The Map Room

Julia reports back on the submissions she received after she asked readers to send in hand-drawn maps. “Slate readers sent in nearly 200 maps, and they ranged from hasty scribbles on scrap paper to elaborate, multicolored renderings. No matter what it looks like, a handmade map offers several advantages over a road atlas or the directions you get from Google. … [H]omemade maps can be better than professional ones at eliminating extraneous detail, playing with scale, simplifying complex forms, and mapping remote terrain or interiors.” She posts 15 examples, and has thoughtful things to say about them. Via Boing Boing.

Previously: Slate Wants Hand-Drawn Maps.

Google Maps is using new map data in Canada, abandoning the Tele Atlas data with which I had so many problems in September 2008. According to Google, “In Canada, we’ve made use of data from organizations such as the National Hydrography Network and Canadian Council on Geomatics. Once again things like satellite imagery and Street View were also helpful to make a rich, thorough base map.”

At first glance, the data is an improvement; there’s more detail (albeit patchy: forest coverage seems a county-by-county affair) and the street data is more up to date. And it does fix the errors I pointed out in 2008.

But if it fixes some errors, it also creates a bunch of new ones. Investigating my own town, I spot driveways, dirt paths and a bicycle trail (!) that are now coded as streets. County-level and secondary roads in Ontario are given trunk-highway symbols across the province. GPS Review notices that “the purple areas depicting StreetView coverage are still aligned with the TeleAtlas data, so you can see areas where the two datasets don’t match very well— it is somewhat amusing to see.”

Fortunately, the Canadian maps get that “Report a Problem” link for submitting corrections map data that U.S. maps acquired when Google started using its own own map data there (there was one before in my area, but I think it might have been just for Street View). With any luck (and a few thousand iterations), things may get better.

Previously: Google Switches to Tele Atlas, Errors Proliferate.

As part of a series on learning new life skills, Sam Watts learns how to read an Ordnance Survey map. Though not necessarily how to fold them. They’re, ah, big. Via OrdnanceSurvey.

This video is a visualization of the resumption of flights over European airspace after everything got shut down due to volcanic ash. ITO World combined flight data from flightradar24.com with OpenStreetMap map data; there are some gaps in coverage (France, the Atlantic), but you get the idea. Via La Cartoteca.

Nearly two years after releasing a browser plugin allowing Google Maps API developers to embed Google Earth into a web page, Google has integrated “Earth view” into the Google Maps site itself: “Earth” is now a tab beside “Map” and “Satellite,” displacing “Terrain” (now found under “More”). Downloading the browser plugin is still required. CNet, Google LatLong, Official Google Blog.

This is not to deprecate the standalone Google Earth application. From the Official Google Blog: “Current Google Earth users, of course, will continue to enjoy the full power of the standalone application: KML editing, historical imagery, GPS tracks, tour-creation, Mars, Sky, flight simulator and so on. But for quick online access, the power of 3D will also be available at the click of a[n Earth] button.”

Speaking of Magnificent Maps, today’s Guardian has an article about the exhibition.

We’re one week away from the opening of Magnificent Maps at the British Library; in the meantime, there’s an accompanying curators’ blog, which started up earlier this month. Via Mapperz.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a lot of images of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption; handily, there’s an index.

Previously: Eyjafjallajökull and European Airspace; Eyjafjallajökull.

Several Apple-oriented sites I follow have reported that Google, fresh off its launch of Google Maps Navigation in the U.K. and Ireland, may be about to release turn-by-turn navigation for the iPhone. That was based on the following line in a MacUser article: “Google confirmed at a London press conference that it plans to bring free satnav to other smartphone platforms, including the iPhone, although it wouldn’t say when.” Which triggered all sorts of speculation that turn-by-turn navigation would show up in iPhone OS 4 this summer (e.g., Engadget, MacNN). However, according to PC World, the Goog has since walked back that statement, saying only that they may bring it to other platforms, generically speaking, in the future. Via AppleInsider, Cult of Mac and MacRumors.

