The Map Room

Today, after more than eight years and more than 4,000 posts, regular blogging on The Map Room comes to an end.

The blog will stay online and the archives will be accessible for as long as I have anything to say about it. But I won’t be looking for more material to blog about: no more scouring mailing lists, tweets and blogs; no more Google Alerts.

There will almost certainly an occasional post here in the future — I actually got a review copy of a book in the mail today — and if I have something to say on the subject of maps, I’ll say it here. So you might not want to unsubscribe from my RSS feed or my Twitter account just yet.

Why am I bringing things to an end? Eight years is a long time to spend on one thing and, truth be told, The Map Room has kept me from other projects, some of which have been on hold for this blog’s entire existence. Work on these projects will require me to disappear down the rabbit hole for weeks or even months at a time, which isn’t really compatible with regular blogging.

I also have to confess that this tough decision was made a little easier by the fact that ad revenues are down by more than half from their peak a few years ago. Fortunately, there are plenty of other excellent map blogs out there worth reading. It really is time to move on.

This is not to say that I’m abandoning maps altogether: in fact, two of those projects are map-related. I plan to do some research on the use of maps in fantasy literature. I also want to work on a beginner’s guide to OpenStreetMap, to encourage more people to contribute. I’ll let you know how those projects go. If you’d like to follow my progress on matters non-cartographical, join me on my personal website.

I’d be rude if I didn’t take this opportunity to thank everyone reading this — every visitor, every regular follower, every commenter, everyone who supported this site in financial and other ways.

Sometimes great links sit in my to-do list for far too long. This is one of the best: I should have posted it a year and a half ago. Their site isn’t responding right now, but when it gets back online you must go and read “Global Impositioning Systems,” Alex Hutchinson’s article in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus. (Or find a cached version if you can.) It’s about how regular GPS use may be making our brains’ ability to navigate atrophy, and brings to my attention a disorder I hadn’t heard of before: “developmental topographical disorientation” — an inability to form cognitive maps. (If you know anyone who cannot deviate from their normal commuting route without breaking out in a cold sweat, you’ve probably seen this in action.) A must-read, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner.

French artist Sabine Réthoré works with maps and globes from a different perspective. Her globes frequently spin the world on a different axis; in her maps, north is often not up. At right: Lovely Place 1, 2005-2007.

Wired’s Underwired blog examines the work of artist Nikki Rosato, who creates human forms by cutting away at maps, leaving only roads and rivers behind. Here’s her artist statement:

Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body.

In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent.

Above, “Couple: Boston, MA,” 2009.

Mapnificent is a neat tool that shows the area that can be reached by walking or public transit from a given point — the idea being that you can figure out, for example, which neighbourhoods would be within a 30-minute commute of your workplace. The video above explains how it works. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Twitter has a couple of interesting visualizations of tweets, replies and retweets to and from Japan immediately following the March 11 earthquake. “On Twitter, we saw a 500 percent increase in Tweets from Japan as people reached out to friends, family and loved ones in the moments after the earthquake. The video below shows the volume of @replies traveling into and out of Japan in a one-hour period just before and then after the earthquake.”

A second video, displaying “worldwide retweets of Tweets originating in Japan for one hour after the earthquake,” is also available.

Previously: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Maps.

Earlier this month, GIS and Science reported that a map of green turtle nesting sites by Andrew DiMatteo, cartographer for the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Project, won this year’s International Conservation Mapping Competition. The map was published in Volume VI of the SWOT Report and is available separately here (PDF). The SWOT project has published a number of maps showing sea turtle nesting sites and biogeography; there’s also an interactive map. If you know me at all, you know how big a fan I am of reptiles in general, so I’m happy to see so much mapping activity dedicated to their conservation.

Mark Tully writes with a link to the above video, part of the Visualizing Early Washington DC project, which I’ve seen before but (as has sometimes happened) I never seem to have gotten round to posting it. Here’s a description of the project:

UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) is working to re-create Washington DC in its early years 1790-1820. Remarkably little visual information remains from this time period. What began as a simple effort to use 3D digital re-creation and display techniques has become full-scale research to uncover the original landscape. In 1791, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown Maryland with orders from President George Washington to lay out the new Federal City. What did he actually see as he rode the land on horseback? This is just one question that we are trying to answer.

Author Lev Grossman interviews Roland Chambers, the artist who created the maps for his novels The Magicians and The Magician King (forthcoming). Via io9.

