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.
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 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 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 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]
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.
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.
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 Magazineand the Guardian have excerpts and examples from the book.
Today’s xkcd is a British map labelled by an American. It’s another one of those where the longer you stare at it, the more it hurts. Randall’s messing with us again.
Fantasy maps increased in number during the 20th century due to the rise of science fiction and fantasy writing, and the birth of television and video games.
Many of them are products of the wildest imaginations, and are immersive places of escapism. Yet all of them retain vestiges of the ‘real’ world in which they were created—whether because of a particular feature illustrated in it, the way in which it has been drawn, or even the ‘real-world’ contexts which inspired it.
Harper’s examples aren’t what someone well-versed in fantasy fiction would expect: they include Milne and Tolkien, but also Sleigh’s 1918 map of Fairyland (above), San Serriffe, and other maps of the unreal from outside genre fiction. (A reminder that fantasy map does not only mean map accompanying a secondary-world fantasy novel in the Tolkien tradition.)
The Spectator reviews Malachy Tallack’s new book, The Un-Discovered Islands. “This book is an account of 24 non-existent islands, yet is suffused with the same elegiac frostiness as before. Tallack’s style is precise without being perjink, and the overwhelming feeling is of something lost, or disappearing. It’s just this time, what is lost never was.” [WMS]
Are you used to seeing a big map behind the news anchors during election night coverage? As the Los Angeles Times reports, that’s something that began only in 1976, when NBC News commissioned a 14-foot-high plastic map that lit up (red for Democrats, blue for Republicans—the colors hadn’t been standardized yet) depending on who won the state. [Map Dragons]
While we wait for the results, think back, raise a glass, and remember fondly the meme that came and went so quickly a month or so ago: What if only … voted? Based on FiveThirtyEight maps showing the gender gap in voting intentions (What if only women voted? What if only men voted?) that quickly went viral, similar maps showing gap by race and educationwere followed by other maps that were considerably … sillier—here’s a selection. As Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza said on 14 October: “The whole thing went from funny to saturation point to old in record time, and is already over.” Thing is, now that it’s Election Day I’m seeing them again. It ain’t over till it’s over. And sometimes not even then.
As we approach the first election results of the evening, here are a few maps of the electorate that is doing the voting tonight.
Swing Counties
The Washington Post
The Washington Postmaps the swing counties that could decide the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Landslide Counties
The New York Times
The New York Timesmaps the increasing number of so-called landslide counties—counties where a candidate won by 20 or more percentage points. “The proportion of voters living in landslide counties has steadily increased since 1992, a trend that reflects the growing tendency of like-minded people to live near one another, according to Bill Bishop, a co-author of ‘The Big Sort,’ a 2008 book that identified this phenomenon.”
Bad Hombres, China and Trump Supporters
For all of Donald Trump’s rhetoric about illegal Mexican immigration and competition from China, his supporters don’t seem to be much affected by either. That’s the conclusion of a study by Raul Hinojosa Ojeda of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “[A]n examination of the geographical concentration of support for Donald Trump in the presidential primaries indicates a negative correlation between the number of Trump supporters and the population size of Mexican immigrants, as well as a negative correlation between Trump support and import competition from Mexico or China. […] In fact, only 2% of U.S. counties in the U.S. actually fit the Trump narrative of very high Trump support combined with very high levels of immigration or trade.” [CityLab]
The Mysterious Blue Curve
Geographical magazine explores what they call the “mysterious blue curve” —a narrow swath of Democratic support across the centre of the Deep South. I’ll save you a click: it’s where the African-American voters are concentrated. Geographical, though, goes a bit further back—to the fricking late Cretaceous—to explain why the soil in that area was so amenable to growing cotton, an activity that brought so many slaves to the area in the first place.
Felony Convictions and Voting Rights
Cards on the table: I live in a country where prisoners have the right to vote even while in prison, so the American practice—in 48 of 50 states—of not allowing ex-convicts to vote even after release is both alien and upsetting to me. The New York Times maps the impact of that practice, both in terms of how many people in each state can’t vote due to felony convictions, and in terms of how many African-American adults can’t vote—1 in 13!—because of same. When, as the Times says, “[a] black person is more likely to be convicted of a felony than a white person who committed the same crime,” this has the smell of systemic, targeted disenfranchisement to me.
The white underlying geographic map places states in their familiar size, shape and location, allowing them to be identified quickly. Using a cluster of dots rather than a solid fill to represent the outcome ensures that the amount of red and blue on the map accurately reflects states’ weight in the election outcome, rather than the (irrelevant) surface area.
Like the tiled grid cartogram, the number of electoral votes in each state is easy to compare visually without counting or interpreting numbers printed on the map. Because each electoral vote is a discrete mark, it is possible to accurately represent the split electoral votes that are possible in Maine and Nebraska, or the possibility of a faithless elector.
