The Map Room

If you use LibraryThing to catalogue your books online, you might want to join the Maps and Atlases group, which I just created there.

More from the Hartford Courant on the libraries’ growing belief that Forbes Smiley may not have fessed up to all the maps he stole from them. In a nutshell (and as covered previously here), the libraries’ post-arrest inventories turned up missing maps that have not been accounted for by the FBI investigation or by Smiley’s cooperation. The libraries believe that Smiley was responsible for those thefts as well; Smiley’s lawyer insists that his client has cooperated fully and that the libraries are looking for a scapegoat — for other map thieves or for poor recordkeeping. Either scenario seems plausible to me.

The evidence pointing to Smiley is circumstantial at best. Copies of seven maps Yale found missing from Sterling Memorial Library appear on Smiley’s website, including a 1776 map of Boston under British siege that Smiley says he sold for $110,000. Though the copies Smiley handled are extremely rare, the FBI apparently found no proof they were stolen from Yale.

The British Library and Harvard can prove Smiley looked at all the rare books in which maps have been found stolen. The problem lies in proving the maps were there when Smiley pulled the books.

For more on the libraries’ missing maps, see the following previous entries: Yale’s Missing Maps; Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?; Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing.

Meanwhile, Tony Campbell has posted a copy of the U.S. attorney’s press release about Smiley’s guilty plea. See previous entry: Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents.

• Buy The Island of Lost Maps at Amazon.com

Another story about growth outpacing mapmaking, as the Arizona Republic looks at the Phoenix Metropolitan Street Atlas, published by local map store Wide World of Maps, and its cartographer, Bob Cournoyer, who has to deal with an average of 4,000 map changes every year. Via James Fee.

See previous entries: LA Times: Maps Outpaced by Suburban Growth; Wide World of Maps Profiled.

This page overlays out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (circa 1925 to 1945) on the Google Maps interface. Via Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc.

See previous entry: Ordnance Survey Overlays on Multimap Aerial Photos.

The New York Times has a very nice set of interactive maps for the 2006 election races: the choropleth maps are animated, morphing between population-based cartograms and normal U.S. maps; and you can select states based on certain criteria and create hypothetical scenarios. Via MetaFilter.

Bill Rankin’s latest project on Radical Cartography is called City Income Donuts:

These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.

This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.

At right (for example), Atlanta. (This jibes with my own experience: in Winnipeg, all the wealthy neighbourhoods are south and west, with older money closer to the centre.) Via CNet.

See previous entry: Radical Cartography.

Remember how Library and Archives Canada was getting set to bid on a 1562 world map by Forlani, one of the first with “Canada” on the map, that was expected to go for $200,000? Well, heh, funny story: it turns out they already have one. Actually, they have two: they also own a 1560 edition of the map. Val Ross’s article in today’s Globe and Mail cites it as an example of LAC’s rather ad-hoc and chaotic information management system.

Fortunately they were able to figure out that they had one of the maps before bidding.

See previous entry: Canada’s Archives Interested in Map Auction?

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame
by Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 2006. Hardcover, 229 pp. ISBN 0-226-53465-0

When I was living in Edmonton, I heard the story of Chinaman’s Peak. In 1886, a Chinese labourer named Ha Ling, working as a cook in a mining camp near Canmore, Alberta, climbed a nearby mountain on a bet. The peak he scaled became known locally as Chinaman’s Peak; that name was given official status, based on historical usage, in 1980, but shortly thereafter a campaign began to have the name changed, on the grounds that “chinaman” was offensive and derogatory. By 1997, after a long debate, that name was dropped, and the peak — the northwest summit of Mount Lawrence Grassi — is now known as Ha Ling Peak.

It’s long since defunct, but a Canadian Pacific Railway station along its Kettle Valley line had its name changed in 1940: originally named after Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, the “Hero of Verdun” in the First World War, the station of Pétain was renamed Odlum due to Pétain’s role as head of the collaborationist Vichy government. (Ironically, the Pétain Glacier, in Alberta’s Kananaskis region, kept its name — but then its name was not under the purview of the CPR.)

Neither of these anecdotes is in Mark Monmonier’s latest book, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame, but they came to mind while I was reading it; there are many examples just like them throughout the text. This book is about contentious placenames — troublesome toponyms, as it were — and how mapmakers handle them. Though the title — and some of the media coverage — suggests a focus on the politically incorrect, such as derogatory ethnic epithets, gross anatomic or scatalogical references, or both, Monmonier’s focus is in fact much broader.

Besides the chapters on pejorative names and dirty words, there’s a chapter on replacing “white” toponyms with more traditional native names (e.g., Mt. McKinley vs. Denali, or Frobisher Bay vs. Iqaluit) and several chapters on contested toponyms — countries that erase the other’s names from their own maps in disputed regions like Cyprus, commemorative names that arouse controversy, and even campaigns to change or preserve the names of international bodies of water — like Iran’s vis-à-vis the Persian Gulf or, notably, Korea’s vis-à-vis the Sea of Japan, about which a letter-writing campaign is under way to have it renamed the East Sea.