Meanwhile, illustrator Mike Schley writes to share a link to maps he produced for children’s books.

The Daily Mail has posted a collection of astronaut photos of the Earth at night taken from the International Space Station. Via @spacefuture.

David Hopp sent me a note about his new website, CLIWOC Repurposed. “The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) was a project sponsored by the European Union from 2001 through 2003. Meteorological data was extracted from the logbooks of ships, sailing primarily under the flags of Great Britain Spain, The Netherlands, and France. […] The intended purpose of this present web site is to explore visualiztions of the CLIWOC data not for their meteorological value, but to illustrate the trade routes of the ships of the four countries.” Which he does with a set of maps, one for each country, showing that country’s Atlantic trade routes.

Via MapHist comes word of the publication of the second, revised edition of Marcel van den Broecke’s Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide. “This very practical and informative manual gives an extensive overview and a description of all the maps that appeared in the famous first atlas by Abraham Ortelius, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 and all later editions.”

The European Space Agency has launched a pilot study to see if avalanches can be mapped from space, to determine whether a road has been blocked — handy in remote regions where observation stations are few on the ground and aerial monitoring is expensive.

Another Street View update, which Google is calling “our biggest update yet” — no new countries, it seems, but “[n]ew imagery is now available for 13 of our established Street View countries: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.”

Whenever I see a weather forecast, it’s usually accompanied by normal temperatures for the day. In NOAA’s case, that normal is calculated from a 30-year average, updated every decade. NOAA just updated those norms, Dan Satterfield reports, and as you might expect, things are a bit warmer: “Climate change is expected to be stronger in northern areas of North America and that trend continues to show up. It is also expected to be more noticeable at night and in winter and that too shows up clearly,” Dan says. Here’s a PDF of the NOAA briefing deck explaining the update, from which the map above is taken: the map shows the increase in degrees Fahrenheit between the 1971-2000 and 1981-2010 normal minimum temperatures for January. Via MAPS-L.

I’ve seen a lot of maps in a lot of places in the eight years I’ve been writing this blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map on a coin. The Royal Canadian Mint is producing a limited-edition $25 silver coin with a map of Toronto on the reverse. Via @jakubczaplicki.

One of the more unique interactive city maps I have seen to date is the Reykjavík Center Map, an online map of Iceland’s capital. Yes, it’s a pushpin map, but it uses an isometric projection (which I’ve seen in some Chinese maps) and the base map is a veritable work of art — it’s not at all computer generated, and it looks like a watercolour. Snorri Þór Tryggvason, who worked on the map with some friends and sent me the link, wrote, “The mapmaking took two years and over 3,000 hours to complete,” and I believe him.

The European Space Agency has released a map of sea ice thickness in the Arctic based on observations by the CryoSat-2 satellite. “CryoSat measures the height of the sea ice above the water line, known as the freeboard, to calculate the thickness. The measurements used to generate this first map of the Arctic were from January and February 2011, as the ice approaches its annual maximum. The data are exceptionally detailed and considerably better than the mission’s specification. They even show lineations in the central Arctic that reflect the ice’s response to wind stress.” There’s also a map of Antarctic ice, but it’s preliminary.

With his 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, Orlando Ferguson made visual his emphatic claim that the earth was flat. One hundred and eighteen years later, one of the last remaining copies is being donated to the Library of Congress, which inexplicably does not already own a copy of this dotty gem. Only one other copy is known to exist. More (including a high-resolution scan) at The History Blog. Via io9 and MapHist.

Drawing on data from this study, David McCandless maps the decline in North Atlantic fish stocks over the past century. “Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.” Via Kottke.

I’m increasingly interested in getting more people to contribute to OpenStreetMap, so I will happily note David Ellam’s instructional videos, which are screencasts that show you, step-by-step, how to use Potlatch to add points of interest, roads and areas. Via OpenGeoData.

Rare Book Feast, a video series “celebrating the timeless beauty of books in the age of digital ephemera” (as Maria Popova puts it), opens with a look at the privately printed World Geo-Graphic Atlas (1953), now a collector’s item.

Yesterday’s APOD was a map of the 50,000 nearest galaxies in infrared light, based on data collected by the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (io9).

Speaking of China, Reuters and ZDNet (among others) report that Google has applied for a licence to continue to operate Google Maps in China. Drip, drip. Via @geospatialnews and @ogleearth.

