Map art will be featured on the walls of a new hotel in Dubai: the upcoming Address Boulevard Hotel will display art by Matthew Picton (previously) and Ewan David Eason. [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.
Great Circles in Cardboard
The Global Map is a neat toy from the 1940s. The whole thing is just under one by two feet in area, and consists of two rotating hemispheres that touch at a single point, with the purpose of showing the shortest distance by air or sea between two points—a quick and dirty way of showing a great-circle route with a bit of cardboard and no math. From the David Rumsey Map Collection. [Maps on the Web]
Mapping Post-Election Violence in the U.S.
Crisis mapper Ushahidi is turning its focus to the United States, with an interactive map that collects reports of post-election violence, hate speech, protests and harassment. [The Verge]
Mapping Ineligible Voters
Last year Neil Freeman produced a map of ineligible voters in the United States. “There are three main groups of people who aren’t eligible to vote: children, non-citizens, and disenfranchised felons. The Census does a survey of voting age and citizenship, this map uses 2013 estimates.”
Where the Animals Go
Co-authored by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics (Particular Books, 2016) is a book of maps by wild animals. It’s a compendium of tracking data from field biologists’ research projects, ably curated and turned into some spectacular maps (if the excerpts on the authors’ website are any indication). Greg has written a piece at All Over the Map.
Where the Animals Go is available now in the U.K.; the U.S. edition comes out in September 2017.
Cheshire and Uberti first teamed up to produce London: The Information Capital (2014), which should be out in paperback any time now.
3D Election Maps
Mapping U.S. election results by county and state is a bit different than mapping results by electoral or congressional district, because counties and states don’t have (roughly) equal populations. Choropleth maps are often used to show the margin of victory, but to show the raw vote total, some election cartographers are going 3D.
Max Galka of Metrocosm has created an interactive 3D map of county-level results (above) using his Blueshift tool. The resulting map, called a prism map, uses height to show the number of votes cast in each county.
Here’s a similar 3D interactive map, but using state-level rather than county-level data, by Sketchfab member f3cr204. [Maps on the Web]
Downloading County-Level Election Results
Maps need data. Election maps need election results. Data journalist Simon Rogers looks at the challenges of laying hands on open, publicly available county-level election results for use in election maps.
Globemaking Films
This short film on globemaking from 1955 has been making the social media rounds:
Compare it to this short film from 1949:
It’s nearly identical in its turns of phrase and factoids, though there are slightly different emphases. Though the firm is unnamed, it’s clearly the same one: it’s even the same guy doing the varnishing.
These films fascinate me because they describe a kind of globemaking—layers of plaster, paper globe gores, and varnish—that I don’t think happens any more. There are some similarities to Bellerby’s globemaking methods, but Bellerby’s underlying globe isn’t a plaster shell. And most of us don’t have the money for a Bellerby globe: if we have a globe, it’s almost certainly a Replogle. As this short video from the Chicago History Museum reveals, Replogle’s globes are a combination of paper, cardboard and glue:
Migrations in Motion
Migrations in Motion models the average directions wildlife will need to move in order to survive the effects of climate change. As Canadian Geographic explains, “As climate change disrupts habitats, researchers believe wildlife will instinctively migrate to higher elevations and latitudes, but for many species, that will mean navigating around, over or through human settlements and infrastructure.” The map, the design of which is modeled on the hint.fm wind map, covers both North and South America and does not purport to model the path of individual species; rather it’s an average based on computer modelling.
The New York Times Maps the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
The New York Times has a first-rate graphics department, and they’ve come up with some stunning ways to depict the 2016 U.S. presidential election results. They updated their maps of so-called “landslide counties” (see previous entry), which was straightforward enough. Their feature on how Trump reshaped the election map, with arrows showing the county-by-county swing (red and to the right for Trump, blue and to the left for Clinton), was unexpectedly good. But their maps of the Two Americas (above), imagining Trump’s America and Clinton’s America as separate countries, with bodies of water replacing the areas won by their opponents—Trump’s America is nibbled at the edges by coastlines and pockmarked by lakes; Clinton’s is an archipelago—is quite simply a work of art. Incredible, incredible work.
The Economist’s County-by-County Election Map
The Economist’s county-by-county election map is a standout because of its quick-acting slider: you can scroll quite quickly through 64 years of presidential elections. Their analysis also focuses on the urban/rural divide (there’s also a graph). [Benjamin Hennig]
U.S. Presidential Election Cartogram
I’ve delayed posting maps of the 2016 U.S. presidential election results because—well, because like many of you I’m still recovering. But here we go. We’ll start with Benjamin Hennig’s cartogram of the results which, as cartograms tend to do, correct for the urban concentrations that made up Hillary Clinton’s vote, and demonstrate the rural nature of Donald Trump’s support. See it at Geographical magazine and Hennig’s website.
Cartography at the CIA
The CIA has posted a short institutional history of its Cartography Center, which reaches back before the CIA was created: in 1941 the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which was replaced by the CIA’s forerunner, the OSS, hired a young graduate student named Arthur Robinson
Another CIA page looks at its first female cartographer, Marion Frieswyk, whom Robinson recruited in 1942.
The CIA also has a Flickr account, where they’ve posted a number of their maps in various albums sorted by decade (all of which are labelled “Cartography Maps,” which sounds dumb until you realize they probably mean Cartography Center Maps). I think the Cartography Tools album is even more interesting than the maps.
The Phantom Atlas
Edward Brooke-Hitching’s new book, The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps (Simon & Schuster UK, November) is a book about fictitious and erroneous places that were presented on maps as real—“non-existent islands, invented mountain ranges, mythical civilisations and other fictitious geography.” Places like the Mountains of Kong, or the open ocean at the North Pole, or California as an island. Both the Economist’s 1843 Magazine and the Guardian have excerpts and examples from the book.
The hardcover seems to be available only in the U.K. right now, or through third-party resellers on Amazon. The ebook, however, is more widely available: here are links for the Kindle and iBooks. [Ian McDonald/WMS]
Related: Map Books of 2016.
Atlas of Design, Volume 3
The third volume of the Atlas of Design is now available for pre-order and will ship some time this month. The Atlas’s 32 maps are listed here; Wired’s report has a gallery of some of them. At least one or two will probably look familiar to my regular readers. Published by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), the 98-page book costs $35 (with a 25 percent discount for NACIS members like me).