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.

A Roundup of Canadian Map News

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Various items about maps and map history from here in Canada:

Last month former Canadian diplomat Dan Livermore donated his small collection of 17th- and 18th-century maps to the Brock University Library’s Special Collections and Archives, which will digitize the maps. St. Catharines Standard. [Tony Campbell/WMS]

Also last month, the Parry Sound North Star’s John Macfie came into possession of an 1886 map of the area by a local land agent, the history and provenance of which he explores in some detail. [WMS]

As the site of a major aviation base during World War II, the town of Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, is surrounded by crash sites and other historical points of interest; the town and local historical groups are now mapping those sites and creating trails to them. [WMS]

Michael Layland, author of a book about the early maps and charts of Vancouver Island, writes in the Victoria Times-Colonist about his map habit and his research methods for that book. [WMS]

Canadian Maps Claim the North Pole—Canada Doesn’t

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
canada-north-pole
Canada Political Divisions (English), 2006. Natural Resources Canada.

Most maps published by the Canadian government, including the poster-sized map I have on my wall, claim a vast tract of the Arctic Ocean, all the way up to the North Pole—basically everything east of 141 degrees west longitude—as Canadian territory. The National Post’s Tristin Hopper argues that this is a mistake. Canada doesn’t even officially claim that (briskly melting) expanse of ice.

The incorrect Canadian maps are all based on the old-fashioned “sector theory” of claiming the Arctic. Back when the Arctic Ocean was largely an inaccessible chunk of ice that swallowed explorers, polar nations were generally content with dividing it up like the slices of a pizza that had the North Pole at its centre. […]

Nevertheless, while various expansionist Canadian politicians have enthusiastically touted some version of the sector theory over the years, it has never been officially adopted as Canadian policy.

It’s a position that seems to exist only on the maps produced by Natural Resources Canada. [CAG]

(I seem to have a number of other Canada-related items in my queue. Let me get to them next.)

This Map Needs a Magnifying Glass

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Bangkok Post interviews artist Karoon Keamviriyasatean (aka Zillv). “To record the beauty of Rattanakosin Island, known simply as the ‘Old Town’, freelance artist Karoon Jeamviriyasatean has drawn a map. But it isn’t any normal map. It is a stunning and intricately detailed architectural birds-eye-view cityscape of Rattanakosin Island. Every block, shophouse, fort, temple and soi is depicted, and the only way to see it in full detail is through a magnifying glass.” The map is available for sale here. [WMS]

Mini Metros

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

mini-metros

Mini Metros shrinks and simplifies 220 subway and light rail systems; the end result fits on a single sheet. Its creator, Peter Dovak, explains the challenge of making small and simple representations of sometimes inordinately complex transit systems:

All of the cities in the project had the same requirements: they had to fit in a 120px circle (with 10px of padding), the lines had to be 3px wide with a minimum of another 3px between the next parallel line, and all diagonals had to be 45-degrees. The systems themselves needed to be full-fledged heavy rail metro systems or light rail networks that were distinct enough from trolleys or streetcars.

Prints and mugs are available. [Maptitude]

How the Transit App Got Its Curves

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

transit-appThe makers of the Transit app (iPhone, Android) like to point out that whereas Apple’s transit maps are beautiful but basically hand-drawn and added manually and slowly, and Google’s maps are algorithmically generated but look terrible, their maps are algorithmically generated but look smooth and neat. A technical post by their backend developer explains in ridiculous detail how they managed to auto-generate their smooth, curved transit network maps.

Dymaxion Folding Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

dymaxion-folding-globe

This morning’s post about the AuthaGraph World Map reminded me of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map (which after all was explicitly referenced by its creator). Designer Brendan Ravenhill has produced a version of Fuller’s map in the form of a magnetic folding globe. Wired: “Like Fuller’s original map, Ravenhill’s globe can exist in two or three dimensions. Laid flat, it’s a series of 20 triangles that show Fuller’s projection as a single landmass. The back of each triangle features a magnet so you can fold the map into an angular globe. ‘Really it’s a toy, but a toy that has a lot of resonance and importance,’ Ravenhill says.” $15 each, in three colours. [Sociative GIS]

With all the new books coming to my attention in recent weeks, it’s taken me a while to update the Map Books of 2016 page, but I’ve finally done so.

I’m also beginning to hear about books coming out in 2017, so it’s not too early for me to start working on the Map Books of 2017 page.

Some of you may have noticed the bestseller list on the sidebar of The Map Room’s home page (if you’re browsing on a mobile device, it’s at the bottom of the page). It’s based on Amazon and iBooks affiliate sales via this website over the previous three full months: right now it covers August through October; on December 1st I’ll drop August and add November, and so on.

