The Map Room

Henry Walling’s five-foot-square “Map of the Counties of Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket, Massachusetts,” produced in 1858, is now available as a hardcover book, the Cape Cod Times reports: “The new book’s maps were shot digitally by Truro photographer Charles Fields, turning each section of the map into a 12-inch-by-12-inch page. Gail Fields helped design the book. Then local authors and artisans Robert Finch, Theresa Mitchell Barbo, Elliott Carr, Jim Coogan, Adam Gamble — the book’s co-publisher — and Cape Cod Community College President Kathleen Schatzberg added comments and short essays.”

• Buy The 1858 Map of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, & Nantucket at Amazon.com

I’m about halfway through Toby Lester’s Fourth Part of the World and hope to have a review for you soon. In the meantime, check out this brief review in the New York Times’s travel section that covers both Lester’s book and Frank Jacobs’s Strange Maps. Via All Points Blog.

Previously: The Daily Telegraph Reviews The Fourth Part of the World; Strange Maps: Frank Jacobs Interviewed; Updates on Two New Books; The Fourth Part of the World; Strange Maps, the Book, Coming Later This Month.

• Buy The Fourth Part of the World at Amazon.com
• Buy Strange Maps at Amazon.com

As a way of promoting itself during the holiday shopping season, eBay has mapped “all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions on eBay on Black Friday, November 27, 2009 (12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM EST).” Via All Points Blog and Cartophilia.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation has produced a map of biking and hiking trails in the northeastern part of the state. “The routes generally use existing highways that have been identified as desirable roads for bicycling. In some cases, the route uses improved rail trails to bypass difficult sections.” County-level maps are also available; all maps are PDFs. More from the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader.

With TomTom apparently coming out with a GPS device priced at $59(!), DailyFinance asks: just how much lower can GPS prices get? Via Gadling.

Google Maps’s Tips for Life page is a bit too preciously titled — it’s more a collection of tips on how to use Google Maps, based on four user profiles (local search, global browsing, navigation, business listings). More thorough than I think I’m making it sound. Via googlemaps.

Economics professor Patrick Chovanec has grouped the provinces and autonomous regions of China into what he calls the Nine Nations of China — regions with their own “resources, dynamics, and historical character.” Of course there’s an interactive map. Via The Map Scroll.

The following is a guest post by Mark Ovenden, who relates how, in the cavernous confines of the abandoned Court Street Subway station in Brooklyn, now re-used as the Transit Museum, three great innovators in the world of transit map design were in the same room together for the first time in thirty years. The occasion was the launch of a new coffee table book on the design of Paris’s art nouveau Métro system, but New Yorkers may well find that the guests at the event are as interesting as the French-flavored presentation.

There’s nothing more likely to fire up a native New Yorker than the state of the Subway — you hear it talked over in delis and corner shops and on television, and one of the juiciest debates starts up when it comes to the map of the Subway. There are those who recall the baroque beauty of the Hagstrom maps of the 1930s to 1950s which they held on to when racing out to Coney Island as kids. Others, whose heyday was the late fifties, will recall the clinical clarity of the Salomon diagram map.

But, ever since a design contest in 1964 — one of the winners being the dashing young lawyer Raleigh D’Adamo — the controversy over how the 772 miles of subway lines and countless service permutations are presented to riders has raged sporadically. Things came to a head when world-renowned Italian designer Massimo Vignelli presented his re-working of the map in an artist’s palette of bright colors and neat forty-five-degree diagonals. This was published in 1972. Many graphic design buffs and visitors found it superbly stylish and, like Salomon’s 1958 map, comparable in clarity to the London Underground diagram designed by Harry Beck in 1933.

But many others found the abstraction made the map difficult to use. In 1975, the Transit Authority set up a Subway Map Committee, chaired for most of its three years by John Tauranac — which labored to re-design the map and incorporate into it the staggering quantity of detailed service information that New Yorkers need to use their Subway. Under the direction of the Committee, Michael Hertz Associates put together a map that combined the beautifully flowing lines of artist Nobuyuki Siraisi with the dense assemblage of service data. This completely new map was published in 1979. It’s been the key to the way New Yorkers look at the city beneath their feet for the last thirty years.

