The Map Room

Roger Baskes, president of the International Map Collectors’ Society, responds to the Forbes Smiley business (covered here at great length) with an article on what collectors can do to deter map thieves. In the article, which first appeared in the IMCoS quarterly journal but has been reprinted on Tony Campbell’s Map History/History of Cartography site, he looks both at collectors’ self-interest and in the greater good that collectors can support.

Clearly there are practical, legal, and financial reasons why collectors should not wish to buy stolen maps. Many of these have been discussed in connection with the current publicity. Certainly, in most jurisdictions, even an innocent purchaser for value cannot acquire good title to a map when claimed by a party from whom it has been stolen. The complications of this are manifold. A map stolen from a library may be sold to another dealer, or a third, then to a collector, who in turn may sell it at auction or give it to another library (or even the victimized library itself). Running the stolen map back up the chain may or may not work— is each party willing and solvent? Does the refund bear interest? The successive prices may be higher or even lower. Commissions are paid by auction buyers and sellers. Donors, especially in America, have claimed tax benefits. The suggestion sometimes made to secure a mitigating tax benefit by giving it back to the victimized library is at least problematical when the donor does not have good title.

I would urge also that there are significant ethical reasons why collectors should be actively involved in preventing map theft, reasons which extend beyond the criminal law and the eighth of the Ten Commandments. The first reason is also a practical one: if there were no efficient market for stolen maps, maps would seldom be stolen. Collectors themselves are likely to have occasionally stolen maps, but most maps certainly were taken to sell to collectors. But another reason, at least as compelling to my mind, is to preserve the integrity of our cultural, intellectual, and bibliographical heritage.

He urges collectors to support libraries’ security efforts and to establish where a map came from when doing business with a dealer. Via MapHist.

I should have mentioned before that I did a podcast interview a few weeks ago with Dailysonic’s Adam Varga about The Map Room; it’s now online as part of Dailysonic’s February 20 episode; my segment is at minute 20. Adam asked me about my favourite map site — the kind of question I usually go blank on. I had to think a few seconds before Adrian Leskiw’s collection of fictional road maps popped into my head; I think I chose well.

Yes, I’m still alive. Should be back to normal on Monday. Meanwhile:

The centre of Google Maps’s universe is apparently Coffeyville, Kansas.

And you thought talking on the phone while driving is bad. You’d think that consulting a map while driving wasn’t the safest thing, but it turns out that in-car GPS navigation systems are even worse in terms of distraction and safety.

Via James: The Where 2.0 conference is open for registration.

I’m still up to my neck in Olympics nonsense, but I’ve got a few links to share with you that have been accumulating in my “post these soon” file.

For all you tube map fanatics, a London Underground Map where the stations have been relabelled with anagrams of their names. Via Boing Boing.

The Spokane Journal of Business ran a story about the GIS certificate program at the University of Idaho Coeur d’Alene last week.

The Daily Telegraph’s “Auction Mouse” had a piece on antique maps on Sunday, talking about the investment value of old maps and all that. “Reproduction maps — those that are done photo-mechanically — should be avoided,” she writes. Sure, if you’re trying to spend money.

In a new article this week for the online journal Coordinates, map librarian David Y. Allen raises concerns that the so-called “Velasco Map,” a widely known map of northeastern North America that purportedly dates to 1610, may in fact be a nineteenth-century forgery. From the article abstract:

The map contains numerous oddities, and many features on the map do not appear on other maps made in the early seventeenth century. Overall it seems anachronistic and it stands in isolation from other maps made around 1600. Although no single feature on the map proves beyond a doubt that it is a forgery, the overall weight of the evidence makes it seem highly probable that it is a fake. Tests on the paper, pigment, and handwriting of the map should be made to prove conclusively whether or not it is a forgery.

Read the article for the full treatment, and see also the commentary on Allen’s article by Kirsten Seaver. Via MapHist.

Google Earth makes the cover of this week’s issue of Nature: inside, an article by Declan Butler on the uses of virtual globes by scientists, available free; an editorial and a commentary on the use of Google Earth during natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistani earthquake) are behind the pay wall. More from Declan on his blog; see also Geography 2.0, Google Earth Blog and Kathryn Cramer.