AuthaGraph World Map Wins Japanese Design Award

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

authagraph

Japan’s Good Design Awards have been announced for 2016, and the Grand Award has gone to an unusual map. The AuthaGraph World Map “is made by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles, transferring it to a tetrahedron while maintaining areas proportions and unfolding it to be a rectangle.” Follow that? Sphere to tetrahedron to rectangle.

The brainchild of designer Hajime Narukawa, the AuthaGraph map was first released in 2010. What’s it for? In many ways it’s sort of a Japanese Peters projection: it aims to maintain the relative sizes of the continents. From the page selling the map outside Japan:

Every world map that has been invented since the Mercator Projection was first revealed in 1569 can be divided into two groups. One group fits the world into a rectangle by distorting the continents. The other group corrects the distortion, but at the cost of the rectangular shape. This is what drove Narukawa to create a map which is rectangular like the Mercator Projection map, and yet correctly projects the continents like the Dyxmaxion Map (revealed in 1946).

[CCA/Gizmodo/Spoon & Tamago]

Sotheby’s to Auction Private Collection of North African Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On 15 November Sotheby’s will be auctioning Gerhard Lerchbaumer’s collection of maps of North Africa. Comprising more than a hundred maps  dating from the 15th through the 19th centuries (Sotheby’s provides a list), the collection is expected to fetch between £60,000 and £80,000. [Tony Campbell]

More Election Cartography Primers

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
nyt-foldout-map
The New York Times

Today, print subscribers to the New York Times were treated to a fold-out map showing a choropleth map of the 2012 election results at the ZIP code level (above). “The map is part of a special election section that aims to help explain the political geography of the United States — identifying where people who are conservative and liberal live and pointing out how physical boundaries, like the Rio Grande and the Cascade Mountains, often align with political ones,” writes the Times’s Alicia Parlapiano.

Parlapiano’s piece is in fact a lengthy tutorial on how to read election maps, along the lines of the pages I linked to in last week’s post on election map cartography—it outlines the problems of state-level election maps and choropleth maps that privilege area over population, for example, and shows some other ways of depicting the results.

It can’t be a coincidence that in today’s Washington Post we have Lazaro Gamio’s article dramatically highlighting the difference between area and population size with comparative maps. Mark Newman’s cartograms also make an appearance.

I can only conclude that both the Times and the Post are making efforts to educate their readers before the election results start coming in, one week from tonight. (Deep breath.)

You Are Here: NYC

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

you-are-here-nycToday is the publication date for Katharine Harmon’s latest book of map art: You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City (Princeton Architectural Press). This is Harmon’s third map art book and features some two hundred maps of New York City, “charting every inch and facet of the five boroughs, depicting New Yorks of past and present, and a city that never was.” Fast Company Co.Design’s Meg Miller has a piece on the book. [via]

Previously: A Forthcoming Map Art Book About New York City.

Ricci Map Derivative Found in a Garage Sells for $24,000

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Two dark, torn illustrations found in the garage of a Palm Springs home and listed for sale as “two 19th century hand colored prints of the world” turned out to be something quite possibly a bit more significant. First identified as two panels (of six) from a 1708 Korean map, Kim Jin-yeo’s Gonyeomangukjeondo (곤여만국전도), which is a derivative of Matteo Ricci’s famous Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (aka the “Impossible Black Tulip”), the panels ended up selling earlier this month for $24,000; the buyer, map dealer Barry Ruderman, is restoring the map for sale and suspects that it may in fact be a 17th-century Chinese copy rather than a Korean map. Daily Mail, Fine Books Magazine. [WMS]

Previously: China at the Center.

Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else: A Book on Australian Toponyms

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

mount-buggeryA decade ago Mark Monmonier published From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, the definitive treatment on toponyms and the controversies behind naming places (here’s my review). Now we have an Australian entry: Eamon Evans’s Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else: The Stories Behind Australia’s Weird and Wonderful Place Names, which came out last week. The book, Joshua Nash reports for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, “charts place names from the serious – the many names for Australia, for example—to the jocular, like Australia’s many rude and dirty topographic monikers.”

Many of Evans’s humorous stories go a way to responding to some of the scientific inadequacies and toponymic foibles so common in place naming studies. And after I’ve spent almost a decade inundated with often sterile and uninspirational place name theory and how it may fit within more general research in onomastics, the study of proper names, Evans’s tongue-in-cheek take is more than welcome.

I get the distinct impression that this is a less-serious work of scholarship than Monmonier’s. [WMS]

Speaking American

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

speaking-americanBased on an interactive dialect quiz in the New York Times that generated more than 350,000 responses, Josh Katz’s Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide “offers a visual atlas of the American vernacular—who says what, and where they say it—revealing the history of our nation, our regions, and our language.” Out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Buy at Amazon.