• Video
A part of the Maps in Literature project, which is interesting enough in itself (in Italian and English), Maps in Movies and TV looks at the use and portrayal of maps in TV programs and movies, focusing on fiction rather than, say, documentaries. Clips on the project’s YouTube channel range from Casablanca and M to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Mischief managed. Via La Cartoteca.
Via GeoCarta comes this curious story about a cruise ship accident that may have been the result of faulty nautical charts of the area, rather than negligence on the part of the ship’s crew. In April 2007 the Sea Diamond ran aground and subsequently sank on a reef off the coast of Santorini, Greece. “According to an official statement from the cruise line, the reef in question is actually located 131 meters from the coastline, instead of only 57 meters as was marked on the official map with which all ships were equipped. … Also, the official map indicated the depth at the point of impact was 18 to 22 meters; surveys have now shown that it is between 3.5 and 5 meters.” In which case the Greek navy, which produces the maps, are in trouble, rather than the crew.
Here’s a review of Nikon’s upcoming GP-1 geotagger, which got my attention because I’m planning to lay hands on it for my D90 as soon as possible. (Which would make it my first-ever GPS unit, believe it or not.) It’s a detailed review, the kind of obsessive camera-site review that goes into menus and screenshots and that gives you an idea of exactly what to expect. It’s also unhesitatingly positive, as many camera-site reviews also are. The GP-1 is surprisingly expensive — $275 Canadian, around US$240 — but that’s Nikon accessories for you (he said, ruefully, after dropping $200 on a right-angle viewfinder).
Previously: Nikon’s Digital SLR Geotagger.
Google Maps has now come to South Korea, but only from the Korean version of Google Maps (compare this view of Seoul with this one). This is apparently due to Korean export restrictions on mapping data. Via Google Maps Mania.
Meanwhile, the controls for Google Maps have been redesigned: they’re cleaner and on the left rather than the right. They also include a draggable icon for direct access to Street View, which Google calls its mascot, “Pegman” (hoo boy). This is an evolutionary change; it’s a bit much to call it a major redesign.
Finally, the iPhone 2.2 software update last week included upgrades to the included Google Maps application — notably, the addition of Street View and transit and walking directions. The iPod touch 2.2 update, however, did not, which has led to a number of guesses as to why this was the case, from product differentiation to usability issues. But my money’s on the accounting rules that mean new features are free for the iPhone but cost money for the iPod, because the two devices’ revenues are accounted for differently (Sarbanes-Oxley and all that). I think adding Street View would have constituted — or was deemed to constitute — something more than a bug fix, which led to its omission.
Over the past few months there has been some discussion on MapHist about “escape maps” — maps handed out to Allied pilots and air crews during World War II, printed on fabric (cloth, silk or rayon) and intended to be hid on their person in case of capture, to aid in their escape. The idea sounded fascinating; I made a mental note for a future post.
This morning, Sean Gillies posted photos of his grandfather’s escape maps. “Yesterday, I received in the mail my grandfather’s cloth escape maps of France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. He flew a Piper Cub for the US Army, mainly shuttling brass between England and France. Never used, the maps went from a pocket in his jacket to an envelope in a foot locker; they’re in great condition.”
As it turns out, there are actually (at least) two Web sites about WWII escape maps; each has a collection of scans. U.S. Cloth Maps of World War II is less comprehensive than WWII Escape Maps; the latter includes maps from American, British and Australian services.
An article in today’s Washington Post looks at the mystery about where the information found in Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map — the first one to label the New World as “America” — came from, and interviews John Hessler, author of a recent book on the subject, The Naming of America. (An online discussion between Hessler and the writer of the article will take place tomorrow — Tuesday, November 18 — at 11:00 AM EST.)
Previously: Which Waldseemüller?; Waldseemüller Map Exhibit Opens Thursday; Upcoming Books on Waldseemüller; More About Waldseemüller; Waldseemüller Map Formally Transferred; Waldseemüller Map Stamp Issued; Encasing Waldseemüller’s Map; Waldseemüller’s Map Goes for £545,600; Auction of First Map of the New World.