Previously: An Update on Google Maps in China.

Update: Ogle Earth makes things more clear.

A few months back, Tibettruth, a website advocating Tibetan independence, blasted National Geographic for changing to Chinese names of Tibetan places and accused them of violating their own policy of being apolitical. “Such an action, taken we must imagine with the knowledge and possible encouragement and cooperation of China’s regime, surely constitutes a political action on the part of National Geographic?”

Now this one’s tricky. Assuming that National Geographic is colluding with the (wicked) Chinese government is a bit of a stretch: as we’ve seen from other naming disputes, mapmakers are routinely accused of distortion, bias and support for the other side unless they take their side. Supra-national mapmakers like National Geographic and Google simply can’t win these kinds of argument: they’re going to piss someone off no matter what. Thanks to Andy Proehl for the link.

Paul Di Filippo reviews Tom Koch’s Disease Maps in the Barnes and Noble Review. “What cannot be overlooked about this book is something incidental but overwhelming: the visual beauty of these maps. Colored and drawn by hand in most cases, with exquisite calligraphy, they offer aesthetic joys divorced from their mortal reality. Seldom has mass death looked so graphically alluring.”

Previously: Disease Maps.

• Buy Disease Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

More fodder for the long-running argument between geographically accurate subway maps and system diagrams in the style of Beck’s London underground map: a new study suggests that schematic transit maps — and the London tube map in particular — distort passengers’ travel path choices. That’s the conclusion drawn by NYU professor Zhan Guo in a paper published in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice (a PDF of the manuscript is available).

[T]he map effect is almost two times more influential than the actual travel time. In other words, Underground passengers trust the tube map (two times) more than their own travel experience with the system. The map effect decreases when passengers become more familiar with the system but is still greater than the effect of the actual experience, even for passengers who use the Underground five day or more per week.

Via Second Avenue Sagas.

Google continues to replace mapping data from other providers like TomTom (Tele Atlas) with its own data pulled together from multiple services. Most recently it was the turn of France, Monaco and Luxembourg, whose TomTom-derived map has been replaced by data coming in part from the IGN, complete with the “Report a Problem” link. (Google’s made this switch in the U.S., Canada and, last fall, 10 other countries). Via All Points Blog.

Chicago Model City is a 320-square-foot model of downtown Chicago. The models were printed by a 3D printer from digital files. It’s on display at the Chicago Architecture Foundation; free admission. Above, a video of a visit to the model. Via @scilib: 1, 2.

Previously: Wired on Model Cities.

The Albany Times-Union has a story about local map publisher Jimapco. They’ve recently moved into online maps, launching their Map Room website (no relation). “Map Room features colorful, interactive maps of Capital Region features from tax rates to golfing and goes beyond the Round Lake map-making company’s old strategy of creating static, customized maps for online use.”

The Boston Globe points to Donna Seger’s blog entry in which she has collected caricature maps from the early modern period. “The shift from conceptual to more realistic cartography in the early modern era is a very evident and important trend, but early modern mapmakers retained a bit of whimsy when they produced maps in the form of plants, animals and humans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” My impression had been that caricature maps were a quintessentially late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century phenomenon — and indeed Seger includes many familiar examples from that period — so the early ones are interesting.

Previously: Keith Thompson’s Caricature Map of Europe; 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.

The Washington Post on the upcoming redesign of the Washington Metro system map: “More than three decades ago, Lance Wyman designed the Metro map’s iconic interlocking colored lines, which have become the symbol of the transit system for millions of Washington commuters and tourists. Now he’s been hired to give it a makeover.” Via @jpmaps.

Meanwhile, there has been an unofficial competition to design the next map of the Washington Metro. Announcement here, entries here; voting closed last month. (Thanks to DK for the tip.)

Cartographer David Imus is in the news again: The Oregonian has an interview. Imus’s map, The Essential Geography of the United States of America, won the 2010 best of show award from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society.

Previously: David Imus’s Map of Oregon; The Best Map of Alaska?

Garmin seems to be adding cameras to a lot of its top-line handhelds: now it’s the turn of the GPSMAP 62 series, which will get the five-megapixel-camera-equipped 62sc and 62stc units in the third quarter of 2011. Adding the camera is only a $50 premium over the non-camera-equipped equivalents (Rich thinks that means a price drop for some units). That said, $600 for a GPS is a lot of money.