Vignelli was understandably dismayed by the Transit Authority’s decision to abandon his schematic in favor of a much more geographic approach and the differences of opinion famously surfaced at a public debate in Cooper Union Great Hall in July 1978. Since that date, none of the main protagonists have been in the same room together until last Saturday. It was a love of transportation cartography that brought Vignelli, D’Adamo, and Tauranac under one roof — appropriately at New York’s atmospheric Transit Museum. They all came for a talk on mapping the Paris Métro. This was a peculiarly pertinent occasion, as Vignelli himself designed the regional transportation map of Paris in the 1990s, which in turn pushed the actual Métro map into a more diagrammatic direction. Nor was the Paris Métro unfamiliar to Tauranac, who once designed a map of the Métro — executed, like the 1979 New York map, by Michael Hertz, but never published.

The recent elevation of interest in the complex skill of transit cartography — especially since the publication of the first global book on the subject (Transit Maps of the World, Penguin, 2007) — seems to have forged some unity among both professionals and amateurs alike. But New York has the most complex subway system in the world, and no single map will ever capture all its nuances in a form that will satisfy all its riders. So there’s little chance that the talented minds in New York Subway map design — Vignelli, Tauranac, D’Adamo, Hertz, Siraisi — will ever agree with each other on a single all-purpose design. But the good news is that now the maps and the mechanics of making them is so much more in the public eye, that there is growing respect for each man’s work.

This was clear at another meeting a few days later — in the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library on Tuesday, October 27 (the 105th anniversary of the opening of the Subway). Around 130 people turned up to listen to a talk by John Tauranac on the history of mapping the New York Subway. John gave a thorough background to the story of how the city’s system has been presented to the public but saved the crux of his thoughts for the comparison between how each mapmaker has solved one particularly thorny issue: the Bleecker Street interchange from Line 6 to the B, D, F and V (at Broadway Lafayette) — or more accurately the complexity of it. Bleecker Street is odd because it is possible to transfer onto the other lines from the 6 on the downtown bound platform only. You just can’t do it from the uptown bound side. Tauranac — who describes himself as “a guide” — sees this level of information as crucial to using the system. It was from this perspective of demanding complete accuracy over station placing that he first took exception to Vignelli’s 1972 diagram. “No matter how aesthetically pleasing the thing was to look at,” he told the capacity crowd at the Library, “some stations were just in the wrong place.” Indeed, John saved his strongest criticism for Vignelli’s widely acclaimed 2008 revision of the famous diagram because, despite many improvements, the Bleecker Street transfer was still shown incorrectly. “On Vignelli’s new diagram it looks like the transfer is possible only in the uptown direction — but of course it’s the other way round!” lamented John.

Tauranac has designed a wide range of cartographic products for the city, incorporating what he regards as the best practice, but almost exclusively based on real geography — “parks are green and water is blue,” he explained to the gathered mass squashed into the library’s presentation room — as if one of us might dare leave thinking otherwise. But he’d reminded us earlier of one rather prophetic comment that arose during that Cooper Union debate: “Why don’t you just have two maps — one geographic the other schematic?” said one bright spark. As John came to his conclusions he unfolded his latest Subway map: “I’ve finally bitten the bullet,” he reveals to the dumbstruck crowd: “I’ve put a geographic map on one side and a schematic on the other.”

This coincidentally is the solution they’ve also adopted in Paris, where despite several early attempts to neaten up all those unruly interweaving lines, the Métro operator, the RATP, had long preferred a more Parisian feel (essentially quite accurately geographic). But in 2000 even they relented and provided passengers with a schematic network map inside the cars (and as a tiny pocket map also) and they have left the handy but strictly geographic map at station entrances and on platform walls — a very definite concession to the fact that any big transit operation is easier to navigate with the two-pronged approach of providing maps of both types.

Postscript

After the event at the Library, I make my way back to 23rd and 7th in the rain. I unravel the large MTA Subway map to find where I am relative to the station. It works. Bless that trusty thirty-year-old design! When I get to Times Square it’s the usual labyrinth full of chaos but I jump onto a 2 train only to realize I’m not actually sure the train will stop at 23rd. I’m unfolding the MTA Subway map again to double check. The large piece of frequently folded paper is damp and unwieldy in the crowded train. It opens rather unhelpfully at the other end of Long Island and as I trying to refold it to the appropriate section of Manhattan whilst clinging onto a strap to stop myself toppling over, I knock into a fellow passenger who scowls knowingly at the stupid tourist. A part of the paper drops off along the oft-folded crease and lands on the wet, dirty floor, but the doors have already opened at 34 St Penn Station and I’m not sure whether to change here onto the Local or wait ’till the next stop or even if this train stops at 23rd anyway. This is precisely where a small simple diagram would clearly have been jolly handy and as the doors close I realize I’m stuck on a Express which will zoom past 28th. Curses! The words of John’s talk are racing round my head as my stop at 23rd whizzes past at speed, and I’m frantically trying to reassemble the sodden mass before I get any further downtown.

