The Map Room

Megan Hurst writes to tell us about her Memory Mapping project: “Memorymapping.com is a site I co-created which invites visitors to draw maps of places they’ve lived based solely on memory. Their maps are then saved in a database and re-displayed — categorized by country, county and city.” Backing up the concept — which was the basis of an exhibition in 2001 — is a ColdFusion database and an online app that allows visitors to draw their maps on-site. (With, it must be said, inevitable results.)

Joel takes a look at a couple of software packages that do neat things with satellite imagery: Keyhole, which was taken over by Google a while back; and NASA World Wind. They’re Windows-only, so I can’t try them out — if you have, comment on this thread or drop me a line and tell me what you think.

The World Sunlight Map is a neat trick: it shows which parts of the Earth are currently in daylight and which are in darkness. It’s a simulation that begins with composite images of the Earth by day (sans clouds) and by night (with lights), and it adds clouds from current composite images of the planetary cloud cover. Via MetaFilter.

This page on the differences between editions of Richard Adams’s Watership Down also has scans of the different editions’ maps (the 1972 original hardback had something that looks like a UTM grid; the 1973 Puffin paperback had a more traditional fantasy-literature map by Pauline Baynes, who did maps for Lewis and Tolkien). I’d love to know more about these maps if anyone could provide any information. Via Things Magazine.

These maps of Ukraine’s presidential election results (originals here and here) illustrate the problem: suspiciously higher voter turnouts (compared to the first round of voting) and regionally polarized results (though, as Le Sabot Post-Moderne points out, that’s including the questionable votes, and the real picture may well be quite different).

Ezra Padoa writes with a few links to collections of Russian/Soviet maps. First off are collections of Soviet military topographical maps. Says Ezra, “I’ve heard that Soviet military cartographers could be tried for treason if they made any mistakes. At this site you can find many fruits of that evil genius.” And at that site (which is a general digital topographical map archive, containing maps from several sources, not just Soviet) there’s a link to this site, which has even more Soviet topo maps.

In a related vein, Ezra also shares a link to Old Maps of Russian Asia — early 20th-century maps of central Asia.

Organizational note: the recent posts about the U.S. election results have been moved, along with related older posts, from the News & Politics category to the new Electoral Maps category.

The University of Openness (previous entry) has a new project to make copyright-free street maps of London; the page explains the details and MO, but it looks like it’ll involve an awful lot of GPS tracing and GIS data processing from diverse sources and by divers hands. It must be said that, like many open-source projects, they’re essentially reinventing the wheel in order to make it free/freely available — and doing it harder. Via Here Be Dragons.

This past week the media reported the death of Arthur Robinson, whose eponymous projection was adopted by the National Geographic Society for its world maps. He died Oct. 10 at the age of 89. Obituaries from the Arizona Republic (reprinting the NYT) and the Daily Telegraph; NPR has an interview with one of Robinson’s former students (RealAudio format).

More on the Robinson projection from the University of Wisconsin’s map library, which is named after him, and from Wikipedia. The Robinson projection was, like the less-successful (and, to my mind, inferior) Peters projection, intended to reduce the distortions inherent in the Mercator projection. The Mercator, as I mentioned earlier, was a navigational tool meant to preserve compass directions; the fact that it made Greenland look larger than South America was aesthetically and representationally incorrect, certainly, and made it unsuitable for general world maps. While the Robinson projection is essentially an aesthetic response to the Mercator, that’s entirely the point of world maps, which aren’t going to be used for navigation in any event.

Via MetaFilter, among other sources.

A collection of contemporary, black and white World War II maps, provided by the University of San Diego’s History department. Informative: some of the maps cover less-famous theatres of war. Via The Cartoonist.

A small map exhibit at the Wayland Town Building in Wayland, Massachusetts — west of Boston — is running until Dec. 22. It’s called “The Art of Map Making, 1775-2005” and it focuses on local and regional maps; the article from the MetroWest Daily News has details.

Site owners are invariably far more interested in their sites’ traffic stats than their readers are, but I hope you won’t mind this brief digression. Have a look at the daily page views (I don’t have discrete daily visitor stats) from August 1st to last Thursday.

Continue reading this entry.

After all that election nonsense, now for a bit of fun. Naturally, as a benighted colonist, I don’t get the joke, but here, via The (always nifty) Cartoonist, is London (and the rest of the known universe) as seen by North Londoners (PDF).

The deceased equine is yet insufficiently flogged. Wonkette found a couple I hadn’t seen elsewhere: this map showing red and blue percentages by state; and this CBS News map showing the sizes of each county in 3D, which is kind of misleading because it shows counties as all blue or all red, which obscures the margin of each plurality — i.e., it’s Not Purple.

Now that ought to do it for a while. Right? Please?

