The Map Room

The National Association of Railroad Passengers, a passenger rail lobby group, has a collection of maps showing the change in Amtrak route coverage since the national rail carrier was created in 1971. The PDF maps are rather basic, and show overall routes (unlabelled) and frequencies, rather than individual stops. (“Non-Amtrak service” means passenger trains run by the Denver & Rio Grande Western and the Southern before their services were folded into Amtrak, and CP Rail/VIA Rail service across Maine.)

Custom icons for Google Maps. Ostensibly just fun, but this can be quite practical. The standard set of icons is useful but limited: imagine, for example, adding a set of map symbols from another source.

An animated map depicting the history of the New York subway: “[a]n animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built.” For more maps showing the history of New York’s subway, see this page of antique maps at nycsubway.org — which incidentally has quite the map collection, if I haven’t mentioned it before. Via Kottke.

This is not a proof of concept or an art piece, but a real product: this cane containing a pull-out map of Boston was produced in 1940 for attendees of the American Legion’s National Convention in that city. Via Gizmodo.

Way back in the early days of this blog, I linked to portions of James Turner’s Map of Humanity, where feelings, beliefs and aspirations are places on an imaginary map. He was kind enough to write back to explain his purpose in creating the map, and mentioned that he was trying to get it published. The map is so good — it’s a dead ringer for a map from a real world atlas — that it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t.

Flash forward four years, and Joey de Villa — the Accordion Guy — has a blog entry about Turner’s map, replete with more detail images and a large, 1.2-megabyte version of the complete map. And the map is now available for sale, printed on a large-format printer — $30 for a 24×36-inch version.

Get Lost: Artists Map Downtown New York “is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary.” At right: Old New Jersey (2007) by William Pope.L. Via Kottke.

Also announced last week, a beta release (of course) of Yahoo’s MapMixer tool, which allows you to overlay an image atop of Yahoo’s mapping engine. It seems analagous to Microsoft’s MapCruncher, which was released last year. Yahoo! Local and Maps Blog:

[A]nyone who has a map in .jpeg, .gif, or .png format can now upload their map onto a background of Yahoo! Map and mix it, blend it, or customize it. The app gives users tools to adjust transparency, pin-point chosen locations for accurate overlaying and placement, stretch, rotate, zoom, and pan.

More from Wired and O’Reilly Radar.

Previously: MapCruncher; MapCruncher Update.

One of the most common questions from beginning amateur astronomers is whether you can see the Apollo landing sites on the moon through a telescope. You can’t. You can, however, see detailed layers for the Apollo moon missions on Google Moon, which got a major upgrade last week; other upgrades include some insanely high-resolution imagery, an elevation layer, and 1960s-era lunar charts.

Previously: Google Moon.

With detailed map data being added to more and more countries all the time in Google Maps — 54 countries were added last Thursday — the holdout countries are beginning to stick out. Now that much of Latin America and Asia is online, for example, Argentina and Israel are conspicuous by their emptiness. At some point there is a tipping point where we’re more surprised by the absence of a country’s details on a mapping service than its presence. We may well have just passed that point with Google Maps.

The Rocky Mountain Map Fair takes place September 14-15 at the Denver Public Library (via GeoCarta); the Paris Map Fair takes place November 10 at the Hotel Ambassador (via Map the Universe).

Libraries aren’t the only targets of map thieves. “Please be advised that on 20 August an atlas was stolen from a private premises in Normandy in France,” Béatrice Loeb-Larocque wrote to Map the Universe. “The atlas contains 48 maps by Hugo Allardt and F. de Wit.” List of maps here (since it’s quite likely that the atlas will be broken up for individual maps).

Nokia, as part of its new suite of Internet services, has made a free map application available for a dozen of its smartphones. It seems fairly versatile at first glance (not having a compatible Nokia smartphone myself). It supports built-in GPS, Bluetooth GPS or no GPS; it has a map uploading option for users who don’t have unlimited data plans. Via Mapperz; thanks also to Richard for the tip.

This astonishing relief map carpet, made from foam bars of different heights and colours, is a product of the Dutch design firm Studio Laurens van Wieringen. Via Boing Boing and Very Spatial.

The Times has an article on the new — 12th — edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which was released yesterday. The article discusses the changes that had to be made since the previous edition, especially those that are a result of global warming — lakes like Lake Chad shrinking, coastlines gradually eroding away, rivers running dry, urbanization.

A new Times Atlas is a matter of considerable interest around here. While it’s available on the British version of Amazon and available for pre-order on the Canadian Amazon site, it’s not yet listed on U.S. version of Amazon. I wonder who the U.S. publisher is.

NOAA now has an online tool that maps historical hurricane tracks. You can also compare storm tracks against coastal population data. Data are available for storms as far back as the mid-19th century, and they’re exportable: tracks are also downloadable as shapefiles, and you can get direct links to embed in a web site. Press release. Via CNET News.com.

I’m very keen on old fire insurance maps, so this story from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record (no idea how long it’ll be available online) made me smile. Gore Mutual, a Cambridge, Ontario insurance company, has gone to its vaults to reveal “a century’s worth of maps, documents, photographs, newspapers and letters,” now being made available to researchers.

Over the summer, the company has worked with a Waterloo photo studio to create digital versions of 2,467 historic insurance maps. The company has set up a room in its main lobby where anyone can scan old maps of Kitchener, Galt, Waterloo, Woodstock or any number of other Ontario towns where Gore had policyholders.

Not online, so far as I can tell, alas. Via Map the Universe.

We now have English-language media coverage of the recent map theft from the Spanish National Library: see The Times and The Independent. And we have some more information. The suspect is apparently an Argentine researcher who apparently was authorized by Spain’s ambassador in Argentina (who denies it); at any rate, the thief was no amateur, and knew exactly which valuable maps were worth taking. Police report that another four books had maps torn from them. As well, Rosa Regàs, the Library’s chief, resigned this week, and not quietly either: in a very public squabble, she charged that she was being made a scapegoat in the affair by César Antonio Molina, the country’s culture minister. Via Map History/History of Cartography and Map the Universe.

Previously: Maps Stolen from Spain’s National Library.