The Map Room

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.

Via Cartophilia: this wallet showing a map of the Chicago transit system is made from Tyvek.

Andy Woodruff announces a new project from Axis Maps: typographic maps — “that is, maps made entirely of typography.” Map features are rendered in repeating lines of type (see example above).

Nearly every line of text in these maps was laid out manually. And after that, nearly every line was edited manually to create effects such as the appearance of woven streets. It was all done in Illustrator, beginning with images from OpenStreetMap. We traced streets, filled in areas like water and parks, and then revisited every detail. In this process I think we’ve learned a few things that will help us generate maps of some other cities without taking two years to do it.

Two maps for Boston and one for Chicago so far, prints of which they’re selling. Via Geoparadigm.

An interesting story on the website of Chicago-area antique map store George Ritzlin Antique Maps and Prints: “The most unusual map we’ve ever encountered recently walked (literally) into our gallery. A nice young woman mentioned in the course of conversation that she loved maps so much that she had one tattooed on her foot. It’s a map of the Chicago Transit Authority elevated system. She is a frequent user of the El lines and finds the map to be handy. She has even used it to give directions.”

Thanks to Dennis McClendon for the link.

Previously: Map Tattoos.

A Chicago Tribune article notes the appearance on Google Maps of obsolete Chicago neighbourhood, street and building names — names that haven’t been used for decades — and landmarks that have long since disappeared. Map designer Dennis McClendon, who was interviewed for this article and sent me this link, shared an explanation with me by e-mail:

Apparently Google and other online map services use the GNIS database without trying to determine if locality names are still commonly in use. Even zoomed out to fairly small scale, Google Maps shows “McCormickville” and “Grant Village” as Chicago neighborhoods. The first hasn’t been used since 1871, and the second is a seniors apartment building. There have been similar problems for years on MapQuest, and Flickr’s automatic tagging often applies curious 19th-century subdivision names to photos of Chicago.

Since the story, I’ve talked with Roger Payne and others at the BGN/GNIS and apparently they used contractors to go through various reference works to add all the local names they could find to GNIS. If a name was ever used for a place that still exists, GNIS will show it, with a lat-long coordinate.

An exhibition of maps from the Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago project, which solicits contributions from participants who sketch out their personal map of Chicago on a blank outline map, will take place tomorrow between 5:00 and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s been a long time, but the mapping technology that was first presented under the name Dynamap in 2004 has finally left the realm of vapourware and will very shortly result in a shipping product. Well, two products, but…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Transit comes to Chicago….  •  Continue reading this entry.

More maps from the University of Chicago Map Collection have been posted to the Web: Before and After the Fire: Chicago in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Latin American Cities Via MAPS-L. Previously: Chicago…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“The University of Chicago Press has a special web feature to celebrate the publication of Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, the book that accompanies the exhibit currently at the Field Museum in Chicago,” writes Dean Blobaum. “The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of 18 maps of Chicago, dating from 1900 to 1914 and showing everything from railroads to school districts, from the University of Chicago Library, in Zoomify format. This is one of several such collections from the U…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There’s more to the story of Big Stick’s neighbourhood maps being barred from Chicago Public Schools (see previous entry) than meets the eye, Adena says in Directions: she recounts the map company’s conflicts with local realtors — lawsuits, sponsorships gone…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A map of Chicago so good that police and fire departments are distributing it to their stations has run into bureaucratic obstacles from the public school system: when the mapmaker wanted to distribute free copies of the $50 map to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Chicago Tribune profiles local map collector Robert A. Holland, whose book, Chicago in Maps, 1612 to 2002, was published late last year. From the article: “In a section of the book Holland thinks of as ‘worlds within worlds,’ the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve got an iPod with a colour screen, you can put subway maps on it. It’s a simple matter to put digital images on an iPod; where maps are concerned, though, it’s a challenge to make sure they’re legible…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Computer geeks are the ones hacking Google Maps. Computer geeks like WiFi. No surprise, then, that several of the map hacks using the Google Maps API involve wireless hotspot locations. Maps of free WiFi access points are available for New…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chicagocrime.org presents crime data from publicly available databases for Chicago. In addition to letting you browse by street, district and so forth, it uses Google Maps — what, couldn’t you see that coming? — to plot crimes on a map…  •  Continue reading this entry.