The Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Playground Map Project has been around since 2011; its aim is to provide a painted six-by-eight-metre world map to every school in Scotland that has playground space for one. [NLS Maps]
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.
Cartographies of Disease
The revised edition of Tom Koch’s Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine—“a comprehensive survey of the technology of mapping and its relationship to the battle against disease”—is now out from Esri Press. (Or at least it’s scheduled to be: the paperback is not yet in stock at Amazon.) [GIS Lounge]
Koch is also the author of Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (2011).
Bellerby Seeks Apprentice Globemaker
Want to make globes for a living? Bellerby & Co., maker of expensive, hand-made globes, is looking to hire an apprentice globemaker. They emphasize it’s a long-term job, not an internship:
It takes between 6 months to a year to learn how to make just the smallest sized globe … it is a further few years to make the larger sized globes.
Since it is unlikely we will find a former Globemaker.. all applicants will have to have a trial period… you have to try it before you both know you can do it … and to know you like doing it!
All jobs in our company require a patient and passionate person who will commit to the learning process and wants to stay in the company for at least 3 years afterwards.
The job posting was up for at least two months before Atlas Obscura blogged about it yesterday, but I presume, given Bellerby’s rather precise requirements—not so much about the candidate’s qualifications but their characteristics—that the position is still open. Have at it.
Danny Dorling’s TEDx Talk
Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling spoke at the TEDx Exeter conference in April 2016. If you’re familiar with Dorling’s work, it will come as no surprise that he makes extensive use of cartograms to describe the world’s population. Video: TED, YouTube.
Previously: Hennig and Dorling on ‘Seven New Maps of the World’; People and Places.
Redesigning the Paris Métro Map
Last June I told you about Constantine Konovalov’s redesigned Paris Métro map, a map based on concentric circles. Now, in Smashing Magazine, Konovalov does a deep dive into his own design process, which took more than two years. Quite a bit more detail than on his own website. [Alejandro Polanco]
Map Literacy in the Middle Ages
When we talk about map literacy, we mean the ability to read a map. We can blithely talk about how map reading has changed over the centuries while failing to interrogate whether what we mean by map reading has changed as well. It’s presentism to assume that people in the past did things the same way as they do today. In a useful essay called “Maps, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: Some Reflection About Anachronism,” French academic Patrick Gautier Dalché explores how medieval audiences interpreted mappae mundi and marine charts. Even a mappa mundi, he argues, has a practical function. Spoiler: it’s not how you or I would use them.
It also occurs to me that Dalché’s paper is a must-read for writers of fantasy novels (and fantasy map makers), who might also fall into the trap of assuming that their characters would use their maps the same way as a modern map reader would.
The Economist’s Democracy Index
Here’s The Economist’s interactive map of their Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Its 2016 iteration, released last week, downgrades the United States to a “flawed democracy”—a drop from 8.05 to 7.98 in the index, where 8 is the threshold between flawed and full democracy. (While many developed countries score higher, not all do: France is at 7.92, and Belgium is at 7.77; Japan is practically tied at 7.99.)
Mapping Arctic Warming
At All Over the Map, Betsy Mason posts 11 Ways to See How Climate Change Is Imperilling the Arctic, a collection of maps and infographics depicting several different indicators of global warming, including sea ice extent, atmospheric temperatures, growing season, polar bear populations, as well as projected shipping routes for an ice-free Arctic Ocean.
Meanwhile, NASA Earth Observatory points—while it still can—to a study mapping the extent of existing and potential thermokarst (thawed permafrost) landscapes. On the Earth Observatory maps (see North America, above), “[t]he different colors reflect the types of landscapes—wetlands, lakes, hillslopes, etc.—where thermokarst is likely to be found today and where it is most likely to form in the future.”
Previously: Mapping Arctic Sea Ice; Mapping the Thaw.
Google Roundup for January 2017
Google Maps has updated its ride services mode in its iOS and Android app, allowing you to book an Uber ride from within the app, and may offer parking availability in an upcoming Android release. [Engadget]
Meanwhile, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, seems to be scaling back its satellite imaging ambitions: it’s apparently in talks to sell its Terra Bella division, which it acquired as Skybox Imaging for $500 million in 2014, to competitor Planet. [Engadget]
Maclean’s Profiles Nova Scotia’s COGS
Nova Scotia Community College’s Centre of Geographic Sciences, a tiny, 200-student campus in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, gets two writeups in Canada’s national newsmagazine, Maclean’s, as part of its annual campus guide: its unique marine geomatics program is profiled here, and the W. K. Morrison Special Collection, which I told you about last June, is profiled here.
Utah Drawn
Another map exhibition I neglected to mention yesterday: Utah Drawn: An Exhibition of Rare Maps runs from 27 January to late summer 2017 at the Utah Capitol Building in Salt Lake City; it features “forty rare historical maps depicting the region that became the state of Utah from its earliest imaginings by European cartographers to Utah’s modern state’s boundaries.” [Tony Campbell]
Dirty Reprojectors
Maps online invariably use the Web Mercator projection. The Dirty Reprojectors project aims to change that, at least in Mapbox. Anand Thakker explains.
Almost all web mapping libraries render maps using Web Mercator, making an assumption that you generally can’t change out-of-the-box. This has advantages, but it posed a real challenge for us when we set out to build the Washington Post’s live election results map, where using the Albers USA projection was an important requirement. To meet that requirement, we built a pipeline to pre-process geometries.
It’s a bit of a kludge, a way of fooling Mapbox into showing a different projection—latitude/longitude coordinates aren’t accurate any more—but it’s an impressive stab at a real problem. The Dirty Reprojectors web app demonstrates the possibilities, with all the projections available through the d3-geo and d3-geo-projection libraries. [James Fee]
Duck Dynasty and Donald Trump
Last month the New York Times mapped the U.S. cultural divide by looking at television viewing preferences. More precisely, the geographic distribution of viewership for the 50 most-liked TV shows. The correlation between Duck Dynasty fandom and voting for Trump was higher than for any other show. More surprisingly, the show most correlated with voting for Clinton? Family Guy.
Indiana State Maps Reprinted Over Spelling Error
Hundreds of thousands of Indiana state highway maps that misspelled the new governor’s name are being destroyed and reprinted at the vendor’s expense. (WTHR’s coverage does not indicate what the spelling error was.) Misspelling the boss’s name is obviously politically awkward; I can’t help but suspect that actual cartographic errors would be let through with a sticker or an errata notice instead. [MAPS-L]
Two Upcoming Exhibitions
California as an Island and Worlds That Never Were, an exhibition of maps from the Roy V. Boswell Collection for the History of Cartography at California State University at Fullerton. Runs from 22 January to 29 March at CSU Fullerton’s Pollak Library. News release. [WMS]
Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State features maps spanning more than 400 years of Texas history, mostly from the Texas General Land Office, as well as two museums and private collectors. Runs from 27 January to 8 October at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. News release. [WMS]