But the scowler is a secret angel and recognizing my plight has fished out his iPhone and brought up an application (or “app”) which is a surprisingly clear answer to my needs. It’s the KickMap of the Subway, designed by Eddie Jabbour — a hybrid of a schematic with lots of surface geographic features. I thank the kind gentleman, making a note to download said app at the earliest opportunity, and get off at 14th to go back two stops on the nice Local. And I praise the cartographic equivalent of light at the end of the tunnel!

Mark Ovenden is the author of Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations and Design of the Métro, and Transit Maps of the World, both published by Penguin.

Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro
by Mark Ovenden
Penguin, 2009. Softcover, 176 pp. ISBN 978-0-14-311639-4

It’s possible that I know the Paris Métro better than any other subway system in the world. In the summer of 1997, I spent six weeks in Paris as a research assistant for my Ph.D. supervisor. Where I worked was close enough to where I stayed for me to walk to work each morning; even so, I dutifully bought a Carte orange for the month of June (plus a couple of Cartes hebdomadaires for July) and, during my time off, set about exploring Paris’s underground rail network, which in 1997 comprised 15 subway and four RER lines (counting 3^bis and 7^bis; line 14 and RER line E were still a year or two off).

Because I stayed at the Cité universitaire in the 14th arrondissement, my point of entry to the network was the eponymous station on the RER B line. From there, it was usually a rapid jaunt to one of the massive transfer points along the B line — usually Saint-Michel—Notre-Dame or Châtelet—Les Halles — where I would transfer to the numbered Métro lines. I took the RER wherever possible: their airy, spacious stations were far more easy to take for someone as crowd-averse as me than the older stations of the original network, and the trains were often hot and uncomfortable during the summer.

Somehow I never picked up one of the RATP’s official maps of the network; instead, I made do with my Michelin Plan de Paris, whose Métro map was woefully inadequate but which helpfully pointed out station entrances on its 1:10,000-scale neighbourhood-level maps. Otherwise, I consulted the maps at each station — there were plenty of these, including geographical and diagrammatic network maps (including network maps that would light up your route to the desired station at the push of a button), regional maps that showed the RER network extending deep into the suburbs, and maps of the surrounding neighbourhood — a godsend for a prairie kid used to right-angle street blocks, thoroughly disoriented by Parisian streets and considerable time underground (my Michelin Plan helped there too).

My time spent in Paris, my background as a French historian, and my known affection for all things cartographical (to say nothing of a minor jones for trains) made me all too susceptible to a book like Mark Ovenden’s Paris Underground (which, incidentally, first saw print in the U.K. in 2008 as Paris Métro Style in Map and Station Design; Penguin Books is publishing the North American edition in 2009).

Paris Underground is not a map book per se, although maps of the Paris Métro illustrate the book throughout, and maps are certainly the book’s primary concern. If anything, the book is too ambitious, trying in one fell 176-page swoop to cover the history of the Métro, its construction, and the style and design language used by its maps and its stations. (Let me put it this way: fonts are discussed. Frequently.) For a taste of the non-map content, see this brief video by the author:

But there’s more than enough to satisfy the cartographic nerds as well. There are maps in this book from the late 19th century that predate the construction of the Métro by several decades, and maps of the network at virtually every stage of development. Maps are used as a way to show the history of the Métro network: each new edition showing progressively more and more completed. The text itself is pretty bare bones, and could be clearer at certain points; it can largely be seen as providing the necessary context to understand what the maps are showing.

Paris Underground is also concerned with how the Paris Métro has been mapped. The Paris Métro is easily the densest subterranean transit network on the planet: lines crisscross and overlap. It’s a challenge to present a map that shows each line clearly — even more so when maps weren’t printed in colour. There are lots and lots of examples from every period — three “bis” chapters look at unofficial commercial maps — and, as a result, lots and lots of attempts at mapping the system.

Most interesting is how much, until rather recently, the maps have largely followed geography, rather than adopting a network diagram in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map. Chapter 13 covers attempts at a diagrammatic map of the Paris network, including a couple by Harry Beck himself. While the RATP has adopted diagrammatic maps for inside its cars and as pocket maps — to say nothing of RER network maps that would be illegible and unwieldy if they were strictly geographic — a single, unified Beck-type diagram has not emerged, and geographic maps continue to be used, for example in stations.