Macworld takes a second look at Google Earth; meanwhile, Google Earth, which was previously Tiger-only, has been quietly made available for OS X 10.3.9. And finally, the first book about Google Earth is finally out — but it’s in German.

I’m not the most consistent of bloggers even at the best of times, but, depending on how things go, over the next two weeks posts to The Map Room might be a bit sporadic due to the demands of one of my other projects: DFL, the blog that celebrates last-place finishes at the Olympics.

On that note, though, there have been a few links relating to maps of the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy.

The Google Blog reports that the Torino area has been updated with high-resolution imagery for Google Local (i.e., Maps) and Google Earth, and there’s also a KMZ file with the Olympic venues.

Google Maps Mania links to a number of Olympics-related mashups.

And Cartography takes a look at the official maps available at the Torino 2006 web site.

GPS Mapping: Make Your Own Maps
by Rich Owings
Ten Mile Press, 2005. Softcover, 382 pp. ISBN 0-9760926-3-8

This is a book for people who want to get their hands dirty with mapping software and GPS units and generate maps from the combination of the two. Almost all the software covered is Windows-based, and the mapmaking part requires a GPS, so, as a Mac user who for some reason still doesn’t own a GPS unit, I was somewhat at a disadvantage while reading this book — I couldn’t try any of it out! But I can at least give you a sense of what you’re getting yourself into when you get this book.

Rich Owings is an outdoor enthusiast and the author of GPS Tracklog, a blog about GPS that focuses on reviews and outdoor use (see previous entry). For Owings, making your own maps means taking the tracks and waypoints generated by your GPS unit from your travels and plotting it on maps using software — and that’s the focus of GPS Mapping. This can be a lot of fun, and even useful — as he points out, sometimes you can even plot a hiking trail with greater accuracy than the topo map!

After introductions to the use of GPS and digital map data sources, both online and on CD-ROM (this material is very helpful, and very interesting, but too brief, and could be expanded), Owings delves into the meat of his books: step-by-step descriptions of how to use a GPS receiver with nearly two dozen software packages, with the pros and cons of each. It’s awfully comprehensive, and awfully impressive, and no doubt useful.

(Personally, I prefer a big-picture approach to software documentation — fewer step-by-step instructions, more general examples. I thought there were too many screenshots of menu items, but not enough of the software’s imagery. But I also know many people for whom the step-by-step approach and close focus is essential, so I’m probably in the minority.)

But Owings’s approach — essentially, providing a user’s manual for the software in question — is not without its limitations. First, as new versions of the software are released and old software goes obsolescent, the book will get dated very quickly. Technical manuals, which in rapidly changing fields can be outdated before they’re even published, depreciate like a new car. Fortunately, Owings is posting updates on the book’s web site — a reasonable fix. The second limitation is that there’s no way that the average user is going to use each program Owings describes: some are specific to one GPS brand, for example. For many readers, much of the book will go unused.

But, having said that, these limitations are the fault of technical manuals as a genre, rather than a shortcoming of this particular book. If you’re the outdoorsy sort, and you’d like a detailed guide to the full mapping potential of your GPS unit or a detailed survey of the available software, then this is your book. But GPS Mapping’s technical focus makes this a hands-on manual, not a casual read — i.e., have a GPS unit!

I received a review copy of this book. More on my book review policy.

Significant Blogspot outages rendered several favourite mapping blogs unavailable for portions of last weekend, including Cartography and GeoCarta.

The city of North Platte, Nebraska, its police department, and surrounding Lincoln County all use different GIS and CAD software to generate city maps; a move is underway to have them all share a common (and commonly developed) map.

A new edition of the Peters Map (see previous entry) has been released by ODT Maps with new supplemental material that shows other equal-area projections and tones down the proselytizing (it doesn’t bash Mercator). Thanks to Tony for the early heads-up; see also GeoCarta.

Via MapHist and MAPS-L, we learn that the New York Map Society is being reactivated; see also First Printing.