That last one triggered a bit of déjà vu: I actually got one of those letters, from a Korean student who got confused about a map I linked to that called it the Sea of Japan and wrote me about it. Here’s an excerpt that may sound familiar to some of you:

Such an error in a well known website as yours comes as a surprise since we regard you as one of the world’s best.

Using a proper name for the body of water between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago is not simply a question of changing the name of a geographical feature.

It is rather a part of national effort by the Korean people to erase the legacy of Japanese Imperialism and to redress the unfairness that has resulted from it. It is an absolutely mistaken thing to hear one side of story and follow. If we let this kind of things alone, it brings about a serious problem to disturb order of International society. …

As a member of VANK, I urge you to use “East Sea” to describe the body of water in question or both Korean and Japanese designation simultaneously (e.g. “East Sea/Sea of Japan”) in all your documents and atlases.

(Too bad I don’t actually make any documents or atlases.)

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is, at its root, all about what happens when placenames are contested, and how mapmakers respond to controversy. Much of that response is not only a result of changing mores — dealing with “Nigger,” and later “Negro,” in placenames as the terms became unacceptable — but also a result of changing how toponyms in general are being managed: for example, from state-level gazeteers to a national-level database that must bow not only to present-day sensitivities (reflected in government policy) but also include, as historical references, the very names that have been changed. It’s also about mediating interests: not only between the Koreans and the Japanese, for example, but also between those for and those against a name change. Dildo, Newfoundland and Swastika, Ontario kept their names; Whorehouse Meadow was eventually restored. It’s also about standardizing the naming process, both nationally and internationally.

Those expecting a bit of cartographic sniggering might well be disappointed by this solid and serious work, but I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a fascinating topic, and Monmonier’s writing is as engaging as ever. The University of Chicago Press clearly feels that this book has an appeal beyond academe: it’s priced quite aggressively. I think they expect to sell a few copies of this book, and I think it deserves to.

Read an excerpt online — it’s from chapter four, “Body Parts and Risqué Toponyms.”

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

See previous entries: Mark Monmonier Does NPR; Book Roundup; Review: How to Lie with Maps; Mark Monmonier.

• Buy From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow at Amazon.com

Some upcoming professional conferences:

1. Maps for the New Nation: Mapping and Cartography of the United States, 1776-1860, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, November 3-4.
2. Perceptions of the World in the Middle Ages a postgraduate colloquium dealing with geographical and astronomical knowledge, Philipps-Universität Marburg, March 9-11, 2007.
3. Colloque Coronelli, a conference on the Coronelli globes (see previous entry), to take place March 22-23, 2007 at the Bibliothèque Nationale’s François Miterrand site in Paris.
4. Association for American Geographers AGM, April 17-21, 2007 in San Francisco.

Via MapHist and MAPS-L.

Ogle Earth reports on improvements to the Google Earth layer (KMZ format; see previous entry): “It’s kept up with events on both sides of the border, and now comes with folders for individual days. There are also very recent overlays of Getty Images showing Beirut airport and Jiyeh after the air attacks.”

In addition to that KMZ file, Al Mashriq also hosts a number of other map resources, including scans of a 1:200,000 map of Lebanon, scans of a 1968 map of Beirut, a map showing the Israeli occupation zone as of January 1998 and a map of Israel’s air strikes from July 12 to 22 (PDF). Via Cartography.

Also via Cartography (though I wouldn’t use “delicious” to descibe them), infographics from the New York Times (JPEG) that illustrate the power dynamics of the region.

Finally, Koolyoom.com collects several Google Maps mashups related to the situation. Via Google Maps Mania.

See previous entries: Israel-Lebanon: Visualizing Scale; An Israel-Lebanon Roundup; More Israel-Lebanon Mapping; The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets; The Israel-Lebanon Situation.

Via Ogle Earth:

1. GPS Photo Linker is software to save GPS data to a photo.
2. iPhotoToGoogleEarth exports photos to Google Earth. You should have GPS data assigned to the photo data; isn’t it handy that you already have GPS Photo Linker?
3. LoadMyTracks downloads GPS data and converts it to GPX or KML format.

Via Slashgeo, High Earth Orbit’s big list of Mac software.

Seeing Through Maps
by Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser and Bob Abramms
ODT, 2006. Softcover, 160 pp. ISBN 1-931057-20-6

It’s really not a difficult concept: there are no “right” and “wrong” cartographic projections. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and as such is better for some purposes and less good for others.

But considering the fuss that has been kicked up in some quarters about the “right” cartographic projection to use on maps of the world, you’d think it was otherwise. The Mercator projection has been derided as unfair — imperialist or even racist — in some quarters, because it distorts the size of the polar regions to the point where they dwarf the (much larger in real life) equatorial regions. But the widely proselytized Peters projection (see previous entry), developed by the late Arno Peters as a “fairer” projection that shows the world’s continents in their proportionate size, has come under criticism itself, as much because of Peters’s own rhetoric as the fact that, in preserving equal areas, it badly distorts continents’ shapes.