What emerges from Paris Underground is the extreme diversity of mapping that has been undertaken, even from official sources (even as they were standardizing colours for each line, as well as fonts). Mapping the Paris Métro has been an ongoing experiment for decades, the result of some serious cartographic challenges (a dense system map, the need to produce a system map that is recognizably of Paris) and yielding some awfully interesting maps in the process.

Like the Paris Métro and its maps, Paris Underground is dense and crowded and has far too much crammed into it: it could easily have been twice as long or half as comprehensive — and a lot more concise. But then it wouldn’t be quite as quintessentially Parisian, nor nearly as much fun.

Previously: Paris Underground; Harry Beck’s Map of the Paris Metro.

• Buy Paris Underground at Amazon.com

NASA’s Earth Observatory site has a feature article on the 2005 Global Land Survey, a collection of 9,500 Landsat images captured between 2004 and 2007:

The images are detailed enough to make out features as small as 30 meters (about one-third the length of an American football field), they have been carefully screened for clouds, and each one shows the landscape during its growing season.

Some of the images are as striking as a piece of artwork. Stitched together into a single mosaic, the collection paints the most detailed picture of Earth’s land surface a person can get for free.

Before you think about ordering it, however, consider this: to view the entire thing at full size, your computer screen would need to be as big as the Hoover Dam.

See also Universe Today.

“You could lose yourself in here,” says The Scotsman’s Peter Ross, in his expansive piece about the National Library of Scotland’s map collection. Via MapHist.

Caricature maps usually belong to a specific period — i.e., the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So it’s interesting to see Keith Thompson’s modern take on a 1914 caricature map of Europe. Via Kottke.

Update (Feb. 3, 2010): This map illustrates Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan — it’s found on the endpapers of the hardcover edition.

Previously: Even More Caricature Maps; Adidas’s Impossible Map; More Caricature Maps from World War I; A Japanese Caricature Map of the World; Angling in Troubled Waters.

KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio’s Weekday spent an hour last Thursday morning on maps and art; the program featured Katharine Harmon, two local artists whose work appeared in her latest book, and a local art historian. Via All Points Blog.

Previously: The Map as Art.

• Buy The Map as Art at Amazon.com

In the current issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, there’s a study that models — and maps — the estimated prevalence of diabetes and obesity at the U.S. county level. It’s always interesting to see when things like this aren’t evenly distributed. Via geoparadigm.

Previously: Diabetes Atlas; Mapping Obesity; Health Maps Roundup.

Macworld reviews four geotagging applications for the iPhone. Now the iPhone geotags its own photos — if you take a photo with the iPhone’s built-in camera, it can be automatically geotagged. But these applications turn the iPhone into a GPS logger: you shoot with your regular camera, and merge the time and location data from the iPhone application. A standalone GPS logger is cheaper than an iPhone with two- or three-year data plan, but if you already have an iPhone …

Michalis Avraam has compiled a list of the essential skills for a successful GIS career, based on a discussion at a GIS Day event in Seattle. Via Slashgeo.

Twitter geotagging is now officially available, though only through the API — which means that third-party applications can do things with it, but it won’t show up in the web interface. It’s off by default; users have to enable it. More information on Twitter’s support page. For developers, this page talks about best practices for implementing the geotagging API.

It also looks like Twitter is using Yahoo’s WOEIDs rather than lat/long tags, which makes sense for its brevity.

Previously: Twitter Working on Adding Location; Yahoo’s Internet Location Platform.

Update, Nov. 20, 11:50 AM: PC World: Twitter Geotagging: What You Need to Know (via Glenn).

Holy shit. Pinch me, check the date to see that it’s not April 1, then read this British government press release: “The Government will consult on proposals to make data from Ordnance Survey freely available so it can be used for digital innovation and to support democratic accountability.” To say the least, this is as big a reversal in policy as we will ever see in the mapping world. As this understandably smug Guardian article explains, this is part of a larger government effort to open up its data. Via Mapperz, Metafilter, and (of course) OpenGeoData.

Update (Nov. 19 at 8:00 PM):

BBC News coverage of this story (via mapperz).

Peter Batty has some thoughts about this:

I think that this is a very good thing for the UK geospatial industry, and for the general principle of open data, which I am a strong supporter of, despite that fact that I will also point out the challenges with it when appropriate! I think that the right broad option has been chosen out of a complex array of possible choices. But there are risks with the decision too, including the potential for reduced funding and deterioration in quality of Ordnance Survey Maps. And there are likely be some big losers too.

For example, he says in his very next post, OpenStreetMap.

Via Maps-L, LaToya Egwuekwe’s animated map of county-by-county unemployment rates in the U.S. from January 2007 to September 2009. I quibble that there is no slider, but the map is well done. (Am I right in guessing that this was a school assignment?)