Bad mapping data has serious consequences in at least one area, Chad argues: “Emergency responders can’t get to some locations because the map data they have is WRONG. … That kind of a mistake really is the difference between life or death.” Fortunately, he says, emergency providers have paper maps for their local areas.
Finally! Argentina gets roads and streets — and municipalities — in Google Maps. It was one of the larger remaining countries without significant coverage. Bolivia, Paraguay and the Guianas still look pretty empty.
• Books
A curious review of Simon Foxell’s Mapping England in the Times earlier this week; it took about half the piece to actually come around to the book:
It’s not the world’s best-edited book — there are factual slips and literals — but it presents a splendidly provocative thesis. Maps, Foxell maintains, are “battlefields of ideas and ideologies, the locus of political, social and cultural skulduggery.” And England, as a non-nation within an uneasy United Kingdom for the past 300-odd years, is particularly prone to loaded image-making by mapmakers with a political or cultural axe to grind.
You can buy that argument or not. But the dozens of fabulous and fantastical maps that the book includes — from the Gough Map of 1360 (England’s first road map) to the surreal fantasy-maps of the artist Layla Curtis, conjuring an England crammed with Japanese place names — certainly make one think about “national identity.”
A 1612 map of New France drawn by Samuel de Champlain — briefly the subject of an investigation by Harvard curators who thought it might be a copy that went missing a few years ago — has fetched £130,000 at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday. That’s three times what was expected. The map went to a private collector. GeoCarta, CBC News, Vancouver Sun.
Previously: It’s Not Harvard’s Map; Harvard’s Missing Map?
Google “has added New York City transit directions and brought its ads to the Big Apple, wrapping an ‘S’ shuttle train that runs between Grand Central and Times Square. Trouble is, the directions it gives in the ads aren’t always correct,” Advertising Age reports. “Specifically, we spotted this erroneous tip inside the train car: To get from Grand Central to Madison Square Garden, take the 1, 2 or 3 train and then walk to 4 Penn Plaza. Only the 1, 2 or 3 train doesn’t run through Grand Central — it goes through Times Square. Oops!” Via Valleywag.
The Google Geo Developers Blog announces the publication of The KML Handbook, written by the tech writer who wrote the KML 2.1 and 2.2 documentation, Josie Wernecke. Quoth the announcement: “It explains all the various elements and features of KML. It also examines both well known topics like Regionation, and lesser known topics like View Based Refresh. It is also the only book on KML officially endorsed by Google.” Previously mentioned.
• Books
The Worldmapper team’s Atlas of the Real World continues to get lots of media coverage; the latest is from CNN. The Atlas “has redrawn the map giving vivid new insights and bringing economic, social and environmental data to life,” Matthew Knight writes. “Not since the German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, sketched out the first detailed theories of continental drift has the world appeared so misshapen, so otherworldly.” Somewhat hyperbolic for a collection of cartograms, but there it is; if nothing else, with coverage like this, this book will go a long way towards installing the idea of the cartogram in the public consciousness. Via MAPS-L.
Previously: The Atlas of the Real World; Atlas Updates.
Where 2.0 2009, the conference’s fifth iteration, will take place from May 19 to 21, 2009; proposals are due by December 2. O’Reilly Radar outlines some of the topics the conference may cover.
• Books, GIS, Historical Maps
A debate on the question of what GIS can offer world history, based on this article by J. B. Owens (PDF), triggered a lengthy discussion on MapHist earlier this month. Unfortunately, the MapHist discussion was sidetracked by a throwaway comment by one of the debaters: “Given the general lack of interest by historians in maps and in thinking spatially, I am dubious about the success of Historical GIS in the discipline” (emphasis mine). Speaking as a lapsed historian, it’s not that my discipline is allergic to maps or spatial thinking per se, it’s that historians, generally speaking, are allergic to other disciplines’ methodologies. When someone publishes a historical monograph making use of statistics, economics or anthropology, other historians are awfully impressed, but tend not to follow in their footsteps. As a rule, we’re generalists with an aversion to numbers.
