The Map Room

The Map Room is seven years old today.

For a blog that was started as a way to learn more about maps, by someone who — at least at the beginning — was, shall we say, more interested than informed, I’m surprised at its staying power. Seven years later, I still feel like I don’t know what I’m talking about — although now, at least, it’s much more a case of my knowing what I don’t know. It’s humbling to muddle through this subject, as a learner rather than an expert, and have so many readers following me as I go.

Your support, feedback (when the commenting system lets you) and link submissions are appreciated, even if I never properly acknowledge them. (I’m terrible at responding to e-mail. Have I mentioned?) Thanks for reading.

The Grub Street Project: Topographies of 18th-Century London “aims to map the city and its texts to create both a historically accurate visualization of the city’s commerce and communications, and a record of how its authors and artists portrayed it.” So far it’s very much a work in progress, with an improved interface and integrated data still to come, but at least there are a couple of maps on the site, including Richard Horwood’s 1795 map of London (above). Via geoparadigm.

O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference got under way yesterday; Google Earth Blog’s Mickey Mellen and All Points Blog’s Joe Francica wrap up the first day’s events.

The conference can be followed on Twitter, as you might expect from a bunch of techies.

Apparently there’s still a reason to get the dedicated MapQuest app for the iPhone OS rather than using the mobile-optimized website: version 1.5.1, released this week, includes basic voice directions. It’s still a free app.

Previously: MapQuest for Advanced Mobile Browsers; MapQuest Application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Yesterday, Google announced draggable public transit directions; the day before, Bing Maps announced walking directions and a number of other features.

Kevin Van Aelst photographs “common artifacts and scenes from everyday life, which have been rearranged, assembled, and constructed into various forms, patterns, and illustrations.” His Apple Globe (2007) is of obvious interest to us; see also what he does with Hawaii. Via MAPS-L.

Pingdom has a collection of factoids about GPS entitled, oddly enough, Everything you ever wanted to know about GPS. (Yes, but how do they know what I wanted to know?) Via geoparadigm.

McSweeney’s: Realistic Google Maps Walking Directions When in a Different Country, by Zach Jones. If you know McSweeney’s, you already have an idea where this is going.

Interesting post from The Electoral Map about how regional divisions in election results reflect other (e.g. ethnic) divisions.

Earth Observatory’s Cities at Night features photography of the night side of the Earth taken by orbiting astronauts. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking in whole regions at once. Onboard cameras and a bit of experimentation allow astronauts to take highly detailed images of our cities at night and share them with the rest of us.” Above: Houston at night, taken on January 30, 2010.

John McKinney argues that paper maps may have some life left in them; among other things, he cites a Japanese study that found that “people on foot using a GPS device make more errors and take longer to reach their destinations than people using an old-fashioned map.”

The study found GPS users made more stops, walked farther and more slowly than map users and demonstrated a poorer knowledge of the terrain, topography and routes taken when asked to sketch a map after their walks. GPS users also adjudged the way-finding tasks as much more difficult than did map users. Those proving to be most proficient at navigation turned out to be those shown the route by researchers — they bested both map and GPS users by striding to destinations faster and with fewer missteps.

What I take away from this is that GPS and paper maps are not direct replacements for one another; each has weaknesses and strengths that the other lacks. Via All Points Blog.

An exhibition that opened this week at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center has a component of interest to antique map enthusiasts. Invented Bodies: Shapely Constructs of the Early Modern runs until June 25.

This exhibition explores the many ways that Europeans in the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries viewed the world, society, and themselves through “invented bodies” — vividly imagined forms that range from the perceptibly human to the decidedly fantastical. The exhibit engages four interrelated themes. Shaping the World looks at Early Modern maps that use anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or floramorphic renderings to make sense of new discoveries beyond Europe. Figures of Architecture explores the anthropomorphic theories and images that come to particular prominence in Early Modern Italian and English architecture. (Re)Discovered Bodies focuses on the ways that Early Modern Europeans look at the people and places of the “New World” through the lens of Antiquity, deploying familiar classicizing forms as a means of understanding these newly discovered cultures and their origins, histories, and traditions. Finally, States and Selves examines the ways in which all these ideas and phenomena are brought to bear in the construction of the identity of the individual and the state; it reveals a merging of civic, personal, and cultural imagery that is both deeply specific and yet resonant throughout Early Modern Europe.

More from the Yale Daily News. Note that while the exhibition draws from Yale libraries, only facsimiles are on display. At post-Smiley Yale, originals are kept off-display, I guess.