Previously: WSJ Map of U.S. Unemployment; Another Animated Map of U.S. Job Losses; Slate Maps U.S. Job Losses; U.S. Unemployment and Job Losses; Mapping the Recession and Stimulus.

The New York Times looks at user contributions to online maps, starting with Google, with its Map Maker program covering 140 countries and its recent opening of its U.S. maps. “People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.” Not that OpenStreetMap and WikiMapia are left out of the discussion. (Note the not-disinterested response from Tele Atlas that such maps cannot be relied upon.) Thanks to Jim Peets for the link; also via Maps-L.

Al Franken’s uncanny ability to draw all 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from memory inspired the National Geographic Society to ask other senators to draw their home states from memory, labelling at least three important places on that map. ElevenTwelve senators accepted the challenge. Via Cartophilia.

The Daily Telegraph reviews The Fourth Part of the World, the new book on the Waldseemüller map by Toby Lester: “Just telling the story of the invention of the name, the creation of the map, its disappearance, and its eventual discovery, would make an interesting book. But Toby Lester, an American journalist with a voracious intellectual appetite, has done much more than that. He starts and ends with the map itself; in between, he packs in an extraordinary amount of information about the growth of geographical knowledge from the ancient world to the Renaissance.” The review concludes: “This is a very impressive book: always user-friendly but never dumbed-down and covering an extraordinary range of subject matters. The best popular book on cartography, in fact, since Nicholas Crane’s Mercator; and that is high praise indeed.”

Previously: Updates on Two New Books; The Fourth Part of the World.

• Buy The Fourth Part of the World at Amazon.com

The Swiss federal data protection commissioner is taking Google to court. Hanspeter Thür argues that Google’s blurring of faces and licence plates in its Street View imagery of Switzerland is insufficient and that Google has not complied with his recommendations, swissinfo.ch reports:

The data protection commissioner wants Google to ensure that all faces and car plates are sufficiently blurred, remove pictures of enclosed areas such as walled gardens and private streets, and declare at least one week in advance which town and cities it plans to photograph and post online.

“Faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently anonymous from the point of view of data protection, especially in cases where the persons concerned are shown in sensitive locations, such as outside hospitals, prisons or schools,” Thür told swissinfo.ch. …

“The height from which the camera on top of the Google vehicle films — two metres 75cm — is also problematic,” Thür pointed out. “It provides a view over fences, hedges and walls, with the result that people see more on Street View than can been seen by a normal passer-by in the street.”

Rather than asking that the imagery be taken down, Thür is asking that no new imagery be posted for the rest of the year. Google plans to fight the case. See also Associated Press and BBC News coverage.

I grew up in Winnipeg, so I was thrilled to discover the thousand-plus maps of Winnipeg, Brandon and the rest of Manitoba posted on the Manitoba Historical Maps Flickr account. The maps include old city maps, transit maps, insurance maps, planning maps, topo maps, highway maps — some of which I actually recognized from my childhood. Favourites so far include a 1941 map of Greater Winnipeg’s streetcar, trolley bus and bus lines (above), a 1963 Texaco map of Winnipeg that seems awfully familiar (I probably had a more recent edition in the house when I was a kid), and 1954 Manitoba highway map. So: not just thrilled — giddy. Via Urban Cartography.

Vanity Fair points to Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009, an exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman building that runs until June 26, 2010 (exhibition details here).

Drawing on The New York Public Library’s collection of Dutch, English, French, and American mapping of the Atlantic coastal regions, this exhibition exemplifies the best early and growing understanding of the “unknown” shores along our neighboring rivers, bays, sounds, and harbors. From maps reflecting Verrazzano’s brief visit, to decorative Dutch charting of the Atlantic and Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland) region, the works illustrate the expanding awareness of trading opportunities.

Thanks to Richard for the tip.

If GPS isn’t accurate enough for you, you should probably look into something like real-time kinematic (RTK) navigation, which corrects GPS signals down to an accuracy of one centimetre. RTK is explained on Wikipedia and Magellan’s site. Make points to a project to build a low-cost RTK-GPS receiver.

The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri gets a mention in the travel section of the New York Times (in an article on rare book collections that are accessible to the public) for its collection of celestial atlases. Via MapHist.

On past exhibitions of the Linda Hall’s celestial atlas collection: The Face of the Moon; Star Atlases; Celestial Atlases, Antique and Modern.

Large globes can be kind of pricey; David Burwell built his own 20-inch globe using the Generic Mapping Tools datasets and a beach ball mold. Ingenious. Via Boing Boing and Make.