(See previous entries: Even More U.S. Presidential Election Maps; More U.S. Presidential Election Maps; U.S. Election Results Cartogram; U.S. Election Results; CSPAN’s Election Map.)

You can’t read political blogs for five minutes without stumbling across another cartographic interpretation of last week’s election results. On the one hand, I’m finding all sorts of cool maps; on the other hand, I have to read political blogs. (Oops. Now I’m in for it.)

First, here are some more cartograms of state, county, and purple-map results (via Daily Kos).

Next, The Blogging of the President presented a whole bunch of new maps I hadn’t seen yet.

• The New York Times’s interactive map morphs between a straight geographical representation and a sort of block cartogram that makes each state’s size proportional to its share of the electoral college.
• Another interactive election thingy at the NYT includes a neat map of the popular vote by population density and a map showing the pluralities won in each county — essentially to show that Kerry’s strengths were in urban areas. (The Washington Post had something similar.)
• Music for America shows the electoral college map for voters under 30.
• A modest proposal to reform the electoral college to end its overrepresentation of rural areas.

(See previous entries: More U.S. Presidential Election Maps; U.S. Election Results Cartogram; U.S. Election Results; CSPAN’s Election Map.)

Election maps definitely have been a popular subject this past week: not only are different maps of the U.S. presidential results popping up all over the web, but traffic at The Map Room has more than tripled since Nov. 2 (2,300+ on Thursday). In that vein, and to let it ride, here are some more:

• Canada by Comparison. In the wake of those maps that split off the Democratic-majority areas and join them with Canada (excuse me?), this map attempts to show where in Canada the vote has been more than 45 per cent conservative. It’s only an approximation, because “conservative” doesn’t quite mean the same thing over here. (Also, we use blue for the Conservative Party and red for the Liberal Party, which this map inverts for U.S. political colours, which plays havoc with Canadian brains.)
• Switch shows which U.S. counties have switched from one party to the other between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
• U.S. county results with population contour lines. I have no idea how this works.

(Via Darren; via Richard. See previous entries: U.S. Election Results Cartogram; U.S. Election Results; CSPAN’s Election Map.)

Suresh has computed a cartogram of the election results, in which the counties are warped so that their sizes are proportional to the number of votes cast. (Via Jason. See previous entries: Cartograms and Map Distortions; Electoral Maps Made Proportional.)

The results of the U.S. presidential election have been mapped in a number of ways. For some, there are two Americas, and one of them is, um, Canada — instead of running away to Canada, some think Canada should come to them. Fun.

For others, America is purple. Instead of showing states as absolutely blue or red (representing Democrat and Republican majorities, respectively), Jeff colours each state a shade of purple to show the extent to which each is one way or the other: i.e. the bluer, the more Democratic. This map extends it to each county, which shows some really interesting patterns within each state. For comparison, here are the 2000 results.

Speaking of the county-by-county results, Richard links to non-purple county results maps for 2004 and 2000 (1, 2).

Update: See Terri Senft’s post on election maps.

Rare maps of the Aegean from 1447 to 1800 are on display at an exhibition at the Hellenic Society for the Protection of the Environment and Cultural Heritage — presumably in Athens — this month. I don’t have any other information than what is found in this brief notice in the Kathimerini, the Greek English-language paper.

A couple of satellite-imagery links from Plep; I don’t think I’ve seen these before.

• Satellite Images of Earth at Night, from the International Dark-Sky Association. Usually you see night maps of the entire planet (e.g. see previous entry: APOD: The Earth at Night); this time we get details of various cities and regions. Neat.
• The European Space Agency has a multimedia gallery of various satellite photos — some extremely neat stuff in this collection of 300+ images, including hurricanes and pyramids — and an image of the week feature.

People blogging the U.S. election tonight say they really like CSPAN’s map of the election results. Mouse over each state for the magic.

The London Tube Map Archive has a new URL, now that sitehouse.net is no longer operative. I don’t know when it happened: I linked to the old address in April 2003; The Cartoonist linked to the new address on Sunday.

Murky writes, “through no prior planning, I stumbled over the mappa mundi this weekend.” Here’s his account of his encounter with the Mappa Mundi in Hereford. (See previous entry: Mappæ Mundi.)

Another article from Nicholas Crane based on his BBC series, “The Map Man” — this time in the Telegraph. This one’s about the Ordnance Survey’s triangulation pillars, the use of which in surveys eventually resulted in a series of one-inch-scale maps.

There are few sights more stirring to a map enthusiast than the tapered outline of a triangulation pillar emerging from the mist of a bleak mountain. There are, or were, 6,173 of these mute beacons — each hand-cast in concrete, 4 feet high and 2 feet square at its base — scattered the length and breadth of Britain… .

Erected during one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the Ordnance Survey, these trapezial monuments gave rise to the maps that opened the door to the British countryside.

(See previous entries: Profile of Tube Map’s Creator; TV Series About Maps.)