Another entry in the microscopic-map sweepstakes: IBM researchers, demonstrating a new manufacturing technique, have created a tiny three-dimensional map of the earth. At 22×11 µm, it’s smaller than the 40-µm map of the world I blogged about in January, but still larger than the smallest map ever. It’s far more accurate, however, and is a bona fide relief map. An IBM video explains the process. Via Slashdot.

Previously: Smallest Map of the World; Smallest. Map. Ever.

The University of Minnesota’s campus paper, The Minnesota Daily, takes a look at the University’s Antarctic Geospatial Information Center (AGIC), which provides maps and GIS analysis to Antarctic researchers.

Cartophilia and The Map Scroll look at the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, now all but dried up due to irrigation diversion. The above time-lapse video captures the Aral Sea’s disappearance.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has been watching the lake’s disappearance as well: this slideshow documents the water’s retreat from 2000 to 2009 (see here and here for earlier comparisons). This image was taken last month.

Previously U.S.-only, Google Maps Navigation is now available in the U.K. and Ireland on Android phones. Jemima Kiss of the Grauniad’s PDA blog runs it through its paces. This being satellite navigation in Britain, hilarity is predestined to ensue. Here’s a gem:

The voice commands function is unintentionally hilarious. I tried “Navigate: Southover Street Brighton” five times with no success. “Did you mean Davis Street Brighton? Sanford Street Brighton? Esophagus tree Brighton?”) before attempting my best Valley-girl voice and lo — it worked first time. So driving directions might be delivered with English plums, but you’ll have to try and sound American to get your navigation instructions understood. Still, it makes the trip a bit more amusing.

Additional coverage: Engadget, Google Maps Mania, Mapperz.

Previously: Reactions to Google Maps Navigation; Google Maps Navigation: Free Turn-by-Turn Directions for Android Phones.

Cartophilia reports that the book of hand-drawn maps collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association (see previous entry) is coming out this fall: Princeton Architectural Press is publishing From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association in October.

• Buy From Here to There at Amazon.com

Leica has announced the V-Lux 20, a compact digital camera with a built-in GPS (Digital Photography Review, Photography Blog). It’s essentially a rebadged Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (TZ10 outside the U.S.), similarly equipped with an onboard GPS, the announcement of which in January I missed. (Panasonic and Leica have been collaborating for years.) The Leica lists for £495, the Panasonic for $399, leading Engadget to call this “pure brand extortion.” (But I’m sure Leica buyers are used to that.)

• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (black) at Amazon.com
• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (blue) at Amazon.com
• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (red) at Amazon.com
• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (silver) at Amazon.com

According to a market analysis by Experian Simmons, about 21.6 percent of U.S. adults own some Apple product or other, Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech reports. A map shows how each market area deviates from that norm, with the national average being given an index value of 100 (unsurprisingly, the Bay Area is on top). Via TUAW.

Google hasn’t completely abandoned China; high-resolution imagery taken after last week’s earthquake in Qinghai is now available through Google Earth (KML link).

So it’s map week on BBC Four, with both Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps to watch (at least if you’re in the UK, grumble), and the British Library’s big exhibition opens at the end of the month. So there’s press coverage. The Telegraph looks at all three, the Yorkshire Post profiles M:PPP presenter Jerry Brotton, and the Independent has a wide-ranging article.

Previously: British Map Roundup: Parker in the Telegraph, BBC TV Series.

JonesCat Publishing, the company publishing The Hills Are Stuffed with Swedish Girls, a comic novel with a cover parodying the Ordnance Survey’s Landranger map series, is throwing in the towel and going out of business, Grough reports; the company can’t afford a legal dispute with the OS. Via Mapperz.

Previously: Ordnance Survey Objects to Comic Novel’s Cover.