The Chicago Tribune profiles local map collector Robert A. Holland, whose book, Chicago in Maps, 1612 to 2002, was published late last year. From the article: “In a section of the book Holland thinks of as ‘worlds within worlds,’ the particulars that gave character to the city are mapped. There’s a 1931 cute but surprisingly accurate gangland map, a map from Esquire magazine showing the city’s jazz clubs from 1914 to 1928, and an ethnic map from 1982 by now Chicago Tribune writer Ron Grossman.”

• Buy Chicago in Maps, 1612 to 2002 at Amazon.com

Last week, the University of British Columbia released a childhood development atlas that maps the factors that affect the development of young children in B.C., comparing socioeconomic factors to vulnerability patterns.

The atlas reveals some interesting patterns. From the press release:

For example, the community of Vernon has several neighbourhoods with vulnerability rates well below what would be expected based on their socio-economic circumstances. Conversely, a nearby school district (Central Okanagan) has socio-economically “advantaged” neighbourhoods with higher vulnerability rates than might be expected.

The atlas, chock-full of well-done cartograms, is available for download online here; it’s a 33-MB PDF file.

MapQuest turned 10 years old yesterday; Westword has a long article by Alan Prendergast that looks at the company’s history and recent challenges — viz., the extra features provided by its competition. As has been reported before, MapQuest is rather skeptical of the features, APIs, and high-resolution imagery provided by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, but I did note this interesting take on the Google Maps API:

MapQuest, of course, already has licensing arrangements with hundreds of businesses that use its maps to show you how to get to their place. “Google has launched a free, very limited API [application programming interface],” Greiner says. “We plan on coming out with something to match and exceed what they’re doing. But there are many restrictions on them. Who knows when Google is going to put advertising on them? Our business clients are high-enterprise — for example, the hospitality and travel industry. They’re fearful of Google having the control.”

Via All Points Blog; see also Cartography.

See previous entries: AP: MapQuest and the Competition; What’s MapQuest Up To?

Now that it’s available for the Mac, Macworld reviews Google Earth.

Robert Gelb reviews Chandu Thota’s Programming MapPoint in .NET: “The bottom line is that if you are developing anything mapping related with Microsoft components, you gotta buy this book. Period.” (Via Chandu Thota.)

The Miami International Map Fair took place last weekend. Via First Printing.

In November, news broke of the discovery of the Soleto Map, an ostrakon discovered two years ago that depicted the Salentine peninsula. The fragment, dated to 500 BC, was characterized as possibly the oldest map yet discovered in the history of Western civilization. (See previous entry: The Western World’s Oldest Map.)

Now, however, there are some questions being raised as to the Soleto Map’s authenticity. In an article in the January-February issue of the Dutch-language Geschiedenis Magazine, archaeologist Douwe Yntema expressed his doubts about the ostrakon, aspects of which simply do not make sense for a fifth-century-BC artifact. The article is not online, and it would be in Dutch if it were, but Peter van der Krogt summarized Yntema’s concerns on MapHist; see also Claus Moser’s post on Kartentisch (in German).

Yntema’s guess is that it was a prank played on the Soleto Map’s discoverer that got out of hand — and now it’s too far along to fess up. Should be interesting to see what happens next.

The UN atlas One Planet, Many People has been making the rounds of the mapping blogosphere lately — see, for example, Very Spatial and Le Petit Blog Cartographique — probably due to it being featured on the Landsat project news site last month. I posted about it last June. Since then, though, it’s not only available through Amazon.com, but it’s been brought to my attention that you can download the entire atlas, chapter by chapter, as PDF files.

See previous entry: One Planet, Many People.

• Buy One Planet, Many People at Amazon.com

Google Maps Hacks is now out and Directions has a review: “This book, started not long after Google Maps debuted last February, is dated. Google Maps is now known as Google Local. Throughout, we hear about how the software is beta and how the API was not released officially until July, at the Where 2.0 conference (more on that later). That does not make the book useless, far from it; but it makes the reader well aware of ‘Internet time’ and ‘book time.’”

• Buy Google Maps Hacks at Amazon.com

A couple of weeks ago, an announcement that a Chinese map had been discovered that “proved” that the Chinese had “discovered” the Americas before Columbus swept the world news media. The Economist broke the story on the 16th; see also Reuters (at CNN), National Geographic News, and Time Asia.