Seeing Through Maps, now in a new second edition, and its new companion DVD, Many Ways to See the World, address this question by — finally — shedding more light than heat on it. Published by ODT, the distributors of the Peters map (see previous entry), the book and DVD nevertheless take an even-handed, if not necessarily agnostic, approach to the question of which map projection is best for world maps. Each projection, the authors correctly point out, involves some tradeoffs: the Mercator sacrifices proportionality to preserve compass angles; the Peters distorts shape to preserve equal areas. That the Peters is preferred to the Mercator is a result of which values are deemed important to the map — values that are not inherent to the projection.

Many projections are given as examples: the Peters is, it turns out, not the only equal-area map in existence (see, for example, the Mollweide or Goode’s Homolosine); it is, however, one of the few cylindrical equal-area maps. And most world maps currently in production involve a “compromise” projection, like the Van der Grinten, Robinson or Winkel Tripel (all of which, incidentally, have been used at one point or another by the National Geographic Society): each sacrifices a little — curved graticules, distorted areas, distorted shapes, but none as much as in other projections — to achieve an overall picture that “looks right.” Which is about as valid a criterion for a world map as anything else, I think. (It’s worth mentioning that, on a visit to the local map store last weekend, I noticed that most of the wall-sized world maps for sale were either in the Van der Grinten or Winkel Tripel projections; there was one Peters and one Mercator, plus one or two other cylindrical projections.)

The book and DVD provide an intellectual framework in which alternative map projections like the Peters and Hobo-Dyer — a newer cylindrical equal-area projection also published by ODT — can be accepted without politicizing cartography. The Peters and Hobo-Dyer maps work well when the emphasis is on equatorial areas, less so when dealing with polar regions. As a Canadian, for example, I feel that the Peters and Hobo-Dyer maps distort my country too much for them to be of much appeal to me. But that’s all right, because other projections will suffice; there’s a reason why maps of Canada are almost always on a conical projection.

Seeing Through Maps is an excellent introduction to the challenges faced — and the choices made — in making map projections. And maps generally: it also touches on cartograms, the tube map, and other creative ways of presenting geographic information. As a high school-level resource it would be ideal.

As for Many Ways to See the World, its heart is a thirty-minute talk by Bob Abramms that outlines the same points as the book, but also discusses some of the personalities behind the projections and other unique maps. It’s an effective presentation, and I enjoyed it. The DVD, which also has short videos about the book, ODT and Arno Peters, and the slides from Abramms’s talk, could be a bit more polished, though.

Both the book and DVD were a little weak in terms of illustrations: the line art for projections got a bit repetitive, with some maps being shown several times; while other projections that I’d like to have seen — for example, an Africa-centred Winkel Tripel or a gnomonic projection — weren’t there.

ODT has loftier goals than making a basic point about cartography. Originally a management consulting company, they use maps as a teaching tool to encourage people to approach their subject matter from a different viewpoint. The thought is that showing someone a Peters map or an upside-down map forces them to look at the world differently. We know that maps are normative, not just descriptive; teaching people that maps are about presentation and choices rather than a neutral reflection of reality — as Wood does with John Krygier in Making Maps (see review) and Mark Monmonier does in How to Lie with Maps (see review) — is important stuff.

I received review copies of this book and DVD. More on my book review policy.

See previous entry: New Edition of Seeing Through Maps.

• Buy Seeing Through Maps at Amazon.com

RouteBuddy, a new Mac GPS and mapping application, was announced today (Cartotalk; GPS Review; MacNN; MacWorld; Ogle Earth). It’s a bit of an enigma: at first I wasn’t sure what problem it was trying to solve. After all, there are other GPS apps for the Mac, and it’s hard to see the need to buy a $100 application that uses TeleAtlas-derived maps that must be purchased separately (priced at $40-70 per bundle) when similar maps are available through the online map services — for free. Also, it doesn’t give directions, so, apart from its GPS compatibility, it actually has less functionality than many free alternatives.

But Stefan points out that its real use seems to be on the road — or in the air or on a bicycle, from the looks of the app’s icon (at right) — where a lack of Internet access means you can’t use Google Earth or Google Maps. So, for example, an in-dash Mac mini, or a MacBook. (But I wish its intended purpose was more obvious: RouteBuddy’s site just isn’t written all that clearly; vague marketing-speak makes me nervous.) If that’s the case, though, this program will have a hard time finding its niche, because this pricey app will be going up against mobile phone services, WiFi hotspots and wireless data plans.

Not a Universal Binary, which is puzzling: it’s been 13 months since the switch to Intel was announced, so a new Mac app has no business being anything but. An Intel version is promised (as is a routing feature), and the current release will run under Rosetta.

The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog: “This week we rolled out a new release of Live Local featuring full support for Australia.” Streets, geocoding, directions, business listings and more aerial imagery.

Traffic conditions for 30 U.S. cities — and directions with driving-time estimates based on those conditions — have been added to the mobile version (i.e., for cell phones) of Google Maps.

See previous entry: Google Local for Mobile.