• Buy The Hills Are Stuffed with Swedish Girls — while you still can — at Amazon.com

Shannon Rankin slices up maps to create new forms: “While bearing traces of the original form, I deconstruct maps to create new geographies, suggesting the potential for a broader landscape.” Her portfolio is extensive (and is also reproduced on her Flickr account). I’m particularly fond of her Uncharted Series. Above, an example from that series, Pod (2009). Via BLDG BLOG, which takes an extensive look at her work.

Jason LaFerrera makes images of wildlife out of collages out of old maps. From Jason’s artist statement: “The textures and contours of old maps are fascinating, even the tattered and stained parts. In this series, I digitally manipulate cartographic materials to create fauna, mostly birds, in poses reminiscent of field guides from a similarly early era of publication. The patterns of forests and shores often become an animal’s feathers or fur, while the rings of topography often trace out wings or antlers.” Via Boing Boing.

The Norwegian Meteorological Office has put together a time-lapse animation showing the spread of the ash cloud emitted by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. I’ve converted it from the original animated GIF, which is nearly 14 MB, and uploaded it here. Yellow indicates ash that has fallen by itself, red ash that has fallen as a result of precipitation, and black where the ash cloud is at that moment in time. More information (in Norwegian) here.

Radar Virtuel is a map of European airspace that shows the real-time positions of aircraft; lately it has been showing (1) an overlay of the ash cloud and (2) not many aircraft in the air. For obvious reasons the site has been kind of hard to load lately (or I would have been able to mention it in my previous entry on Eyjafjallajökull). Via Mapperz.

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni — the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency — showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. “Black is less than 7 mph. Red is less than 19 mph. Blue is less than 43 mph. Green is above that.” Via (and with thanks to) Burrito Justice.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory continues to release updated maps of Saturn’s moons based on Cassini imagery. Yesterday was the turn of the fourth-largest Saturnian moon, Dione: JPL released two polar stereographic maps of the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as a simple cylindrical projection. These maps are unlabelled and are based on spacecraft imagery (with old Voyager imagery filling in Cassini’s gaps). They’re also available on Flickr: northern polar, southern polar, cylindrical. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.)

Previously: Polar Maps of Enceladus; New Map of Enceladus; The Dione Atlas; A Map of Dione and a Planetary Gazetteer.

Here’s a lighthearted interactive map showing the celebrity recolonization of Africa — which is to say, which African countries have become the pet project of which A-list celebrity. What, no love for Guinea-Bissau? Via Andrew Sullivan.

Ben Hennig’s cartogram showing each country’s debt-to-GDP ratio really emphasizes just how screwed North America, western Europe and Japan really are. Credit: SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). Via Geospatial News and La Cartoteca.

Google Maps announces driving directions for 111 new countries, largely in Africa, central Asia, Central and South America, and island countries around the world (from Aruba to Vanuatu).

There are satellite images of the ash clouds thrown up by the eruption of the volcano under Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier; the one above, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite on Wednesday, shows the ash plume following a straight line from the glacier to the Faroe and Shetland Islands. Here’s an alternate link; these images show a closer view of Eyjafjallajökull. More about this at Universe Today and Bad Astronomy. See Google LatLong and Google Earth Blog on viewing the imagery in Google Earth. See Google Maps Mania on maps showing the impact of the ash plume on air traffic in northwestern Europe.

Update: The Met Office has maps forecasting the ash cloud’s spread; this map on Wikimedia Commons is derived from that data.

Update, 6:43 PM EDT: NASA’s Earth Observatory has a map of “aerosol optical thickness,” on the basis that satellite imagery is insufficient at showing the problem.

Update, April 16 at 6:20 PM EDT: NASA continues to add satellite imagery, including some telling infrared imagery, to this page.

Mike Parker has an essay in the Telegraph that refers to the two upcoming BBC TV series and British Library exhibition; Parker’s Map Addict, which I reviewed last October, is now available in paperback. As for those two BBC series, here are the web pages for Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps; the names have changed since I last heard about them (via Mapperz and MapHist).

Previously: The Independent on “Magnificent Maps”; Mike Parker’s “On the Map” Begins Monday; British Library to Hold Map Exhibition, BBC to Air Two Map Series; Review: Map Addict.