The Fail Blog does maps, too.

A report by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Congress ranks states on the performance of their schools in eight categories of “innovation”; naturally, these grades have been put on an interactive map. Via Cartophilia.

Check out Cameron Booth’s map of the U.S. Interstate Highway system in the style of a diagram (i.e., the London Tube map). Not the first time I’ve seen something like this, but this is a very, very good implementation. Thanks to Richard for the tip.

Previously: Interstate Highway Diagram.

GeoVation encourages people to create “great ideas based on geography,” which is to say, map mashups. There are two competitions: one for ideas, more than 100 of which have been posted so far; and one for ventures, which involves prize money. The competitions are backed by the Ordnance Survey and run until January 4, 2010. BBC News has more. Via geoparadigm.

Valleywag thinks Google Latitude’s location history feature (previously) is creepy: “Google said it can now keep a detailed list of everywhere you go, play your trips back like movies and generate ‘alerts’ for unusual movements. Who wants this? The CIA? Nope: ordinary modern humans are asking to be tracked. Insane.”

Webdesigner Depot’s 30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps: “Map illustrations are a dime a dozen; however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.” Via geoparadigm.

More media coverage of Strange Maps, the book version of what is basically the most popular map blog out there: the Freakonomics blog interviews the book’s (and blog’s) author, Frank Jacobs.

Previously: Updates on Two New Books; Strange Maps, the Book, Coming Later This Month; Blogs into Books.

• Buy Strange Maps at Amazon.com

Totem Publications, a Pacific Northwest publisher of detailed maps of obscure parts of Washington state, appears to be winding down, the Everett Herald reports. For certain parts of the state, the maps are “the only map game in town,” offering detail not available in competitors’ products.

The International Conferences on the History of Cartography themselves have a history: this page is an index to pages on every conference since 1964; each conference page has a list of the papers presented, and some of them have photo galleries. Via MapHist.

The Morning News has a different kind of map quiz: “We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the color-coding, names, landmarks, and whatever else you can detect. Here’s one clue to get you started: None of the maps represent gross national anything.” Via Maps-L.

More maps of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, in the form of two polar stereographic maps released today for its northern and southern hemispheres. The maps are mosaics compiled from the best Cassini and Voyager images. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Previously: New Map of Enceladus.

I should have waited: this Google LatLong post summarizes all the Street View updates: not only Hawaii and Mexico, but also Spain and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, Latitude has added a couple of features: history and alerts.

Not to disrespect the Bing, which had some interface and feature upgrades announced yesterday.

In addition to Mexico, Street View has also come to Hawaii.

The Grim Reaper’s Road Map: An Atlas of Mortality in Britain, which came out last year, “analyses over 14 million deaths over the 24-year period 1981-2004 in Britain. It gives a comprehensive overview of the geographical pattern of mortality,” including all deaths and deaths from a number of different causes. Examples of the maps can be found in this PDF excerpt (3.1 MB). Via geoparadigm.

Previously: The Death Map.

• Buy The Grim Reaper’s Road Map at Amazon.com

Like Cartophilia, designer Elizabeth Daggar sent me a copy of her unusual project, Calendria, the full title of which is the World Atlas of Calendria for the Year 2010 of the Common Era, as Observed and Faithfully Recorded by Electrofork. Liz calls Calendria “a calendar-as-world comprising twelve countries (months).” As she explains it on the project website, the map came together by overlaying North America and Europe, producing a strange map with familiar shapes: the Great Lakes flow into the Black Sea; Scotland pokes out of the northwest; the Persian Gulf is inverted as an island. The land mass is divided into 12 countries that are named after the months, with related toponyms following each month in a fanciful manner. Each country/month gets a calendar and history. The folded map (not quite an atlas) is available for sale (in a limited print run) on her Etsy page.

A Mexican version of Google Maps has launched; here’s Google’s announcement from last Friday (in Spanish). As Google Maps Mania also notes, Street View imagery has been added for seven cities in Mexico; that was supposed to have launched today, but I’ve checked Mexico City and Guadalajara and it’s not showing up for me yet.

Very Spatial points to an amusing geocaching t-shirt on Zazzle.com: “I use multi-million dollar satellites to find Tupperware in the woods. What’s your hobby?” A look at the t-shirt page’s recommendations reveals lots of other geocaching-themed t-shirts on the same site.

Zachary Forest Johnson provides “a quick outline of the first maps created with six common cartographic symbologies. … The six symbologies are the classic thematic cartography representation methods: choropleth, proportional symbol, dot density, flow, isarithmic, and cartogram.” Only one of them predates the 19th century.