Microsoft’s new Windows Live toolbar (IE 6 on Windows only, naturally) has a couple of mapping features of note, the Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog reports, namely, the ability to compile a list of addresses from a web page and map them and the ability to take an address on a web page and generate an inline map.

I was at my local map store over the weekend, and of course they had a good selection of map-related tchotchkes — umbrellas, 3D jigsaw puzzles, squeeze-ball globes. In that vein, this map of the U.S. hand-made from state licence plates sold at Uncommon Goods takes it to an extreme. Yours for a mere $3,500. Via MapHist.

Peter Rukavina explores GIS applications for Mac OS X: “The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS. … Suddenly it seems that GIS apps for the Mac are all over the place.” Via James Fee.

The Dallas Morning News reviews the big four mapping sites: “It takes awhile to get the hang of the software giant’s relatively new Windows Live Local service, but it’s a powerful tool. Google and Yahoo Inc. make strong showings, and AOL LLC’s MapQuest — the most popular mapping site on the Web — is the most user-friendly.” Via About.com Geography.

On Search Engine Watch, Greg Sterling takes a closer look at Windows Live Local as it approaches its first anniversary. Via All Points Blog.

An article in today’s New York Times looks at the business strategies of Google, Yahoo, et al., with reference to their mapping products: “Google Maps still does not offer some of the pedestrian conveniences of Yahoo Maps and MapQuest from AOL. For example, while it can remember your favorite starting point, it cannot store multiple addresses. … When asked about the lack of an address book in Google Maps in an interview last fall, Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, said it was a gap in the product. She said it was much easier to get the company’s engineers to spend time developing pioneering new technology than a much more prosaic address storage system.” Via All Points Blog.

My hosting provider has had a serious spate of outages and other technical difficulties lately. Rather than post every last incidence of the site going down, I’ve decided to post such reports to my WordPress.com account; check there for updates if this site is unreachable (or subscribe to the RSS feed).

In general, all downtime is temporary; this site will not go permanently dark.

From today’s Boston Globe: “Eight maps purloined from the Houghton Library at Harvard University will be returned to the institution in September, when E. Forbes Smiley III is sentenced for their thefts, according to a US Justice Department spokesman.”

See previous entries: Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage; Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents; Updates on the Forbes Smiley Case. See the Map Thefts archive for coverage of the Smiley case in general.

Map GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World Maps is a relatively new general-interest mapping blog with an emphasis on British topics and a really unwieldy name.

GIS Dirtbag is probably the closest thing the mapping blogosphere has to a controversial blog: so far it’s taken the piss out of ESRI, Slashgeo and the “pushpin mapping” that is Google Maps mashups. Lord knows who or what the next target will be, but there usually is a point being made there. (Whether you agree with that point is, of course, another question.)

Henry Bottomley’s Java world maps projection page dynamically redraws a map of the world based on your choice of projection and other parameters. You can also apply the projections to other layers (topographic Earth, Earth at night, Moon, Mars, Jupiter), but I was unable to get those to work on my browsers (Safari, Firefox). Via La Cartoteca and Cartography.

See previous entries: A Gallery of Map Projections; Map Projection Pages; The Peters Projection; Cartographic Projections: A Primer.

People who’ve been to Israel or Lebanon invariably impress upon you just how small the region is — something that those of us living in ginormous countries find hard to grasp. Andy Carvin has created a video that fades between Israel/Lebanon/Syria and Massachusetts/Rhode Island; Edward West adds the San Francisco Bay area to a still image that’s a bit hard to follow. Via Boing Boing.

See previous entries: An Israel-Lebanon Roundup; More Israel-Lebanon Mapping; The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets; The Israel-Lebanon Situation.

Revision 2.59 of the Google Maps API adds four new features, including speed improvements, custom cursors, and an accuracy attribute for the geocoder, the Google Maps API Official Blog reports.

Meanwhile, Andre Louis writes to tell us about his project, GZoom, a third-party add-on that “lets you zoom in on a region of a map by drawing a box around it.” It works, and adding it to your mashup does not look complicated.

• A black-and-white graphic from the Globe and Mail (direct link to image).
• A map-intensive Flash presentation from the Guardian.
• A Google Earth layer (KMZ format) showing the attacks on both sides — now, of course, it can be viewed through Google Maps, like this.

Via Cartography, Google Maps Mania and Ogle Earth.

See previous entries: More Israel-Lebanon Mapping; The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets; The Israel-Lebanon Situation.

After Forbes Smiley was caught in the act of stealing maps from Yale’s Beinecke Library last year, the university began an inventory of its map holdings to discover, comprehensively, what was missing. Precluded by federal authorities from making the list public until Smiley’s guilty plea last month, Yale has now posted a list of maps found to be missing from the Sterling Memorial Library’s map collection; they are asking for help in their recovery. Via MapHist.

See previous entry: Forbes Smiley Case: Fallout at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Update, July 20: The Hartford Courant’s coverage makes clear just how significant it is for a library to publish a list like this (they don’t normally fess up to what’s missing) and provides some context.