• Buy Map Addict (hardcover) at Amazon.com (Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk)
• Buy Map Addict (paperback) at Amazon.com (Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk)

On GPS Tracklog, Rich Owings has a review of Garmin’s Oregon 450 handheld GPS receiver. (I’m finally at a point where I can read such reviews and understand what they’re getting at.) Rich recommends it: “The Oregon 450 is a great workhorse, at a reasonable price. The interface is very user friendly and it has a lengthy feature set. It is an excellent choice for nearly any outdoor activity, including geocaching and hiking. This is the first Oregon I’m recommending for bikes too, due to the improved screen visibility, which makes it more appropriate for fixed-mount use.”

• Buy Garmin Oregon 450 at Amazon.com

I drove to Toronto and back over the weekend. I knew the way, but I used my Garmin nüvi 255W (see previous entry) to navigate. Of course, there were some quirks. I have the following observations about what it recommended:

1. It’s deeply schizophrenic about the express and collector lanes on Highway 401 in Toronto: it directed me to switch back and forth between them. I knew better and ignored it.
2. It will not hesitate to recommend back roads as shortcuts — even deeply twisty ones with single-lane bridges. There are times when sticking to main highways is better.
3. The navigation algorithm does not let you deviate from the highlighted route without it squawking about it. I decided to take an alternate route that I knew would add a only couple of minutes. It instructed me to turn around and get back to the original route long after the new route would be shorter; my ETA suddenly improved by 15 minutes once it accepted the new route.

This was using the quickest route option. There will, in other words, always be navigational quirks. It’s always a good idea to know enough about the route to know when to ignore your GPS’s advice — but then I’m not saying anything new here.

Comic Book Cartography collects maps and diagrams from comic books — more the latter (e.g., cutaways of superheroes’ headquarters) than the former so far. Via Boing Boing, among others. At right: Jack Kirby’s World of Kamandi.

Previously: The Marvel Atlas Project.

The requirements for the Boy Scouts of America’s forthcoming geocaching merit badge have been released, though the badge itself has yet to appear. Via geoparadigm.

MAPCO, which makes high-resolution scans of antique maps available online, has added a lot of material since I first blogged about them in 2007; one of their more recent additions has been showing up a lot in my Twitter feed: Edward Weller’s 1868 map of London.

Mike Pegg, now with Google, returns to his old stomping grounds at Google Maps Mania to muse on the fifth anniversary of the first Google Maps hack. “Keep in mind that an API for Google Maps did not yet exist. This was the first act of its kind to mash data up and add it to a Google Map and as far as record keeping goes, is, the first Google Maps hack, or mashup. … There is so much significance to today and it started so many things. It’s the act that showed that a Google Maps API should be created.”

With an imminent general election in the U.K., we should be getting our hands on some examples of electoral map cartography. There are already some early examples of the form, showing the state of things going into the campaign: the Daily Telegraph uses a hexagon-based cartogram to smooth out the differences in area between constituencies (via Map Hawk); the BBC’s map exists in virtual space (via Google Earth Design).

Here’s another profile of MapArt’s founders Hart and Rita Schwerdt, this time from Inside Toronto. The retrospectives seem to be coming because, at 70, they’re handing over the reins to their son.

Previously: Mapmobility/MapArt Founders Profiled.

National Geographic World Atlas is a $1.99 application for the iPhone and iPod touch (iTunes link) that provides high-resolution scans of National Geographic’s wall maps. Included are standard, executive and satellite versions of National Geographic’s world map in the Winkel Tripel projection. This makes for a rather large download (49.7 MB) for an iPhone app. Zooming in changes the view to the appropriate continental map. Map tiles for the continental maps are downloaded over the network, but the entire maps can be downloaded for offline use.

At higher zooms, the app switches over to Bing Maps, which makes this app a Bing Maps viewer as well. (See the announcement on the Big Maps Blog.) The Bing Maps feature works well, and is an interesting combination that plays to each kind of map’s strengths: online maps do not necessarily do large scales very well, and there’s only so much you can zoom in on a print map. (Of course, it requires a network connection.)

