The Map Room

If you’re at all interested in the process of changing pejorative place names to something more acceptable to the present day — the sort of thing covered by Mark Monmonier’s From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow — then you’ll be interested in this story from the Medford Mail Tribune: The Oregon Geographic Names Board, directed in 2001 to remove the word “squaw” from place names in the state, has decided against a blanket replacement of more than 100 remaining uses of the term with “Indian Maiden”; instead, the Board will work on a case-by-case basis to replace the names based on tribal proposals.

Previously: Review: From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow.

• Buy From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

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.

Google explains “the principles we follow in designing our mapping products, particularly as they apply to disputed regions” — e.g., when two countries disagree about what a body of water is named or where a boundary is disputed. “That can mean providing multiple claim lines (e.g. the Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan Heights), multiple names (e.g. two names separated by a slash: ‘Londonderry / Derry’), or clickable political annotations with short descriptions of the issues (e.g. the annotation for ‘Arunachal Pradesh,’ currently in Google Earth only; see blog post about disputed seas).” Via ogleearth.

Previously: Google and Disputed Place Names.

The plains (planitia) of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will be named after planets from Frank Herbert’s Dune series. The first of these, Chusuk Planitia, already appears on this map of Titan (PDF). The map looks spectacularly incomplete because Titan’s thick atmosphere impedes imaging; the Cassini probe has to map the surface at close range using radar. Via Universe Today.

Previously: Titan in Stereo; Topography of Titan; A Map of Dione and a Planetary Gazetteer.

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is an interesting resource: it catalogues more than a million place names and their relationships (such as equivalence, or different names for the same place, including which is preferred; and hierarchy, such as the county to a town, or a province to a county). There are no maps, and the geographic coordinates are there largely for reference purposes, but useful, I think, for anyone with an interest in place names. Via MapHist.

An interesting post on the Collins Maps blog that deals with the following question: when preparing a map or atlas, do you use local names (e.g., Moskva, München, Torino) or the translated names used in the language of your map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

National Geographic’s interactive map of Native American names in the United States (click and drag to magnify) gives the best modern translation of names derived from aboriginal languages. Details at NGM Blog Central. Via MapHist. Previously: The Atlas of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze has a (very brief) interview with the (unnamed) cartographer behind the Atlas of True Names, which I told you about last month. Of particular interest is the following statement on future products: “We continue quite soon with the French,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World and Europe.” Place names are replaced with their literal meanings. It’s fascinating — and some of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, a review of George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, a 1945 work on place names in the United States. Bill Kauffman’s review “a learned…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I told you Iran was campaigning against the use of the name “Arabian Gulf”; this time they’re accusing Google Earth managers of “knowingly or unknowingly” provoking conflict in the region. Wow. Illegal and insulting? Via Ogle Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

How does a global mapping provider like Google deal with disputed map names? (Think, for example, of Iran’s campaign in favour of the Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf, or South Korea’s on behalf of the East Sea instead…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Planetary Society’s blog reports that the International Astronomical Union has approved new names for features on Saturn’s moon Dione, and provides an equatorial map with the new names added to spaceprobe imagery. But what also caught my attention…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names got a little bit more visibility recently, with a story in the October 25 edition of USA Today about the disconnect between what an unincorporated settlement in Iowa calls itself — Frytown — and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

You’re no doubt familiar with the controversies about what gets depicted on a map: disputed territories, disputed names (e.g. Persian Gulf vs. Arabian Gulf, Sea of Japan vs. East Sea). Here’s an interesting article from the International Herald Tribune that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Whitwell’s Rational Geographical Nomenclature: “Stedman Whitwell, 19th-century social reformer and architect of Robert Owen’s failed Utopian city at New Harmony, was deeply troubled by the will-nilly way that cities and towns were named in America, and proposed a more “rational”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A retired public servant in Wellington, New Zealand is on a campaign to correct spelling mistakes in New Zealand place names, the New Zealand Herald reports. He’s made a total of 60 submissions to the Geographic Board pointing out errors…  •  Continue reading this entry.

You may be familiar with the Korean campaign to change the international name of the Sea of Japan to the “East Sea.” It’s an aggressive campaign — even I got e-mail about it (see previous entry) — but one that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geist Atlas of Canada: Meat Maps and Other Strange Cartographies by Melissa Edwards Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006. Softcover, 128 pp. ISBN 1-55152-216-0 Early on in The Map Room’s existence, we learned about a quirky feature emanating from Geist, a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NPR science correspondent Robert Krulwich had a story over the weekend about the practice of naming places after living people: in the 19th century, towns had a distinct tendency to be named after their postmasters; nowadays, though U.S. places cannot…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame by Mark Monmonier University of Chicago Press, 2006. Hardcover, 229 pp. ISBN 0-226-53465-0 When I was living in Edmonton, I heard the story of Chinaman’s Peak. In 1886,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Monmonier appeared on NPR’s “Here and Now” yesterday to promote his new book about controversial place names, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. The interview, which you can listen to with RealPlayer,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartography has a review of Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (web site), a collection of 40 essays; my impression is that the contributors come from a design rather than cartographic background. Meanwhile, on atlas(t), Claire has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Great post by Claire on what she calls the “taxonomy of geographic names” — learn new and useful words like “toponym” (place name), “allonym” (one of two toponyms applied to a single feature, e.g. Istanbul/Constantinople) or “exonym” (place name in…  •  Continue reading this entry.