Shortly thereafter, followup stories began appearing that called this extraordinary claim into question. Because I was insufficiently on the ball to report it in detail — my mistake was to try for an easily procrastinated single comprehensive post rather than to post frequent updates — I’ll sum it up for you now.

In a nutshell, this started in 2001, when a lawyer and collector named Liu Gang bought a map from a dealer in Shanghai for $500. He had it looked at by experts, but did not have a clear sense of what it was. After reading Gavin Menzies’s book, 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America, he (with Menzies’s help) concluded that the map, which dated itself to 1763, was a reprint of a 1418 map that proved that the Chinese were aware of (and discovered) much of the New World.

But first, a bit about Menzies, who claims, both in his book and on his web site, that the Chinese admiral Zheng He, who voyaged to East Africa, also made several long voyages of discovery in the 1420s, including to Australia, New Zealand and the Americas (thereby discovering America long before Columbus). The Menzies theory is dismissed by serious scholars, who point to selective use of evidence and give it about the same credibility as Hapgood’s theories about the Piri Reis map. For an example, see Robert Finlay’s dismissive review of the book. Outside of his followers, Menzies appears to be seen as something of a charlatan or a quack.

Anyway, Menzies seized upon Liu’s map as evidence of his theory — never mind the fact that the map was purportedly dated three years before Menzies claimed Zheng visited the New World. A piece of the map, Liu says, is being sent for carbon dating, though that leaves aside the question of proving that a map dated 1763 is an accurate reproduction of an identical, though now nonexistent, map from 1418.

The academic reaction to Liu’s map was that it was either (a) an 18th-century map that drew its information from European sources, or (b) a more recent forgery, with the consensus of opinion tilting strongly towards the latter. They point to anachronistic uses of language on the map (using a term for Christianity that was not in use prior to the sixteenth century, for example), the fact that fifteenth-century Chinese cartographers would not have known about the kind of projection used in the map, and the details on the map itself — too many continental interior details for a map purportedly made by sailors, along with errors that correspond all too well to known European mapping errors.

For Chinese scholars’ reactions, see Gong Yingyang in the New York Times, Mao Peiqi in this Interfax story (via GeoCarta), and Jin Guoping in his blog (translated from here). Jin points out that the map uses simplified characters in use only in the last 50 years.

For more on the response, see the Guardian, Here Be Dragons, MetaFilter, National Geographic News, and Reuters (via Swissinfo).

I’m indebted to the members of MapHist for their cogent discussion of the map and its veracity early on in the cycle. Would that I could have gotten my act together on this sooner.

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography is an enormous collection of photographs taken by astronauts over a period of decades. From the site: “Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken photographs of the Earth. Our database tracks the locations, supporting data, and digital images for these photographs. We process images coming down from the Space Shuttle and International Space Station on a daily basis and add them to the more than 630,209 views of the Earth already made accessible on our website.” Via La Cartoteca.

Engadget reports that Sony will release mapping software for the Playstation Portable. No GPS; in Japan only. (Original Japanese announcement here.)

See previous entry: PSP Subway Maps.

Issue two of the Journal of Maps (see previous entry) is now online, as is a call for papers for their upcoming poster session at GESS 2006— the conference of the British Geomorphologic Research Group — in June.

Richard Crawford writes, “Is there any software that will enable my Mac to open and read the Ordnance Survey Software and maps that I have on my PC? Or another program for Mac that will open .qct, .qem or .mmi files?”

This is outside my geographical expertise so I can’t speak to this at all. Any suggestions, or is this simply not doable?

Since yesterday, AdBrite has started running network ads — for such relevant products as job sites, online pharmacies, etc. — on the ad strip on the right sidebar despite my wishes; I’ve e-mailed them to complain, but based on what’s happening on other blogs, it looks like (a) it’s a system-wide problem and (b) AdBrite is being none too responsive about it. I haven’t quite figured out what to do if they don’t resolve it quickly, but I’ve got a few options. Your forebearance, please.

Update, 1:40 PM: This now appears to have been fixed; more info here.