Version 7.0 of MAPublisher, a set of plugins for creating publication-quality maps in Adobe Illustrator, was announced yesterday. Via Cartography. See previous entry: MAPublisher 6.0.

I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned portolan charts on The Map Room yet. In that vein, don’t miss peacay’s big post on BibliOdyssey about Battista Agnese’s sixteenth-century Portolan Atlas, scans of which are available on several sites.

Kirk Woerner asks a question that might have an obvious answer, but it’s an interesting one:

On some maps (both online and offline) there are “towns” that do not exist. What are these and why are they on maps? Are they old rail stops? There is one near my house — “Nelson,” Colorado — and there is literally nothing there, but it shows up on MSN maps and some other maps as well.

I can guess at a few reasons why a point on a map might not refer to anything significant in real life:

1. It’s a rail stop in the middle of nowhere (particularly true on northern or remote rail lines).
2. It’s a ghost town: it used to be a town, but it isn’t any more.
3. It’s a spot of little significance (like, two houses) but managed to acquire a name at some point, so that name gets used — i.e., it’s used because it’s there.
4. It has a significance other than its size as a town — historical, for example.

Of course, the real question might well be why mapping companies bother to add the names of nonexistent towns or inconsequential places. Anyone have an idea more concrete than my guesswork?

See previous entry: Ghost Towns.

Sailwx.info’s real-time map of ship locations (based on data from the Voluntary Observing Ships program) has been getting a lot of play on the web lately — I first saw it on La Cartoteca — but the site has a lot of other information maps as well, including tides, water temperature, wave height and wind speed. Graphically, the maps are quite primitive — numbers superimposed on a two-tone cylindrical projection — but what they lack in presentation they more than make up for in raw information.

Add the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) to your list of fire mapping sites: the default view shows the forest fire risk, but there are other layers that show previously burned areas. Via La Cartoteca and Vector One.

See previous entry: Fire!

The BBC’s map of the strikes, and the combat theatre generally. Via Catholicgauze.

See previous entries: The Range of Hezbollah’s Rockets; The Israel-Lebanon Situation.

On Friday the 7th, there was an item on mapping on Patt Morrison’s afternoon show on 89.3 KPCC, a public radio station based in Pasadena, California. On deck were representatives from Thomas Brothers Maps and Navteq; much of the focus was on field surveying — both aerial and on the ground — and on reporting mapping errors. Just under 15 minutes, in RealPlayer format: audio link.

Now, Navteq’s been getting lots of press lately, but the Thomas Guides sound interesting. Since I’m not from southern California, I hadn’t heard of them before, but, I’m told, they’re the road bibles that people swear by — ubiquitous enough that a Thomas Guide page number or map grid is frequently cited when directions are being given. (More on the Wikipedia entry.)

Thanks to Susan Kitchens for the tip.

• Buy Thomas Guides at Amazon.com

To help us visualize how far into Israel Hezbollah’s rockets, based in southern Lebanon, can strike, our friend Kathryn Cramer has put together a useful graphic using Photoshop and Google Earth.

Short outages during the past two days — a result of my hosting provider having all sorts of trouble happen to them (more here). With any luck, I’ll have some new entries for you tomorrow.

Hidden amongst the 50 animated short films put online by Canada’s National Film Board (via Boing Boing) is a 10-minute educational film about cartographic projections from 1947: The Impossible Map. Directed by Evelyn Lambart, the film uses grapefruit peels and turnip skins to make the point that a flat map of a round globe is necessarily imperfect — a point made with more piquancy nowadays, but more matter of fact then: “Every time we get a correct drawing for one part [of the world],” the narrator (Bill Bolt) intones, ” the other parts are out of shape.”

The New York Times’s map of Israel and Lebanon, highlighting the attacks in both countries, is an excellent piece of work. You don’t normally expect newspapers’ maps to be this interactive, but there you are. Thanks to Cyrus for the link.

Highlights of this page about the collection of the U.S. Naval Observatory include scans from several celestial atlases, including Bayer’s Uranometria (1661), Flamsteed’s Atlas céleste (1774), and Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822). Via MetaFilter.

Adena Schutzberg’s column on the “long tail” and its applicability to mapping is interesting in that it mentions the long tail coming up in discussion, but not necessarily where; it might be seen as a response to Joe Francica’s column last month, which, as I pointed out last week, kind of missed the point. (A big thanks to the commenters, by the way, who really added to the discussion.) Adena addresses this in her column, and makes the argument that there is no long tail of mapping — at least not yet: it’s essentially not applicable. While there are niches, there is no central index of geospatial data for sale — no Amazon or iTunes of mapping, meaning no established marketplace that can sell to the niche markets.

I think the problem of applying the “long tail” to mapping is not that we don’t know what the “long tail” is, it’s that we don’t know what we mean by mapping. For Adena, it’s geospatial datasets, but mapping is bigger than the geospatial industry — what about the consumer side? And if it is geospatial data, in what format? Is it a physical product, like a sheet map or an atlas, or just the data — for example, could the “long tail” be applied to GIS data printing out, on a plotter, topo maps that would otherwise be too expensive to produce in a traditional print run? Does it have to be a commercial product, or is it about freely available niche information?