Here are a few self-interested Amazon links to books about the use of GIS in history:
• Fun
xkcd is back again, with some questions about terminology. It’s all about your starting point. (Thanks, Frank.)
Previously: xkcd on Driving Directions; Upcoming Hurricanes; D&D Map of Online Communities.
The New York Times’s Verlyn Klinkenborg takes a look at the City of New York’s mapping portal, NYCityMap:
At first, NYCityMap feels a little clunky, especially if you’re used to navigating in Google Maps. But what’s interesting are its hidden dimensions. With a few clicks, you can pull up an unbelievable wealth of information about any address or neighborhood. You can find the nearest greenmarket, the year of construction on almost any building, the record of restaurant inspections in the neighboring blocks, etc. In other words, the surface map is really a map to all the maps hidden within it. It is an extensive municipal guide to New York City, organized geographically.
Where it says “feels a little clunky,” read “is your standard web-based GIS interface.”
Jason Kottke, who’s been collecting 2008 U.S. presidential election maps, posted these two maps of “Obamaland” and “McCainland” — the counties that voted for one or the other — not in red, blue or purple, but in stark, one-bit black or white. A telling statement.
Meanwhile, using exit polls, the Washington Independent’s Aaron Weiner looks at what the 2008 electoral college map would look like if only certain demographic segments had voted. It looks like McCain would only have had a shot if only whites voted, or if the voting age were raised to 65. In response to a map of the electoral college if it were decided by voters aged 18 to 29. Via Oliver Willis.
Sometimes a mapping error is just a mistake, as when a textbook inadvertently leaves the upper peninsula of Michigan off a map of the U.S. (via GeoCarta) or when a certain V. Putin’s Web site shows four Russian-occupied islands as belonging to Japan (via Vector One). That doesn’t stop residents from getting insulted (in the former case) or academics from getting excited (in the latter case).
But sometimes an “error” is deliberate — as when Colorado Ski Country USA’s map of ski resorts leaves off the four resorts that stopped paying them dues (via GeoCarta).
Mark Newman is once again getting an awful lot of online attention for his maps and cartograms of the 2008 U.S. presidential election results; he did the same thing for the 2004 presidential and 2006 congressional results (see previous entry). The maps come in many flavours: ordinary maps showing blue and red states; maps showing blue and red counties; “purple” maps that show the degree to which a county is blue or red; cartograms for all of the above. Newman is all about the cartograms; he’s one of the authors of the cartogram collection, The Atlas of the Real World. Via many, many sources.
Other cartograms: Peters’s publisher ODT Maps has a grid-style election cartogram based on population rather than Electoral College votes (via AnyGeo); from the comments, this one weighed by electoral votes.
The Onion also has an election map. It’s what you’d expect. Via MAPS-L.
More good stuff from the New York Times: a slideshow showing the shift in support for presidential candidates since 2004, based on exit polls and the results. Five of the slides show county-by-county voting shifts; at right, counties where the Republican vote went up compared to 2004. Arizona, Alaska — the candidates’ home states — and Arkansas and Appalachia. I have a bad feeling about those last two. Via Andrew Sullivan.
As I predicted, some cartograms of the U.S. presidential election results are already available. These cartograms distort the size of each state based on the number of their electoral college votes — making Rhode Island, with four electoral votes, larger than Alaska, with three. Declan Butler has put together cartograms for presidental elections back to 1964; the shapes change as the populations shift from election to election. A similar principle is behind this interactive map. Thanks to Richard and Frank for the links.
Previously: U.S. Election Results Cartogram (for the 2004 elections).
Jason Kottke is collecting election maps produced by various media outlets; his page gathers a screenshot and a link to the map in question. (The screenshot is often from early last night, so does not reflect the final results — which, incidentally, we still don’t know for a couple of states — but this is an exercise in map design, not data.) He has more than two dozen so far and is looking for more.
CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times provide election results maps that I like. All three are interactive: you can hover over each state to obtain the overall results, and click to zoom in to see county-level results. In MSNBC’s case, you have to click on the state to obtain the vote totals (rather than percentages), and it doesn’t show congressional district boundaries at the national level, but at least it provides presidential, congressional and gubernatorial results through the same interface; you need to click on separate maps to get other results at CNN and the Times (I’ve linked to the presidential maps).