Engadget reviews Dual Electronics’s GPS cradle for the iPod touch, and wonders whether the $200 cradle, which, as you might expect, adds GPS and navigation, is worth it when there are plenty of standalone GPS navigation systems out there that cost less. I have to wonder myself.

The Escanaba Daily Press reports the death of John Patrick “Pat” Farrell, a former head of the geography department at Northern Michigan University who, in his retirement, ran Maps North, a map store in Marquette, Michigan, with his son.

Considering how small some of the towns are that are already covered in Street View, I would have thought that there wasn’t much left for Google to do. Apparently I’m wrong. Windsor will be redone because its images were taken during a garbage strike, but everything else — where?! — will be new.

Previously: When Street View Comes to Small Towns; Hey, I Can See My House.

In last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Homer got a GPS. I think you can figure out how that went. Via GPS Tracklog.

Stephen Von Worley has built upon his previous mapping of McDonald’s locations, producing a map that shows where McDonald’s’s dominance is overwhelmed by other burger chains. Collectively, other chains outnumber McD’s two to one; separately, there are regional concentrations of strength. Via Andrew Sullivan and The Map Scroll.

Previously: Mapping McDonald’s.

From British prime minister Gordon Brown’s speech today on “Building Britain’s Digital Future,” as prepared:

And following the strong support in our recent consultation, I can confirm that from 1st April, we will be making a substantial package of information held by Ordnance Survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use. Further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.

Via Mapperz.

Previously: Ordnance Survey Free Data Consultation Period Closes.

The Toronto Star profiles Hartmut and Rita Schwerdt, who founded the company now known as Mapmobility back in 1978. Mapmobility is apparently the new name of [update: it’s apparently more complicated than that] MapArt, whose road maps of Canadian cities and regions are well-known (and, incidentally, fantastic); I reviewed their mammoth Canada Back Road Atlas two years ago. The company is now making a push online, as you might have expected.

A brief but interesting article in Yale Alumni Magazine about research conducted by Yale professor Joseph P. Simmons:

In a series of studies published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Simmons and a coauthor found that people generally assume it will take longer to travel north, are more likely to cash in a coupon if it’s for a store south of them, and think that moving companies charge more when transporting furniture north than south.

Simmons, an assistant professor of marketing at the School of Management, says the studies don’t mean that people consciously believe it’s harder to go north than south, but rather that their thinking can be influenced subconsciously by the pervasive association between north and up. “If you press them, they would deny believing this,” Simmons says. “It just shows that metaphors we use in everyday life affect our thinking and affect the choices we make.”

Quick! Somebody send some emergency upside-down maps! Via Collins Maps Blog.

The shmoo-like Google employees from College Humour’s “Google Street View Guys” video return to image the world for Google Earth from a balloon. (Note: it’s not entirely clean.) Via Google Earth Blog.

Previously: Google Street View Guys.

Sean Connin asks what happened to neogeography, a concept that seemed all the rage not so long ago; his answer: that “neogeography” — i.e., web-based mapping tools — has gotten confused and conflated with GIS, which used to be neogeography’s antithesis. Via geoparadigm.

The Independent has an article about the British Library’s upcoming map exhibition, Magnificent Maps, which opens April 30. The piece quotes British Library map head Peter Barber and makes reference to a number of maps without explicitly saying that they’re part of the exhibition, but I think their presence can be inferred.

Previously: British Library to Hold Map Exhibition, BBC to Air Two Map Series.

Mike Parker’s radio series on maps, On the Map, begins on Monday the 22nd (not the 23rd as I previously reported) on BBC Radio 4. The list of upcoming episodes gives a sense of what will be covered (for more, click on each episode). I don’t know whether this series can be listened to online, but I imagine that we should check these links once a few episodes have been broadcast. Via Collins Maps Blog.

Previously: BBC Radio 4 Series on Maps Coming in March.

Mapping Forestry, Peter Eredics’s book on GIS for the forestry industry, is reviewed in The Forestry Source, the Society of American Foresters’s newsletter. Via ESRI.

Michael Trinklein’s Lost States, which I reviewed in July 2008 when it was a print-on-demand title, is back in print from Quirk Books. Catholicgauze has a review.

The Belmont Citizen-Herald has a Q&A with Toby Lester, author of The Fourth Part of the World (which I reviewed last December).