Nancy Scola on Tech President: “Every time something happens in the world these days, somebody makes a map about it. […] But the growth of the digital mapping space makes it worth considering things from the perspective of the people who devote their time to making these maps. Why do they bother building maps? What are they hoping to do? What aspects of mapping do they worry about? In short, what do they think about when they’re mapping?” Interviews with eight people covering everything from citizen cartography and open mapping to map mashups. Via OpenStreetMap.

Google Maps Mania links to NOAA’s collection of aerial tornado damage imagery from April and May, and has assembled a gallery of before-and-after images of the tornado damage (via).

Pentax already makes a compact digital camera with built-in GPS (see previous entry) so their announcement yesterday of a GPS unit for use with some of their digital SLRs is not too surprising. The $250 O-GPS1 GPS unit works with Pentax’s K-5, K-r and medium-format 645D cameras, and appears to do a bit more than just work as a GPS logger. It’s weather-resistant (something I sometimes worry about when using my Nikon GPS unit), and it even has an astrophotography function: it uses GPS, a compass and accelerometers to figure out where the camera is pointing, and activates shake reduction to reduce star trails in long-exposure images. (Considering the wide field of view in camera lenses when used for astrophotography, that could allow much longer exposures without having to resort to an equatorial mount.) Available in July. Via Photography Blog.

Garmin announced new GPS handhelds this week: new eTrex handhelds yesterday (product site) and new Rino handhelds today (product site). Both series have been around for ages: the eTrex series is Garmin’s entry-level handheld GPS receiver; the Rino series combines a GPS receiver with an FRS/GMRS radio.

As for the new units:

The eTrex 10 ($120) is a basic monochrome handheld; the eTrex 20 ($200) and 30 ($300) add colour screens and expandable memory; the eTrex 30 also adds a compass and altimeter.

The Rino 610 ($350) uses AA batteries and is thicker than its stablemates; the Rino 650 ($500) adds a removable lithium-ion battery (with less battery life), a microSD card slot, a compass and altimeter, a more powerful GMRS radio, a NOAA weather radio, and unit-to-unit transfer; the 655t ($600) adds to that more internal memory, preloaded topo maps and a five-megapixel camera.

Garmin expects them all to be available in the third quarter of 2011.

OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World
by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton
UIT Cambridge, 2010. Paperback, 352 pp.
ISBN 978-1-906860-11-0

Last year saw the publication in English of two books about OpenStreetMap. This one, Frederik Ramm and Jochen Topf’s OpenStreetMap, saw three German editions before being translated into this English edition, which Steve Chilton assisted with.

This is a comprehensive manual on using OpenStreetMap and its data, covering everything from contributing user data to editing, to using and hacking OSM data on websites and in applications. In other words, it covers everything — though not necessarily in thorough detail, with lots of references to OSM wiki pages for more information.

Now I’ve always found the OSM wiki to be a bit overwhelming; I think that this book does a better job of getting people up to speed on using OSM than trying to navigate the wiki pages (which is how I got up to speed, and wished for something clearer). Those who spend a lot of time on OSM will do well to have this on their shelf.

I think OSM needs more contributors, at least in Canada, where edits I left unfinished months ago are unchanged when I get back to them. So I read this book with an eye as to whether it would help beginners contribute. The first two parts of the book do a very good job of introducing the mapping process — collecting tracks, editing map data — to beginners, or at least that’s my impression. I even learned a couple of new things, and I’m a little less trepidatious about using JOSM (all my edits to date have been with Potlatch).

But people who are only interested in uploading GPS tracks and editing the map, rather than using OSM data in mashups and applications, won’t need to read past page 160.

Things move fast in the tech world, and the book has already been overtaken in one regard: most of the examples use Potlatch 1, which has been replaced by Potlatch 2 as the default web editor; I had to work to remember how to use the old editor. Serves me right for taking so long to get to this review.

I received a review copy of this book.

Previously: OpenStreetMap Book Now Available in English; Another OpenStreetMap Book; Bennett’s OpenStreetMap Book Reviewed; Two Book Reviews; OpenStreetMap Manual Reviewed; Another OpenStreetMap Book Review; Still Another OpenStreetMap Book Review; Both OSM Books Reviewed.

• Buy OpenStreetMap (Ramm, Topf and Chilton) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)