Is the language of the “long tail” of mapping the Google Maps API — niche data applied to a generalized dataset?

The “long tail” is an argument about the economics of distribution, but we can’t do much with it unless we know what we’re distributing. It’s a descriptive paradigm; we need something to describe.

See previous entry: The Long Tail of Mapping?

• Buy The Long Tail at Amazon.com

I last mentioned EarthDesk, a program that puts a real-time image of the Earth (showing, for example, day/night and cloud cover) on your desktop background, in March 2004; since then, it’s graduated to version 3.5 and is now compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X (it had previously been Mac-only).

From Steve Chilton: “Keele University is welcoming the Society of Cartographers for the 42nd Annual Summer School. It will be the usual eclectic and stimulating mixture of lectures, workshops, demonstrations, visits, social activities — quiz, dinner and opportunities to network.” See previous entry: Society of Cartographers Summer School.

Garmt de Vries’s Jules Verne Collection has several pages of interest to us:

• The Maps from the Voyages Extraordinaires, a collection of scans from the original (French) editions of Jules Verne’s novel (Verne apparently didn’t invent a geography for his books; he placed his imaginary places and voyages on the real map);
• Other, “unofficial” maps, mostly from foreign-language editions; and
• A form that locates places and travels from Verne’s novels on a world map.

Via MapHist; see also Cartography.

A few web pages place the locations of yesterday’s bomb blasts in Mumbai, India (which you may know as Bombay) on Google Maps: there is this one (via Matt) and this one (via Ogle Earth); the latter is a KML (Google Earth) file viewed through Google Maps. There is also this blog entry which uses a “sequential” mashup that I couldn’t get to work in my browser (via Google Maps Mania).

In all cases, the satellite layer is used and indeed has to be used: Google has no street data for India, which makes placing everything somewhat harder for those of us unfamiliar with the area.

I’ll link to other maps of the blasts as I’m made aware of them.

BLDGBLOG’s been having fun with images from NASA’s Earth Observatory again (see previous entry), linking to this collection of MODIS images of Africa during 2005, showing the occurrence of fires deliberately set by people as part of their agricultural cycle. The colours used on the choropleth layer are a bit dramatic: they make the whole continent seem on fire!

World images are here; they’re updated every 10 days. For a less pretty interface (usual clunky GIS/web interface) for what I believe is the same data, see the Web Fire Mapper site. (Also, shapefiles.)

More continentally, there is the Active Fire Maps Program from the USDA’s Forest Service, which also uses MODIS data.

The Canadian Wildland Fire Information System doesn’t seem to indicate whether it uses MODIS data, but it was the subject of a news item on tonight’s edition of Canada Now, CBC’s supper-hour news program: essentially, the question raised was whether real-time fire mapping did more harm than good, particularly if its imprecision (it could be off by up to 200 metres; not everything in an area will be destroyed) led evacuees to believe that their homes and properties were destroyed by fire. (The news item is not online.)

Quickly, a few maps on health-related subjects, in all their choropleth glory:

• An animated map of obesity in America, tracking state-by-state obesity rates from 1985 to 2004. Via Boing Boing.
• Via Cartography, atlases published by the American Cancer Society, available both as hard-copies and as PDF files: The Cancer Atlas; The Tobacco Atlas.

GPSBabel is a free (donationware) utility that converts GPS data from one format to another. (It doesn’t convert map data, but such things as waypoints and routes.) Useful, I would imagine, if you’re trying to get ostensibly incompatible hardware and software to talk to one another. Especially useful in that it’s multiplatform: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/BSD/UNIX. Via GPS Tracklog.

What is map art? While I’ve posted a few entries on the subject of maps and art, it’s not something I’ve really stopped to think about. An artist’s work or installation incorporates maps. Good enough for me: post it. But what else is included? Do we include, for example, the Tube Map, or a nicely done topo map series, for their elegance of design? Does a consideration of every map’s aesthetic side make all maps art to some extent?

One of the things academics do is think carefully about the things that we normally take for granted. In this context, the special art issue of Cartographic Perspectives — the winter 2006 issue — forced me to stop and think about the use of maps in contemporary art. The issue contains four essays on the topic of art and mapping, and each one is different, revealing just how broad a topic this really is. For Denis Wood and Dalia Varanka, mapping is ubiquitous; but where Wood sees map art as a challenge to institutionalized mapmaking, Varanka rejects a strictly political view of map art and focuses on mapping as “a cognitive and cultural universal.” Meanwhile, kanarika, of the psychogeographical Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and John Krygier, who is well known to us, look at the performance side of things — kanarika from the perspective of psychogeography and guerrilla performances, Krygier by looking at the performance implications of the interactive City of Memory web site.

Design vs. aesthetics, performance vs. installation. It’s a bigger, more problematized field than I thought.

My thanks to John Krygier for sending me a copy of this issue.