• Buy The Fourth Part of the World at Amazon.com
• Buy Lost States at Amazon.com
• Buy Mapping Forestry at Amazon.com

The MapQuest Blog touts the features of MapQuest’s mobile-optimized website, available without having to download a standalone app (which is, to be sure, still available). “Now more people can get a modern look-and-feel, a friendlier user-experience and new features like walking directions from our mobile web site. We still cover all phones that have a mobile browser, but now 40 of the most trafficked mobile devices will render this improved user-experience.” That improved user experience means a touch interface and an ability to use your phone’s GPS; “advanced browsers” means Android and iPhone OS. Even so, MapQuest, ever the contrarian in online maps, still opens with a search box instead of a map.

Previously: MapQuest Application for the iPhone and iPod touch; MapQuest for iPhone.

On the Planetary Society Blog (one of my favourites), Emily Lakdawalla reviews two apps that put virtual globes of the Moon and Mars on an iPhone or iPod touch: Moon Globe, which is (now) free, and Mars Globe, which is 99 cents, both from Michael Howard. “Mars Globe is seriously one of the reasons I went with the iPhone instead of the BlackBerry when I was ready to upgrade to a smart phone,” Emily says.

Previously: Moon Maps and Star Charts for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Okay, I think I’ve got it now. In two earlier posts — this one and this one — I linked to plain-language rewrites of a consultation paper called Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey, which came out on December 23, 2009, when I was busy and missed it completely (what with the holidays and all; I’m sure that’s always a coincidence when government documents are released when no one’s paying attention). That paper opened a consultation period that closed today; the Grauniad’s tech blog looks at some of the comments to date (via Mapperz).

There are an awful lot of maps showing the path of solar eclipses. These maps are vital to eclipse chasers, who spend vast sums travelling to places where they can see one, and those slightly less insane who nevertheless are interested in when the next one comes around. (I was lucky — I saw one from my front porch when I was a kid.)

Let’s begin with this neat poster (above) by Michael Paukner, which shows eclipse paths from 2001 to 2025 (omitting a couple in Antarctica — which, believe you me, some people will try to be there for). Via Gizmodo.

Paukner’s map was based on one by Fred Espenak of NASA’s Planetary Systems Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA’s eclipse website contains Fred’s eclipse calculations, and a number of maps of each eclipse path — including the World Atlas of Solar Eclipse Paths, covering 5,000 years of eclipses, past and future. A Google Earth layer of Espenak’s maps for the 21st century is also available.

Finally, Jay Anderson’s website has maps of upcoming solar eclipses; Jay’s been tracking eclipses for a long time.

The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape
by Harm de Blij
Oxford University Press, 2008. Hardcover, 294 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-536770-6

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed,” the science-fiction writer William Gibson has said. Legendary geographer Harm de Blij’s latest book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape is a pointed rebuttal to those who think that globalization has rendered the world flat, a global village around which its inhabitants can move freely. Modernity (as Eugen Weber argued in his study of 19th-century France, Peasants into Frenchmen) is not evenly distributed. De Blij makes a convincing case that, rather than flat, the world is quite rough around the edges. He splits the world into a developed core — the European Union, Israel, the U.S. and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — and a rough periphery. Only a small fraction of the world’s population — less than three percent — live in a country other than that of their birth. Apart from the highly mobile globals, and the mobals making the difficult trek from local communities to the sweatshops and conurbations that serve as points of contact to the flat world, the rest are trapped, by reasons of geography — economics, religion, health, the status of women — in their localities. Geography matters, De Blij argues — and not for the first time.

The book is illustrated by two-colour maps throughout. I found a few quibbles in the text and maps about Canada that I knew to be wrong: women’s suffrage arrived in my country before 1960 (pp. 178-179), and we’ve had a female leader (p. 172), for example. And there are typos and glitches here and there. But I’m not the sort who thinks that nitpicky errors can shoot down a book’s overall argument, which in this case is very strong and thought-provoking. It’s given me some food for thought in terms of helping me understand the relationship between my little village: an hour outside Ottawa, but isolated in so many ways that you’d think it was in another era and place, not a (long) commute from the nation’s capital.

This was the first book by de Blij that I’ve read, and it was a pleasure. I’m sure that many of you reading this already knew that.

Previously: Harm de Blij Interview; The Power of Place.

• Buy The Power of Place at Amazon.com

The USGS released two satellite maps of the post-earthquake situation in Port-au-Prince last week: one in infrared, one in natural colour. Each is a 200-megabyte PDF. The maps are based on imagery we saw in raw form shortly after the quake; it’s since been “geo-corrected, mosaicked, and reproduced onto a cartographic 1:24,000-scale base map.” I can’t help but note that the quake was two months ago. Via USGS.