In the end, my favourite of the three is the Times’s map. It’s larger and cleaner, and provides one view the others don’t: a “county bubble map” that shows the raw-vote size of a candidate’s lead by county. County-by-county maps (which are also available) don’t take into account the differences in population size. This is one way to do it, a cartogram is another; I expect to see cartograms of these results very soon.
Those of you watching NBC or MSNBC for your dose of election coverage last night may have noticed that they transformed the ice rink at the Rockefeller Center into an election map; apparently they did this the last time, too.
Who needs holograms, anyway?
A few more links before the results come in:
The University of Richmond’s Voting America site says it “offers a wide spectrum of cinematic visualizations of how Americans voted in the presidential elections at the county level, from the beginning of the modern party system to the present day.” I’ve just been having a hell of a time trying to load it today, so I’ve only seen bits of it. Via CalgaryGrit.
Google has made historical results of U.S. presidential elections since 1980 available in a KML file; zoom in enough and you can see county-level results as well as state-level results. There’s also a Web-based version.
Previously: Historical Electoral College Maps.
Patrick Ruffini maps the swing in Democratic presidential election support from 2004 to 2008: “This is a post about relative change, not absolutes. Obama is likely to do better than John Kerry in every single state, even Kentucky and West Virginia that shellacked him so in the primaries. This is simply the national atmospherics and the political environment. ‘The map’ does not dictate his ability to win or lose.” Via Andrew Sullivan.
Vladimiro Valerio has been scanning his map collection and uploading them to his Maps and Images site. Ten atlases and four single-sheet maps, a total of 280 images, are available so far. They range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; all are Italian, most are from Naples. Via MapHist.
Previously: The History of Cartography in a Nutshell.
Customers of a store that sells “antiquities, notable books and rare maps” have apparently been getting a bit out of line, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. The store’s proprietor, John Taylor, ended up posting a note, Martin Luther style, to his front door: “Handle the books, papers and tools gently. … You’re quite lucky to have this opportunity to experience authenticity. So excuse my admonishment while you break the back of a $5,000 atlas.” I’m actually amazed he lets them handle anything of that value. Via MapHist (thanks Tony).
A map showing presidential endorsements by U.S. newspapers. Circle colour indicates which candidate (both now and in 2004); circle size shows relative circulation; mousing over provides more information about the paper. Via Andrew Sullivan.
If the World Could Vote is an interactive map showing the popularity of the two U.S. presidential candidates in other countries. (Democracy not being strictly endemic to the U.S., the title is inaccurate.) No surprise that Barack Obama is polling 89 percent in Kenya — he’s almost as popular there as he is in the District of Columbia. Via HuffPost.
• Electoral Maps, Fun, Video
Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment recently took a swing at the touchscreen interactive electoral maps that have become nearly ubiquitous in U.S. election coverage (i.e., John King on CNN). Here’s the entire segment:
Via Very Spatial.
Montréal now has transit trip planning in Google Maps. A good thing: Montréal is an awful place to drive, but its Metro is wonderful; it’s one of the few North American cities where it’s relatively easy to go car-free. Ottawa seems to have had it for a while as well; here’s Google’s list of cities with transit trip planning.
• Books
Ben Keene provides “some simple guidelines” on how to choose an atlas; since he’s the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World — the 15th edition of which has come out before I had the chance to review the 14th edition — he’s not exactly disinterested, but he is qualified. Bottom line: never mind the fancy front material, go for quality cartography. Buy more than one atlas. And make sure it’s up to date (coincidentally, the Oxford updates annually).
Previously: OUP Year in Geography.
The Map Room is a blog about maps by Jonathan Crowe. It covers everything from collecting to the latest in geospatial technology from a generalist’s perspective.
The Map Room ran from March 2003 to June 2010 and is presently inactive.
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Between March 2003 and June 2010, I posted a total of 4,055 entries. You can explore them by visiting the archives index, or by choosing one of the monthly or category archives below:
