The Osher Map Library’s new exhibition, The Northwest Passage: Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities, opened last week (see previous entry). The opening was also broadcast live on YouTube; if you missed it, the archived video can be watched there. And if you can’t get to Portland Maine, The exhibition’s companion website is now live, and features more than 50 images and maps on the theme of Arctic exploration. The Northwest Passage runs until 11 March 2017.
Five years of civil war has devastated the Syrian city of Aleppo, which had a population of more than two million before the fighting started. CNN provides interactive satellite imagery of Aleppo from before and after the destruction: sliders allow you to see the damage on a block-by-block level.
Decades after German reunification, there are still stark differences between the former West and East Germany, and every so often those differences are explored and examined. Yesterday marked the 26th anniversary of reunification, for which the Washington Post saw fit to dust off and update a 2014 analysis. There are lots of maps, exploring everything from employment to flu vaccination to camper trailer ownership, but all but one date seem to be from that earlier version. This Post piece draws heavily on a 2014 article from Die Zeit (in English), which has even more interesting maps (with a rather funky design).
Newsweek looks at efforts by a group of scientists and mariners to map most of the ocean floor by the year 2030. The objective was endorsed by a meeting of GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, last June. The scale of the project is vast:
To date, more than 85 percent of the seafloor has not been mapped using modern methods. Since 70 percent of the Earth is covered in oceans, this means that we quite literally don’t know our own planet. “We know the surface of Mars better than we do the seafloor,” says Martin Jakobsson, a researcher at Stockholm University.
The Displacement Alert Project Map is a tool built by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development that maps, building by building, the risk of gentrification in New York City—i.e., where the rent is about to get too damn high. Intended for use by housing advocates, tenant organizers, community groups and others, the map calculates the risk of displacement—being pushed out of affordable housing—based on several factors. “Access to this data equips communities with information necessary to fight back against the displacement of residents who are being priced out and pushed out of their neighborhoods, to stop the harassment of tenants by bad landlords, and to prevent the expiration and loss and affordable housing units.” [Gothamist/Maps Mania]
Over the past five years, designer Jug Cerović has produced 40 metro maps using a common, standardized design language. Now he’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to gather them all in a single collection, called One Metro World, in both book and mobile app form. The book in particular sounds lovely: hardbound, printed on quality paper, and with stories about each map—plus 15 of the maps get additional schematics “highlighting network peculiarities as well as map design choices.” [Mark Ovenden]
Previously: INAT London Metro Map.
Later this week, the Library of Congress will host a two-day conference celebrating the 500th anniversary of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 map, Carta Marina. Facts or Fictions: Debating the Mysteries of Early Modern Science and Cartography will take place on 6-7 October in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. The conference agenda is not limited to Waldseemüller or his 1516 map; notable speakers include Kirsten Seaver, Chet Van Duzer and, with a major lecture, Dava Sobel. Free admission; no tickets or reservations required.
(The 1516 Carta Marina should not be confused with the Waldseemüller map most people mean: it’s his 1507 Universalis Cosmographia that names “America.” Nor should it be confused with Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina.)
This striking high-resolution map of Canada’s roads and highways, produced by EarthArtAustralia, is a work of GIS: it’s assembled from Canadian GIS road data, with roads coloured and weighted by importance (freeways are bright yellow, back roads are blue). This map is also inarguably a work of art: I could easily have one on my wall. It’s certainly being sold as such, with high-resolution digital downloads and prints available. (EarthArtAustralia has a number of downloadable and frameable maps based on road and waterway data: they’ve been coming at a furious clip lately.)
The University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library has acquired an early hand-drawn map of Detroit—from the period it was a British outpost—that sheds new light on the city’s early history.
A framed 21-by-40-inch map that reveals a plan of the city in 1790 was discovered in a family home in Almonte, Ontario, after the owner contacted historians to check its validity. […]
Historians concluded that the rare, previously unknown hand-drawn, hand-colored map, titled “Rough sketch of the King’s Domain at Detroit,” was indeed an original—drawn on high-quality, watermarked 18th-century paper, and signed by its author, D. W. Smith (Captain David William Smith), dated September 1790.
An exhibition centred on the map is coming in 2017. Detroit News coverage. [WMS]
Meanwhile, the Boston Public Library’s exhibition on the mapping of the mythical island of Hy-Brasil (see previous entry) wraps up next month; here’s another look at it from Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier. [Leventhal Map Center]
We’re familiar with caricature maps from before and during the First World War: maps that reimagine various countries as warring animals or caricatured faces. These aren’t the only examples of persuasive cartography or of pictorial maps of this or other wars, but I imagine they’ll be front and centre at a new exhibition at The Map House, an antiquarian map seller in London. War Map: Pictorial Conflict Maps, 1900-1950 opened last week and runs until 18 November. A companion book of the same name is apparently available as of next week. [Geographical]
The Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at the George Washington University Museum collects historical documents and other items relating to the history of Washington, DC. The Washington Post has a profile of its patron, Albert H. Small, who donated the collection to the university in 2011, and the collection itself. Of interest to us is the collection’s maps of the capital city, including the Arnold Map of 1862 (above):
Published during the Civil War, the map’s detailed, topographical view of Washington included all 53 forts that guarded the city. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered all the maps confiscated lest they fall into Confederate hands. Small has one. There’s a 1671 map of Maryland, too, the second map of the colony ever published, and a 1904 map of the St. Elizabeths Hospital grounds.
“It’s probably the best map collection outside the Library of Congress,” Goode said.
The Small Collection isn’t online (its web page has very little to it); to see its holdings, you’ll have to visit the Museum. [WMS]
Open now and running through 26 February 2017 at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Center, Shakespeare’s Here and Everywhere asks “What roles do place, identity and travel play in his comedies, tragedies and histories? Explore these questions and more through maps, atlases and illustrations of Shakespeare’s time and beyond.” [Tony Campbell]
The Northwest Passage: Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities opens 29 September 2016 at the Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine. [WMS]
Mapping Australia: Country to Cartography runs from 4 October 2016 to 15 January 2017 at the AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht, Netherlands. The exhibition “will explore the different representations of Australia. Alongside the VOC’s historical maps of Australia’s coast, drawn by Dutch cartographers in the 17th and 18th centuries, are striking depictions of the country in contemporary art works of Aboriginal artists that are derived from thousands of years of traditions.” [WMS]
The Ordnance Survey is launching a National Map Reading Week, to be held 17-23 October 2016, aimed at improving people’s map-reading skills. The OS cites evidence that a surprising number of people in the U.K. do poorly at maps and geography:
People were asked to plot various locations, from cities to National Parks on an outline map of Britain and we were pretty surprised at the results. Some 40% of people struggled to pinpoint London and only 14% could accurately plot Edinburgh’s location. […]
Even more worrying to us, just 40% of those surveyed felt they could confidently read a map with 10% never having used a paper map.
Now, map literacy and geographical knowledge aren’t the same thing: you can know how to read a map without being any good at placing something on a blank map (at least in theory). Either way, the Ordnance Survey will be producing guides and hosting workshops during the week in question. (In the meantime, they point to these map reading guides.)
As a major publisher of maps, it’s in their interest to do this sort of thing—a map-reading public is a map-buying public, after all—but increasing map literacy is an unquestionably good thing.
A freedom of information request sent to Transport for London in 2013 turned up this 2009 map of the London Underground’s track network (17.1 MB PDF)—complete with sidings, switches and yards. Among other things, you can see how a train can cross from one line to another. CityMetric picked up the story last week and it’s gone seriously viral since then: Boing Boing, Jalopnik, Wired.
If this is the sort of thing that fascinates you, you should go look at Franklin Jarrier’s maps of urban rail networks (which I told you about in 2011). These aren’t official maps, but they do for many systems around the world what the map above does for the Tube.