In this map from Wikimedia Commons (reproduced here under its Creative Commons Licence), blue areas use daylight saving time, orange areas no longer use it, red areas never have.

An interview with Google engineer Scott Shawcroft about Google Maps’s new bike directions; the audio is about five minutes long.

A large collection of official metro maps of cities around the world collected by Webdesigner Depot; it’s interesting to see which maps use a Beck-style diagram and which ones are more geographical. Via Jennifer.

• Buy Transit Maps of the World at Amazon.com

The New York Post finds fault with Google Maps’s bike directions in New York City. The feature, the Post says, “is filled with potentially fatal flaws, including routes that cut across Central Park’s treacherous tranverse roads and steer cyclists to truck-riddled thoroughfares.” Google says they’re aware of the problems. There’s a reason for that disclaimer: it’s still early days, folks. Via Boing Boing.

Don’t miss illustrator Christoph Niemann’s collection of whimsical map art, using the lines and symbols from a certain familiar online mapping service. Some illustrate the difficulty from getting from certain points A to certain points B, others create an image from map elements. Via All Points Blog; thanks also to Tucker Hood.

Along with the British updates I mentioned last night, Street View has also arrived in Hong Kong and Macau, Google Maps Mania reports. (I’d be very interested to see whether Street View comes to the Chinese mainland. But I wouldn’t bet on it.)

Geolocation is apparently coming to Facebook next month. “The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends,” reports Nick Bilton. “The other will be a set of software tools, known as APIs, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.” Via Gadling.

Google Maps has added bicycle directions, which take into account such things as bike trails and dedicated bike lanes (take when possible), as well as steep uphill slopes and busy thoroughfares (avoid!). It’s explained in some detail on the Official Google Blog and on Google LatLong. Matt points to this post listing the cities covered (all in the U.S. so far, alas). Rob Pegoraro runs its algorithms through their paces.

Street View’s coverage of the U.K. is about to expand dramatically. As of Thursday, practically every road in Britain will be included — a total of 238,000 miles (380,000 kilometres). That brings it up to the level found in some other countries. See coverage in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph (via Mapperz: 1, 2). Ed Parsons comments.

In other Street View news, business listing locations can now be edited using Street View, which is handy for pinpointing (so to speak) a business’s exact location. (Lord knows virtually every business is misplaced in my little town.)

Brett Camper’s 8-bit map of New York City is geographically accurate (it uses OpenStreetMap data), but renders it like a map of a role-playing or adventure game from an old 8-bit gaming console. Via Kottke.

Here’s the full report by Simply Understand on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data (see previous entry). Via Mapperz. Alternate link.

(e)space & fiction is a blog about the use of maps “and other spatial machineries” in works of fiction, from novels to movies to comic books. Bilingual, in French and English. Thanks to Paul for the link.

Emanuele Pizzolorusso’s Crumpled City Maps are made of Tyvek and are meant to be scrunched up and stuffed rather than folded. (Personally, I would have thought silk, or some other fabric, was more scrunchable than Tyvek — I’m reminded of escape maps — but I guess Tyvek works too; I’m just scared by the idea of scrunching my Tyvek topo maps.) Five city maps are planned, for Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. More from Fast Company and Cool Hunting; via geoparadigm.

Slate’s Julia Turner is the latest to put out a call for hand-drawn maps, in a post that is part of her series on signs:

The maps we draw for one another also have a certain ephemeral beauty. Each map is the product of a conversation. While most professional maps serve “countless numbers of people who have countless purposes,” Stiff says, maps like these are “made for an audience of one.” Examining these bits of personal cartography — studying the ways “we edit, we twist, we rearrange, supportively” — can teach us how humans really perceive and understand maps.

So here’s our request: Send us your maps! Please do not sit down and draft a beautiful, geographically accurate and impeccably stylish sketch of your hometown. We want found objects, maps that were really drawn in a specific moment to orient a real person for a real task.

The deadline is March 11. Via geoparadigm. Londonist asked for hand-drawn maps last month, the Hand Drawn Map Association last year.

Via MapHist, news of the passing on Thursday of Bernard V. Gutsell (1914-2010), who founded the journal Cartographica in 1965.

Fine Books and Collections magazine has published an article by Jeffrey Murray, former archivist and author of Terra Nostra, about trench maps used by British forces in World War I.

