Greater Arizona: Mapping Place, History and Transformation, an exhibition of maps from the Simon Burrow Map Collection at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies that “highlights the different ways the region of Arizona has been conceptualized in a global context,” runs until 19 May at ASU’s Hayden Library. ASU Now: “Dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the maps document everything from peoples to borders to geographical features, and were created by a number of nations, including France, Great Britain and Holland—all that variation reveals portions of history that in some cases have been ignored.” [Tony Campbell/WMS]
Author: Jonathan Crowe
Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room. His essays and reviews have been published by AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.
Connecticut Map Society
It’s worth giving new organizations as much of a boost as possible, so let me draw your attention to the brand-new Connecticut Map Society, whose inaugural meeting takes place this Sunday (9 April) at 3:00 PM in Durham. Details on the website. [WMS]
The Transit Line Colour Palette
This was way too much fun. cc @transitmap pic.twitter.com/QAcmOLD61c
— Ari Ofsevit (@ofsevit) March 21, 2017
MIT grad student Ari Ofsevit created an infographic showing the colours used to mark transit lines by a number of different North American transit agencies and posted it to Twitter last month, where he got all kinds of feedback. (One response pointed out that the colour choices aren’t great for red-green colour blindness.) Ofsevit, who also makes hiking trail maps in the style of transit maps, is running a Kickstarter to create a poster of the transit palette. [Next City]
Harrison Reassessed
Jim Bennett, author of the new book, Navigation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), reassesses the history of John Harrison and his marine chronometer solution to the longitude problem, a story that has been popularized by Dava Sobel’s 1995 bestseller, Longitude (reviewed here).
It is difficult to claim without important qualification that Harrison solved the longitude problem in a practical sense. In the broad sweep of the history of navigation, Harrison was not a major contributor.
The Harrison story seems to attract challenge and controversy. The longitude exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in 2014 was an attempt to offer a more balanced account than has been in vogue recently. The Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, for example, has been maligned without justification. A recent article in The Horological Journal takes a contrary view and offers ‘An Antidote to John Harrison’, and we seem set for another round of disputation. From a historian’s point of view, one of the casualties of the enthusiasm of recent years has been an appreciation of the context of the whole affair, while a degree of partisanship has obscured the legitimate positions of many of the characters involved. There is a much richer and more interesting story to be written than the one-dimensional tale of virtue and villainy.
Deadline Extended for Corlis Benefideo Award Nominations
The nomination deadline for the Corlis Benefideo Award has been extended to April 15. The Award, given by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), “recognizes imaginative cartography,” which is defined in part as “the potential … to transform our ways of seeing and understanding our world, and to trigger imaginative reaction from its audience.” It’s named for a character in “The Mappist,” a short story by Barry Lopez, and if you’ve read the story you’ll understand how appropriate the name is. (The story can be found in two of Lopez’s collections: Light Action in the Caribbean and Vintage Lopez.)
Nominations for this award are accepted from anyone, not just NACIS members.
New York Times Maps Receive Infographic Award
The New York Times Graphics Department was recognized at the 25th Malofiej International Infographics Awards, where the jury awarded the special Miguel Urabayen Award for the best map to two Times
Google Map Maker Is Now Closed
Google Map Maker, Google’s tool to allow users to edit its maps, has been shut down, Ars Technica reports. “A support page went up over the weekend declaring that Map Maker is closed but that ‘many of its features are being integrated into Google Maps.’” You may recall that Map Maker was temporarily suspended in 2015 after a series of embarrassing edits came to light; its editing tools have been increasingly limited to a smaller circle of editors.
There are still plenty of other blogs about maps, cartography and geospatial out there (despite my comments about the future viability of blogging). I have long made a point of using this platform to draw attention to other map blogs;
1882 Isochrone Map of France
I think I'm in love: a stunning isochrone map of travel times from Paris by rail in 1882 (making this a very early example of the genre). pic.twitter.com/gaSEzGCQWI
— Transit Maps (@transitmap) March 31, 2017
Cameron Booth (of Transit Maps fame) posted an 1882 isochrone map of France showing travel times from Paris by rail to Twitter and boy did it ever go viral. He’s planning on selling a print of it on his online store.
