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.

Google’s Missing Green Spaces

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

NPR reports on the disappearance of national forests from Google Maps, and the trouble with accurately displaying green spaces on maps.

Typically, mint green highlights designate publicly owned wild spaces on Google’s maps. But as of this writing, some of those public lands have gone gray. The locations are still searchable, but if you don’t already know the park or forest exists, and where exactly, you might not be able to find it.

No green space is safe: Many of the missing parks are national forests, but some are state forests, Bureau of Land Management recreation areas, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas. Some, like the Blue Hills Reservation in Massachusetts, are just a few thousand acres. Others, like the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, are over 500,000.

[James Fee]

Parnasium’s Fantasy Maps of Real-World Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

parnasium-europe

I’ve written before about maps of the real world done in the style of fantasy maps; they’re a key piece of evidence for my argument that fantasy maps have a distinct (and limited) style. Enough of these fantasy maps of reality are being done that it’s clearly a thing now. The latest examples I’ve encountered come from an Etsy store called Parnasium. Run by a Polish designer named Karol S., it sells poster-sized maps of Europe, the United States, the British Isles, France, Italy, Japan and Poland (so far) in the style of fantasy maps. (The fact he’s using Uncial script suggests he’s primarily inspired by the Lord of the Rings movies; Uncial is fairly rare in book maps.) [Maptitude]

Maps in iOS 10

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve just upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 10, but haven’t had a chance to mess with the new version of Apple Maps; iMore and Macworld set out the changes, including integrated services and apps, predictive intelligence, and improvements in driving directions and search, among other things. Also, you can set it to remember where you parked, which isn’t new in and of itself, but is for iOS.

Karen Margolis: Maps and Holes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Karen Margolis, Lake Champlain, 2010.
Karen Margolis, Lake Champlain, 2010.

Karen Margolis burns holes in old maps to make art:

Maps offer the implicit promise of direction. Symbolizing more than just destinations or the exterior world, and composed of vascular systems and arteries, maps act as proxies for our physical selves. They grow old, become obsolete and worthless. Working with outdated, worn out maps, I enhance their colors and trace over roadways to augment their intrinsic structure and utility. I then proceed to obliterate cities and other geographic data by burning holes into the maps with a soldering iron and excising discs from the maps. Producing dislocations, the holes subvert ability to communicate coherent information, but as maps are layered on top of each other, passages emerge into new territories and interrupted routes find new connections. Possibilities open up for new areas to be generated from what was lost. I reassemble amputated map discs into mandala inspired compositions.

[The Map as Art]

Later This Month, in Chicago

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The International Map Collectors’ Society is holding its 34th International Symposium at the Newberry in Chicago later this month, from Monday the 24th of October to Saturday the 29th. Its theme is “Private Map Collecting and Public Map Collections in the United States”; the preliminary program is available online. Registration is currently $270.

The Symposium coincides with the fourth annual Chicago International Map Fair, which runs from the 28th to the 30th at the Chicago Cultural Center. Free admission with a suggested donation of $5-10. [WMS]

Hurricane Matthew Map Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

nhc-matthew

Start with the National Hurricane Center, which has lots of different maps of Hurricane Matthew’s predicted path, weather warnings, rainfall potential and so forth. See also maps from Weather Underground.

Google’s Crisis Map includes evacuation resources—Red Cross shelters, evacuation routes, traffic data—in addition to storm track and precipitation information.

Matthew has already struck southwest Haiti; the Humanitarian OSM Team has put out a call for crisis mappers on the following projects: buildings in Nippes; road network in Grand’Anse and Sud.

earthwindmap-matthew

Wind maps from Windytv and EarthWindMap visualize the wind patterns of Matthew and, further out in the Atlantic, Nicole.

Hurricane imagery from NOAA’s GOES East satellite. NASA Earth Observatory has imagery of Matthew’s path toward Florida.

[Dave Smith/Maps Mania/NASA Earth/NOAA Satellites]

Ultimate Mapping Guide for Kids

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

ultimate-mapping-guideA book I was not previously aware of: Justin Miles’s Ultimate Mapping Guide for Kids. The British edition came out from QED Publishing last May, the North American edition from Firefly Books in August. “Readers will learn how to understand map symbols and legend, navigate without a compass, create their own maps, plan their own map-reading expedition, and even how to use their mapping skills on a geocaching adventure.”

Related: Map Books of 2016.

NPR Profiles Crisis Mapper

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Here’s an NPR profile of crisis mapper Patrick Meier, who was spurred into action by the 2010 Haitian earthquake and later went on to co-found the Digital Humanitarian Network.

With the Haiti earthquake, he had a chance to put everything he’d been thinking about into practice. He and some friends and colleagues began pulling information from social media—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos—and added it to a base map to start to get a picture of the damage in Haiti. They plotted points on the map in red dots, indicating pharmacies that were open, which ones did and didn’t have medicines, which roads were blocked, where people were trapped under rubble and needed help.

As the days went on, the effort attracted thousands of volunteers from 40 countries around the world, all wrangling tweets, text messages, videos, emails, Facebook posts and other messages. A special toll-free number was set up for people in Haiti to send text messages about their conditions and whereabouts. Meanwhile, Meier and his team in the U.S., including members of Haitian diaspora, worked around the clock, funneling a flood of information into a constantly evolving map.

[Caitlin Dempsey]

The Northwest Passage: An Osher Map Library Exhibition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Murray, Map Shewing the Discoveries Made by British Officers in the Arctic Region, 1828. Map, 41.5 × 52 cm. Osher Collection.
John Murray, Map Shewing the Discoveries Made by British Officers in the Arctic Region, 1828. Map, 41.5 × 52 cm. Osher Collection.

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.

The Divisions of Post-Reunification Germany

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Washington Post
The Washington Post

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).

Mapping the Ocean Floor by 2030

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

[Leventhal/MAPS-L]

Mapping Gentrification Risk in New York City

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

nyc-housing-displacement

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]

One Metro World

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

one-metro-worldOver 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.

Library of Congress Conference Celebrates 500th Anniversary of Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Manuscript Page from the 1516 Carta Marina. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
Manuscript Page from the 1516 Carta Marina. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

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.)