social Design Notes’s post; Steven contacted them too, but they beat me to the punch. Have a look.