The app is also GPS-aware, but I was unable to test that on my first-generation iPod touch. Rounding out the app is a database that provides flags and other basic geographic details for every country and territory on the planet.

Early versions of this app were not as stable as I would have liked, and I still get a crash now and then. The initial version I downloaded in January had an interesting tile bug (right) that has not reappeared after subsequent upgrades.

Its price point is kind of awkward: an app dedicated to presenting more, or even all, of National Geographic’s maps would almost certainly cost more but would be awesome — I’m big a fan of their cartography. At $1.99, though, it has to offer more than a free app. I think the price is reasonable for what you get, but I’m not jumping-up-and-down excited — it’s fair value.

It’s also rather limiting to look at a large map on an iPhone’s rather small screen; these maps beg for a larger screen. As such, I’d have no hesitation grabbing the iPad version of this app, which also costs $1.99. If I had an iPad, that is (in Canada: have to wait).

The Globe and Mail on a new book co-published by Ecotrust Canada and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, Living Proof: The Essential Data Colection Guide for Indigenous Use-and-Occupancy Map Surveys by Terry N. Tobias: “The book, seven years in the making, lays down the foundation for creating exquisitely detailed maps that show how native people use the land on which they live.” It’s not cheap — between $50 and $140 depending on edition and on who’s buying — and can only be ordered from the organizations.

Via multiple sources, the New York Times’s taxi map shows the average number of taxi pickups by street for Manhattan for each hour of the week — an incredibly deep portrait of where New Yorkers get their cabs. (Interesting to see what pops out on Friday and Saturday nights but not at other times. Now I know where to drink in New York.)

The Ordnance Survey made a bunch of its mapping data freely available on April 1; lists of downloadable data are here and here. ESRI Mapping Center discusses the data; via AnyGeo, GeoWeb Guru and Mapperz.

The Independent covers the release in the context of the OS’s long history. (Update: So does the Times.)

I’ve expressed my enthusiasm before about what the iPad could do for mobile mapping, especially the 3G models with GPS and ubiquitous network connectivity: take everything that’s been done with the iPhone, and quadruple the screen real estate — what won’t that do. (Killer field mapping, that’s what I think.) Anyway, All Points Blog points to a couple of press releases for geo apps for the iPod; Fred Zahradnik notes that turn-by-turn and outdoor/recreational navigation apps aren’t to be found in the iPad apps already found on iTunes; he figures that’s because the 3G models, which are the ones with GPS, won’t be on sale in the U.S. until later this month. But they’re coming. (I’m crossing my fingers for an iPad OpenStreetMap editor; there are several for the iPhone already, so I’m not being unrealistic here.) (Image credit: Apple)

A 3D mode for Google Street View, requiring 3D glasses, turned up yesterday, which made me wonder whether it was a time-limited April Fool’s gag, but it’s April 2 and it’s still there. Moreover, the mode actually works. Jennifer found some 3D glasses so that we could actually test this; she saw the 3D just fine, but I couldn’t, thanks to my wonky, cross-eyed eyes — 3D isn’t much good when you have no depth perception. More: Google Maps Mania.

Regarding my previous post about solar eclipse maps, Michael Zeiler writes to point to his map of solar eclipses from 2010 to 2050 (4 MB PDF), which uses a Mollweide projection (which he prefers to cylindrical projections used in other maps) as well as two azimuthal projections for the polar regions. Very nicely done.

Previously: Eclipse Maps.

Not a Google initiative or an April Fool’s gag, Google Mail Envelopes is a project by two industrial design students at Syracuse University, who posit a “send envelope” button in Gmail that prints a map showing directions from the sender’s address to the recipient that can be folded into an envelope for mailing. (You know, mail.) I imagine the metaphor falls down, though, if the sender’s address is not north and west of the recipient’s. Via Engadget and Mike Elgan.