• Buy Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (hardcover) at Amazon.com
• Buy Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (paperback) at Amazon.com
• Buy You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination at Amazon.com

NASA’s Earth Observatory reports on a new satellite-imagery-based mapping — the example is of the Washington-Baltimore area — that shows how much “impervious surface” there is in the area: “These space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces, such as roads and parking lots, which are impervious to water, can indicate where large amounts of storm water runs off. Concentrated runoff leads to erosion and elevated discharge of soil and chemicals into rivers, streams, and ground water. … Baltimore and the counties that border it have at least 20 percent, and up to 40 percent, impervious surface area, indicating that pollution from runoff could be a problem.”

The image here is false-colour (and frankly looks like Jackson Pollock had something to do with it); the linked page has high-resolution false-colour and true-colour versions available. Via BLDGBLOG.

I did not, alas, pay much attention to the William C. Wonders Map Collection at the University of Alberta when I was studying there (unfortunately, Ph.D. studies in modern French history didn’t allow for mucking around much with maps), but through MAPS-L comes news that the Wonders Collection’s catalogue is now online. The page itself is quite sparse, as you can see, so we’ll have to rely on the announcement (as well as this page) for details. Originally, the catalogue was handwritten, in 26 binders; creating the database, which covers 450,000 map sheets with 31,000 records, took 11 years. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find anything about the collection’s holdings, so we’ll have to search blindly and see what there is to see.

The New York Times adds to the pile of coverage about digital mapping data providers with this piece about Navteq’s field surveyors, tagging along as they survey a part of Queens.

Since Navteq and TeleAtlas don’t sell directly to consumers, articles like these invariably refer to their customers: sometimes it’s the online mapping services; sometimes (as in this case) it’s the makers of in-car GPS navigation systems. See previous entries about Navteq in San Diego and New York, and TeleAtlas in Santa Fe and Berlin. See also: More on Digital Map Field Researchers; CNet Profiles TeleAtlas; SF Chronicle: Digital Map Field Researchers; Backcountry Mapping; Online Maps’ Foot Soldiers.

Kim Dingle, Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers, 1990:

Via Kottke.

Another mapping blog celebrates its first anniversary: this time it’s Ogle Earth. Congratulations, Stefan. (812 posts in one year? Yow.)

Mark Monmonier appeared on NPR’s “Here and Now” yesterday to promote his new book about controversial place names, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. The interview, which you can listen to with RealPlayer, is interesting in and of itself, but also because of the verbal gymnastics required to avoid saying words that you just can’t say on NPR — the use of which words are precisely the point of the book. They only bleeped him once, but my god, the apologies. (To compensate, my review of this book will be written as though I have Tourette’s syndrome.) Via All Points Blog.

See previous entries: Mark Monmonier; Review: How to Lie with Maps; Book Roundup.

• Buy From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow on Amazon.com

On ZDNet, Phil Wainewright dismisses “Web 2.0” mashups — especially map mashups — as “fool’s gold”: they don’t integrate any data that wasn’t semantically easy to integrate in the first place (i.e., it’s not exactly rocket science to put geotagged data on a map), and they don’t make any money (important in the context in which he’s writing).

Mashups that rely on core, culturally defined and universally agreed informal data structures like names and addresses are misleading outliers. They mask the true difficulty at the heart of the integration problem … They’ve just made it look easier because they’ve all homed in on the few information types that already enshrine some form of pre-existing semantic structure.

If Web 2.0 really is a gold rush, this will be the first in history when the people pushing the maps are the ones who’ve had their fingers burned. Mapping mashups are the fool’s gold of Web 2.0 not merely because they produce no revenue, but far more crucially because they add no new semantic value to the integrations they perform.

The whole point of mashups is that they’re extraordinarily easy to do, which means we should be careful of swallowing too much of our own hype. Great, you’ve mapped another geocoded data set; great, you’ve set up a service to plot user data on a map. Neat. Cool. But now what?

Via Vector One.

Caught Mapping is a nine-minute film, made in 1940, about how the road maps of the time were made — and, more importantly, revised, with a fair bit on field surveyors. I was surprised that the film reported that map revisions could be made every few weeks — a far cry from the annually issued road maps I grew up with. The film is public domain and can be downloaded or streamed in several formats. (My significant other, Jennifer, wants the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, or at least wants there to be one.) Via Cartography (from whom I steal too much, but Paul finds stuff too good to ignore — I can’t help myself).

Much discussion about Forbes Smiley’s purported cooperation and the appropriateness of his upcoming sentence on MapHist, where Tony Campbell, referring to the news stories that maps from Harvard and the British Library are still missing, is starting to notice a pattern: “[W]hile the FBI appears to believe that the case is effectively closed,” he writes, “journalists are picking up a widespread suspicion that the 97 maps to whose theft Smiley confessed do not represent the real total.”

This is not in itself surprising; as map thieves go it would almost be typical. Map thief Gilbert Bland co-operated with the authorities, Miles Harvey wrote in The Island of Lost Maps, but likely did not fully disclose all his thefts. Rather than full disclosure, apparently, there was as much disclosure as was necessary to get him out of trouble.