Our latest example of map miscellany comes in the form of quilting fabrics with a pattern resembling a New York subway map from a quilt shop in New York City. Probably not for use in navigation. Via Very Spatial.

Jeff Thurston reviews Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, a collection of essays:

In summary, this book cuts a wide swath. It is not solely for cartographers or map makers. Rather, it is about the processes that motivate people to include maps into their daily lives, from the simplest forms to the more complex. The book brings to the forefront the idea that mapping is changing and that how we engage maps should be a consideration — continually. Rather than top-down hierarchies that push graphic content out into the wider world, Rethinking Maps picks us up and places us right in the middle of the process and hands us numerous ideas, thoughts and considerations to orient ourselves.

Previously: Rethinking Maps.

• Buy Rethinking Maps at Amazon.com

Since 2004, the International Maritime Organization has required all vessels of 300 or more gross tons to carry an AIS transponder, which transponder transmits position, speed and course and other information about the ship. MarineTraffic.com takes that data and plots it on a map. The data is updated every hour — close enough to real-time. Think about it: this is a near-real-time map of every ship on the planet above a certain size. Mind-boggling. Via Cartophilia.

Previously: ESA Maps European Shipping Routes.

At the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, north of Toronto, until January 17, 2010, an exhibition of Cape Dorset art: Nunannguaq: In the Likeness of the Earth:

In Inuktitut, the word Nunannguaq translates into “in the likeness of the earth,” which refers to a complex system used (like a map) to record ancient pathways. While travelling across the vast northern territories, the Inuit were guided by maps imprinted in the community’s collective memory rather than on skin or ivory. By using this type of ephemeral mapping, all travellers were encouraged to actively participate in the setting of directions and, in consequence, developed highly sophisticated skills to observe and instantly interpret the land. This ability to swiftly memorize visual forms strongly influenced the works of Inuit artists and was noted by several European explorers who sought out Inuit assistance in their mapping efforts. The historical Inuit maps displayed in Nunannguaq: In the Likeness of the Earth provides an important visual context to the early works of Cape Dorset artists.

The Toronto Star has more:

Ideas about objectivity — “the western approach to map making,” according to Anna Stanisz, the McMichael curator for “Nunannguaq” — are suspect when it comes to understanding Inuit mapping.

An Inuit map may “be about the metaphysical knowledge of a place, and not just the physical knowledge,” Stanisz continues. “With the changing nature of the snow texture, with only wind direction as an indicator, the true distance between one place and another has to be adjusted from day to day.”

Previous posts about Inuit mapping and navigation: Inuit Routefinding and Oral Tradition; Inuit Tactile Maps; Driftwood Map.

Peter Batty weighs in on the quality of Google’s new, homegrown map data:

As anyone in the geo world knows, all maps have errors, and it’s hard to do a really rigorous analysis on Google’s current dataset versus others. But I think there is strong evidence that the new Google dataset in the U.S. is a significant step down in quality from what they had before, and from what Microsoft, Yahoo and MapQuest have (via Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ).

Google clearly hopes to clean up the data fairly quickly by having users notify them of errors. But looking at the situation, I think that they may have a few challenges with this. One is just that the number of errors seems to be pretty large. But more importantly, I think the question for Google is whether consumers will be motivated to help them fix up the data, when there are plenty of good free alternatives available. If Google gives you the wrong answer once maybe you let it slide, and perhaps you notice the link to inform them of the problem and maybe fill it out. But if it happens a couple of times, is the average consumer likely to keep informing Google of errors, or just say “*&#% this, I’m switching to MapQuest/Bing/Yahoo”?

Worth reading in full.

Previously: Too Soon?; Google Stops Using Tele Atlas in the U.S.

Remember Children Map the World, the collection of maps from the biennial Barbara Petchenik Children’s Maps Competition? I blogged about it four years ago. Now there’s a second volume; whereas the first volume covered the first 10 years of the competition, volume two showcases 100 maps from the 2005-2007 competition. Press release.

Previously: Children Map the World: The Book.

• Buy Children Map the World, Vol. 2 at Amazon.com
• Buy Children Map the World, Vol. 1 at Amazon.com

While browsing in, of all places, a science fiction bookstore, I stumbled across a new book by Mark Ovenden that looked quite interesting in the brief time I had to look at it: Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Metro. Mark is, you will remember, the author of Transit Maps of the World, which I reviewed here in March 2008. Unlike most transit systems, the Paris Metro is something I’m quite familiar with, so I’m going to have to look into this.

