The Map Room

Via @nyplmaps, I discover that Los Angeles in Maps by Glen Creason was published last October.

The Irish Times has a review of If Maps Could Speak, a memoir by the former director of the Irish Ordnance Survey, Richard Kirwan, which the Times calls “[f]ascinating, lyrical, [and] affecting in its candour.”

On MapHist, Waldo Tobler (yes, him) announced that his 1972 translation of J. H. Heinrich’s 1772 work, Anmerkungen und Zusätze zur Entwerfung der Land- und Himmelscharten (Notes and Comments on the Composition of Terrestrial and Celestial Maps), is being reprinted in a new edition by Esri Press.

• Buy Los Angeles in Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)
• Buy If Maps Could Speak at Amazon.co.uk
• Buy Notes and Comments on the Composition of Terrestrial and Celestial Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The Los Angeles Times has updated its map of 113 Los Angeles neighbourhoods, taking into account reader feedback as to what neighbourhoods comprise what areas. It’s a project that sounds a lot like what the Toronto Star is doing with Toronto neighbourhoods (but I don’t know which one came first). Via MAPS-L.

The Geography of Buzz, a project of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, “set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles.” In layman’s terms, they were trying to map the intangible “buzz” from celebrity-driven arts-and-entertainment events. The researchers did so by categorizing and geotagging more than 300,000 photos from the Getty Images database that were catalogued as arts and entertainment, from 6,000 events in New York and Los Angeles. The locations of these events served as a “proxy” for buzz measurement. Buzz, the researchers discovered, is not evenly distributed (here’s a PDF of the researchers’ working paper). “The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo,” says the New York Times. “In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park.”

Via My Wonderful World and The Map Scroll.

L.A. Unfolded: Maps from the Los Angeles Public Library opened today at Los Angeles’s Central Library; it runs until January 22. “The exhibition focuses on Los Angeles and California and features topographic surveys, tourist guides, real estate maps, pictorials, illustrations and more. Highlights include a 1791 Spanish explorers’ California coast map; a 1975 Goetz Guide to the Murals of East Los Angeles; and Artist-Historian Jo Mora’s masterly illustrated 1942 city map. The exhibition draws exclusively from the Los Angeles Public Library’s own map collection, one of the largest collections owned by a public library in the U.S.” More at Angelenic. Via MAPS-L.

Four more cities in Google Maps Street View: Houston, Orlando, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Cute: Google Maps Street View Circa 1907 — or, rather, a sample of Rand McNally’s photo auto-maps, which apparently predated road maps.

Numan Parada’s map of an extensive, and imaginary, rapid transit network for Los Angeles is one of several on the web site of the Transit Coalition, a public transit advocacy group. The maps envision a Los Angeles with a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Downtown Homeless Map tracks the number of homeless people in downtown Los Angeles; yesterday it received a revamp: Today we’ve put online a new version of the maps, using a radically different methodology for showing the data. Instead…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Boing Boing links to Los Angeles Mapped, the online version of an exhibition of historical maps of Los Angeles on display through January 2007 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The maps on display are diverse in both subject…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Also from the USC Digital Archive, WPA land-use survey maps for the City of Los Angeles, 1933-1939: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted a land use survey from December 18, 1933 to May 8, 1939 for the city of Los…  •  Continue reading this entry.