Tony’s also concerned that Smiley may be getting rather preferential treatment from the prosecution:

One particularly worrying feature of this case is the way that the FBI and prosecution come across as if they are acting as Smiley’s defence/defense council/counsel. Kim Martineau, the diligent local reporter on the Hartford Courant, fears that, even if more thefts can be pinned on Smiley, it may make no difference. Those in charge seem mesmerised by the fact that Smiley has ‘cooperated’. Is it unjustifiably cynical to suggest that he might have done so, but only to a certain extent, because he was certain to be found out anyway?

Crime and Federalism points out that being sentenced first by the feds, then by the state, is advantageous.

Map librarians generally call for extreme punishment whenever map thieves are sentenced, but their perspective is obviously not disinterested. Their nervousness is nonetheless understandable: they want map thieves deterred, and there’s a real concern that this plea agreement isn’t going to deter someone else from trying this stunt. (Gilbert Bland didn’t deter Forbes Smiley, after all.)

Smiley is due to be sentenced in September.

More coverage of Smiley’s court appearance from the Guardian and Antiques and the Arts Online.

See previous entries: Breaking News: Forbes Smiley Pleads Guilty; Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents; Hartford Courant: ‘For Map Thief, a World of Deceit’; Forbes Smiley Case: Nine Maps of Canada; Forbes Smiley Case: Martha’s Vineyard Coverage; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing; Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage.

• Buy The Island of Lost Maps at Amazon.com

I don’t think Joe Francica’s article, The Long Tail of Mapping, quite grasps what the concept of the “long tail” is all about.

As I understood it, the “long tail” — as first expounded in Chris Anderson’s Wired article in 2004, and subsequently expanded through his blog and, just out, his book on the subject.— was an argument about the economics of web retailing: while physical stores had limited shelf space, online retailers (e.g., Amazon, iTunes) could, theoretically, stock practically everything, and might actually do more business selling the bottom-sellers that physical stores wouldn’t have room to stock than the few bestselling titles.

It is not, however, shorthand for ubiquity.

As a concept, the “long tail” is strictly retail, so it doesn’t quite apply to searches for free maps; a “long tail of mapping” would make it easier for me to find maps of places that I wouldn’t be able to find in a local bookstore or map store. For example, in 1997, when I was living in Edmonton but about to depart on a research trip to Paris, I was able to buy a Michelin Plan de Paris before my trip, but to get maps of provincial French cities — Lyon, Lille and Roubaix/Tourcoing — I had to buy them in France. But because Internet mapping doesn’t work the same way as Internet book- or music selling, the metaphor kind of falls apart.

Or am I missing something?

GPS Review tackles a basic question, but a frequent one nonetheless: why are the maps in GPS navigation units out of date? The same question could, and doubtless has, been asked about all consumer mapping products — online maps included. The answer, GPS Review says, is in the information chain, and in the steps the data takes from the producer to the final product. (The answer is as applicable elsewhere as the question is.)

The New York Public Library’s map room — the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, rather — and its chief, Alice Hudson, were apparently on the CBS Sunday Morning show yesterday, according to a posting on MAPS-L. See the recap here (you may have to scroll down if you’re coming late to this entry); the video is here (Windows Media 10 or RealPlayer; I haven’t been able to watch it yet for technical reasons — hence “apparently,” above). This item was, I believe, a long time coming, and marks its reopening late last year.

See previous entry: NYPL Map Room Reopens.

A tutorial on the history of cartography from professors at the University of Passau. A slide-based general overview, originally in German but translated into several other languages including English; some sections aren’t yet complete. It ends too soon: in the early modern period. Via MapHist.

A new edition of Seeing Through Maps, by Denis Wood, Ward Kaiser and Bob Abramms, is now available. It’s the second edition of the book; the first edition, still available on Amazon.com, came out in 2001. This edition, however, appears to be available only through ODT at this point. (Direct link here.) The first chapter is available online as a PDF file, and it makes the rest of the book sound quite interesting: the chapter looks at geographic projections and their purposes — for example, the Mercator projection is not inherently imperialist, it’s simply for a specific use: navigation. The point of the chapter is that each map has its own purpose.

From the press release: “The book discusses how map projections provide information about countries, cultures, the world’s peoples and their history. It also explains the principles and hidden messages contained in a number of unique maps and provocative images.” (Coverage in the Paramus Post is essentially a rewrite of this release.)

This book sounds like it’s in the same vein as Making Maps (co-authored by Wood; reviewed here) and How to Lie with Maps (reviewed here), and you know how I feel about those books.

A companion DVD is also available as of this month.

Cartography draws our attention to the Living Map, a huge, three-dimensional map of British Columbia now on display as part of the “B.C. Experience” exhibition that just opened in Victoria’s Crystal Garden. The 40-foot-by-74-foot map even models the curvature of the earth. More on the Living Map on the B.C. Experience web site; Solid Terrain Modeling (STM), which constructed the model, has a gallery of high-resolution images on their press page.