In its day, the Great War was the largest survey and mapping operation undertaken in history. No previous military engagement had so thoroughly exploited their potential. Today, trench maps provide an important visual record of the conflict that cannot be duplicated from other sources and stand as a noble testament to the hardships experienced by frontline troops as they faced the horrors of the battlefield.

Maps were constantly being produced for artillery crews, who needed up-to-date information; the existing topographical maps were not necessarily up to the task. Thanks to Rebecca Barry for the tip. (Above: a blueprint map of No Man’s Land in the Ypres salient, produced by the 2nd Canadian Division in 1916; Library and Archives Canada, NMC 21462).

Over on Autostraddle, Taylor posts a “love song” to maps in video games. Well, no: no actual singing involved; it is, however, a long, appreciative post on maps found in various video games.

Steven Heller’s roundup of map books in the book review section of tomorrow’s New York Times includes some familiar titles, such as Mark Ovenden’s Paris Underground (which I reviewed last November), Frank Jacobs’s Strange Maps, and The Map as Art by Katharine Harmon (a review of which is forthcoming). It also covers books I wasn’t aware of before this, including Mapping the World: Stories of Geography by Caroline and Martine Laffon, and Jan Conradi’s Unimark International, a history of Massimo Vignelli’s eponymous design firm.

I’m really bothered by this Canadian Press story on GPS-equipped smartphones. For one thing, it’s written as though its target audience is populated by idiots, using the breezy, chatty. brainless prose you’d expect from a fashion article. If you’re expecting something of substance — or at least technical literacy — you will be disappointed. And second, this is an article that cites precisely two sources: Nokia and RIM. Anyone who thinks they can write about mobile maps on smartphones and not make any reference to Google or Apple simply doesn’t understand the subject — and shouldn’t be writing about it either. Grumble.

Jon Heilman’s replica of the time portal map used in the 1981 Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits is available for sale as a $100 giclée print on 40×24½-inch canvas. Via Boing Boing.

Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group have created Relief, “an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models like geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The tabletop surface is actuated by an array of 120 motorized pins, which are controlled with a platform built upon open-source hardware and software tools. Each pin can be addressed individually and senses user input like pulling and pushing.” Scale this thing up, either in terms of area or in terms of pins per square inch, and you’ve got an awesome, dynamic terrain display for exhibitions. Via Make.

Joe B. has this to say about the differences between the diagrammatic, iconic London Underground map and the hash that has been the maps of the New York subway system: “The simplicity of the London diagram comes in part from the system itself being simpler. The general trend in London is for each Line to operate separately, with easy transfers across the platform to other Lines; the general trend in New York is toward interline routings involving merges and splits, with relatively inconvenient transfers.” (Of course, he goes on to say, the London system is more complicated than it looks on the map.) Via Mark.

Engadget does a head-to-head comparison of three GPS smartphone navigation systems: Google Navigation, Ovi Maps, and VZ Navigator.

So which is the nav for you? There’s zero platform overlap here, so if you already have a smartphone in your pocket and you’re happy with it that will be the one and only deciding factor. Android? Google Nav. Nokia devices? Ovi Maps. WinMo or BlackBerry on Verizon? VZ Nav. But, if you’re ready to jump on a new contract, get yourself a new toy, and want the one with the best navigation which is it? Well, it depends.

Note that a consideration of iPhone navigation options have been set aside for another time. (No surprise there: too many of them.)

Wired’s Joe Brown tests the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger the only way he can: by getting lost. After eight hours of doing his best to get lost in Tahoe National Forest, he pressed the SOS button; help arrived in 30 minutes. This was planned in advance with SPOT and the relevant authorities, but this is not the sort of service you play around with casually, so I suspect that this is about as close as you can get to a real test as you can get. Lord knows emergency services get too many false alarms as it is. Via Gadling and Gizmodo.

• Buy SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger at Amazon.com

Platial is shutting down; the site may go dark as early as tomorrow. Instructions on exporting data hosted by Platial have been posted, but the data will be archived at Geocommons. Di-Ann Eisnor explains:

We are retiring the site because we just can’t afford to keep it up any longer. The team has been volunteering for 18 months. However, it will morph into something more extraordinary, more efficient and more in line with the possibilities and technology of 2010 and beyond. We don’t have the full picture yet, but we will let you know once we have a realistic picture.

James and Leszek have some thoughts.

Update, Mar. 2: ReadWriteWeb looks at Platial’s legacy.