Previously: Harry Beck’s Map of the Paris Metro; Review: Transit Maps of the World; Transit Maps of the World (Again); Transit Maps of the World.

• Buy Paris Underground at Amazon.com
• Buy Transit Maps of the World at Amazon.com

The National Post takes a look at Katharine Harmon’s new book, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, which I briefly mentioned back in August. Via AnyGeo.

Meanwhile, a related exhibition curated by Harmon along with Christopher Henry, also called The Map as Art, opens today at the Christopher Henry Gallery in New York, and runs until January 10, 2010.

• Buy The Map as Art at Amazon.com
• Buy You Are Here at Amazon.com

Here’s a map of the Moon generated by laser altimeter data from the Japanese lunar probe Kaguya, which has just been released. In this image, brighter/yellow is higher elevation, darker/red is lower elevation. This map is centred on the far side of the Moon, which obviously has some interesting stuff going on topographically. (Image credit: JAXA/SELENE.) On the Planetary Society’s blog, Emily Lakdawalla shows a bunch more of these maps, plus some examples of what happens when this data is mapped to a sphere using Celestia — including this video of a rotating Moon, which was generated not from imagery but from this altimeter data:

Previously: Kaguya’s Lunar Topo Maps.

The New York Times’s election results page has maps for the New York City mayoral and council races, plus the New Jersey governorship. Via Map Hawk.

Steven Citron-Pousty wonders whether Google dropped Tele Atlas before their own data was ready. “Google’s routing data sucks right now and there are no two ways about it.” Via Peter.

Previously: Google Stops Using Tele Atlas in the U.S.

ABC News critiques the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s map of influenza (both seasonal and H1N1) activity, arguing that it fails to show the differences in severity from state to state or within states — all but two states, plus Guam, the District of Columbia, the USVI and Puerto Rico are currently labelled “widespread.” Of course, the map says as much in a disclaimer at the bottom. Via All Points Blog.

Gadling reminds us that handheld GPS units do have their limitations when you hike with them in the wilderness: they don’t have turn-by-turn directions, they may not get a signal in rough terrain (e.g., in a canyon), and they’re dependent on batteries. These seem like obvious points, but sometimes you do need to state the obvious.

Odd and a bit horrific: a NOAA survey vessel mapping the ocean floor off the coast of California struck and killed a 21-metre female blue whale on October 19. (The endangered blue whale is the largest animal species ever known to have existed on this planet.) Via Maps-L.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist is the Library of Congress’s online, continuously updated version of its 1981 publication, Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress. The searchable database provides listings of the 50,000 editions of Sanborn Maps held by the Library, with links to images as they are added to the system. This is primarily a research tool, not an online exhibition. Because of their detail, fire insurance maps are profoundly useful as historical sources; because of copyright issues, we rarely see them online. Via MapHist and Maps-L.

Previously: Company Makes Fire Insurance Maps Available to Researchers; San Francisco Fire Insurance Maps; New York Fire Insurance Maps.

Mapping Manchester: Cartographic Stories of the City opened last June and runs until January 17, 2010, at Manchester’s John Rylands Library. From the promotional leaflet (PDF):

Mapping Manchester showcases the wealth of cartographic treasures held by the University of Manchester and other institutions in the city, including generous loans of materials from the Manchester City Library and Archives and Chetham’s Library. … Over eighty different maps, plans, diagrams and photographs of the city — published over the last two hundred and fifty years — are on display. These range in date from the first large scale survey of the city published by William Green in 1794, to a 2008 statistical map of binge drinking hotspots across Manchester.

See also the catalogue (5.2 MB PDF); a higher-resolution version (30 MB PDF) is also available). A talk will also be given on December 10. Via Maps-L.

Previously: More on Soviet Maps of the UK.

Etsy seller studiokmo produces interesting map cuts — maps of cities where the city blocks are cut out, leaving a transparent lattice of streets. So far, she’s produced maps of New York and Paris; London is next, and she will do custom orders. This kind of intricate work doesn’t come cheaply: New York sold last week for $550. Via Gizmodo and Make; see also the Jailbreak.

Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments, an exhibition of astronomical equipment, celestial globes and manuscripts taking place at the Vatican Museums until January 16, 2010, includes equipment like astrolabes and planetariums, and 16th- and 17th-century celestial globes by Coronelli and Vanosino. More at Art Knowledge News; io9 has a gallery, including several shots of those globes.

Two more map blogs have come to my attention recently: the new ArcGIS Data Blog and El mundo de los mapas, a Spanish-language blog that has been around somewhat longer.