Zero Degrees
Jon Wright reviews Charles W. J. Withers’s Zero Degrees:
Related: Map Books of 2017.
Flex Projector
With all this recent talk about map projections, it might be worth pointing out the existence of Flex Projector, a cross-platform Java application for creating map projections, now at version 1.0.6. Yes, creating: if you want to invent your own map projection and slap your own name on it, you can do that with this app; others certainly have. (You will need to have Java installed on your computer.) Heck, Tom Patterson’s Natural Earth projection was built with it. [GIS Lounge]
Previously: Shaded Relief World Map and Flex Projector.
The Isle of Bait
The Future Mapping Company has announced the discovery of a new island 20 kilometres off the coast of Great Britain. They have naturally already produced a new map of this island.
The Isle of Bait is a small, beautiful and untouched paradise, but there is a hitch—it is only visible through the Face Swap Snapchat filter.
It appears that a glitch during the most recent geological shift caused a permanent geofence to go up around the island, preventing it from being visible to the naked eye.
Geocached for so long, local authorities are debating whether to rename landmarks and points of interest to bring the island into the post-Brexit era. Bay of Bright Futures, the Eneychestuary and Happiness Hill are all remnants of a past that is no longer a reality for the rest of the country. Toblerone Ridge, a local favourite for its distinctive jagged shape, may be the worst affected as plans to widen the gaps between peaks are unveiled as part of a “Greater Value Modernisation Programme.”
For this reason, this map is already a collector’s item, so we would advise acting now before the facts are revealed to be of an alternative nature.
Not since the discoveries of Null Island or San Seriffe has there been news of this magnitude—indeed, this announcement comes 40 years to the day after the Guardian published its supplement on the latter island.
Today marks The Map Room’s fourteenth anniversary: its first posts went live on 31 March 2003.
The general consensus is that the blog is finished as a medium, done in by the effective death of RSS (thanks to Google killing Reader), the collapse of online advertising (too many publishers chasing too few ads), and the shift in online attention from blogs to social media. Blogs aren’t as financially viable as they once were, if they ever were. Another portent: this week the blog advertising network The Deck announced it would be closing down.
In 2006, The Map Room was at what would turn out to be its peak in terms of attention and revenue, and I was looking forward to additional growth. Neither ended up occurring. Revenues stagnated, and I took a needed break in 2011. I returned in 2016, and over the past year this blog’s traffic has been stable at about a fifth of what it was at its peak. Google ad income is one-twentieth (Amazon income is more or less on par: you folks do like buying books).
(This is probably the point at which I ought to mention that you can support this blog by kicking a few dollars my way via Ko-Fi or towards my web hosting costs. Either way, appreciated.)
Looking back on it now, for all the bumph about the long tail and niche blogging, this was never going to be a bill-paying operation. I’d frankly have to work a lot harder and more consistently for that to happen, and I’m not capable of that: my poor health is one of the reasons why I’m available to do The Map Room in the first place. (For example, I spent most of the last two weeks flat on my back, which is why posts have been so sporadic this month.) I’m not comfortable soliciting sponsorships or setting up a Patreon page if I can’t guarantee that I’ll follow through.
But that’s not to say that I won’t keep at this. I’ll do what I can, when I can. Fourteen years after starting this project, I’m still not tired of it. I’m still learning new things about maps, and I’m still enjoying myself.
Ms. Pac-Maps
Google tends to release wacky things around April 1st, as well as some more serious things (like Gmail). Ms. Pac-Maps is one of the former, and the latest strange thing to be added to Google Maps around this time. In the same vein as the Google Maps Pac-Man feature from 2015, it enables you to play Ms. Pac-Man on the road grid in Google Maps, and runs on the most recent Android and iOS apps as well as on the desktop until April 4th. [The Verge]
Mapping Great Lakes Pollution
President Trump’s budget proposes eliminating the EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That fact is no doubt what’s behind two publications posting maps earlier this month, only a couple of days apart, showing the environmental stresses on the Great Lakes basin.
Canadian Geographic reposted a map from their July/August 2013 issue:
And the Washington Post included the following map in an article on the proposed elimination of two EPA programs (including the aforementioned Great Lakes Restoration Initiative):
