Here’s a brief guide to the Universal Transverse Mercator system, which many of us know from mucking around with topographical maps. (At one point I could give my location using the UTM-derived military grid system.) [Geonewsfeed]
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.
The William H. Galvani Rare Maps Collection
Last month KVAL TV of Eugene, Oregon took a look at the recently catalogued William H. Galvani Rare Maps Collection at Oregon State University. The maps, more than a thousand in number, were bequeathed by Galvani, along with more than five thousand books, to what was then Oregon State College in 1947. It’s taken this long to catalogue the collection, which emphasizes military maps and includes maps from the 16th through the 20th centuries. [WMS]
Elantris Map Posters Available
A set of map posters from Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris is now available at the author’s online store. The maps are by fantasy cartographer Isaac Stewart, range in size from 12×18″ to 18×24″ and cost $5 each or $15 for the set of three.
Uber to Spend Half a Billion Dollars on Mapping
The Financial Times: “Uber is preparing to pour $500m into an ambitious global mapping project as it seeks to wean itself off dependence on Google Maps and pave the way for driverless cars.” [James Fee]
Russia Accuses Google Maps of ‘Topographical Cretinism’ Over Crimea
As is often the case with disputed boundaries, what online maps show depends on who they’re showing it to. So when it comes to Crimea, which annexation by Russia two years ago many countries refuse to recognize (not least of which Ukraine!), Google Maps shows Crimea as Russian territory to Russian users, as Ukrainian territory to Ukrainian users, and disputed territory to everyone else. As the Washington Post reports, that didn’t stop Google from getting in trouble with Russia last month, when Google changed Crimean names in all versions of Google Maps to conform with a 2015 Ukrainian law that removed Soviet names from Ukrainian territory. Russian Crimean politicians called it “Russophobic” and “topographical cretinism,” according to the Post; by last Friday, though, the name changes had apparently been reverted. [WMS]
A Forthcoming Map Art Book About New York City
Yesterday on her Facebook page, Katharine Harmon announced her next map art book: You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City is coming in November from Princeton Architectural Press. “It features 150 cartographic views of New York (which has to be the most-mapped city in the world)—including historical maps, cartoons, contemporary art, pictorial maps, hand-drawn maps, and more,” Harmon writes. Based on her previous books, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (2004) and The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009), both of which I own, this will almost certainly be a book worth looking for. Pre-order at Amazon.
See also: Map Books of 2016.
Google Maps Expands User Edits
Google Maps is adding features to its iOS and Android apps to enable its users to add and edit information about points of interest. Edits will be verified by other users before going live. More at TechCrunch. [James Fee]
New Book: Making Art from Maps
Jill K. Berry’s latest book, Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists, is out this month from Rockport Publishers. From the publisher: “With her cartographic connections, she takes you on a gallery tour, introducing you to the work of some of the most exciting artists creating with maps today. Designer interviews are accompanied by 25 accessible how-to projects of her own design that teach many of the techniques used by the gallery artists.”
(I reviewed Berry’s first book, Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking, back in 2011.)
Cartographiae, a Belgian Map Exhibition
Cartographiae, a map exhibition organized as part of a summer science and culture festival at the Belgian royal palace, opens today and runs until 4 September. Press release (in French). Admission is free; for those of us who can’t make it to Brussels, there’s an online version. [WMS]
Antonín Rükl, 1932-2016
Astronomer and lunar cartographer Antonín Rükl, author of the authoritative Atlas of the Moon among other works, died on 12 July in his home in Prague at the age of 83, Sky and Telescope reports.
Two More Posts on Fantasy Maps
Two more posts about imaginary maps on the Library of Congress’s map blog: a look at maps made after the books were published (such as posters, movie adaptations and online maps), focusing on Middle-earth and Westeros; and a look at maps in children’s stories that talks about whether what appears on maps is in fact true.
(In my previous entry about this series I misattributed the authorship of these posts. That entry has since been corrected. Sorry about that.)
Previously: Fantasy Maps: Middle-earth vs. Westeros; The Library of Congress Looks at Fantasy Maps.
Sea Monster Shower Curtain
Retired graphic designer Don Moyer is producing a sea monster shower curtain, inspired by the iconic beasties found on early modern European maps and based on a sea monster print he created last year. It’s a Kickstarter project, but since it’s already been funded, it’s definitely happening. So if your world map shower curtain is beginning to fray, here’s an alternative. [Mental Floss]
New NLS Exhibition: You Are Here
A new map exhibition opens this Friday at the National Library of Scotland. You Are Here “challenges our acceptance of maps. It poses questions about how they are made and how we understand them. Drawn from our collection of more than two million maps and atlases, each map in the exhibition shows the answer to some or all of those questions. The maps on display zoom out from the Library itself to the whole world in the shape of the Blaeu Atlas Maior—‘the most beautiful atlas ever made.’ They also include one of the finest plans of Edinburgh and the first map of Scotland, as well as more utilitarian railway, fishing and schoolroom maps.” The exhibition runs until 3 April 2017. I imagine there will be more links once it opens. [NLS]
The United Swears of America
Linguist Jack Grieve studies regional variations in languages using quantitative methods. A year ago he posted a number of maps of the United States showing regional variation in swear word usage, based on a corpus of nearly nine billion geocoded tweets. Stan Carey of the Strong Language blog has more on the maps:
Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states—together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—are the areas of particular motherfucker favour. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts. Fuckboy—a rising star—is also mainly a coastal thing, so far.
I love everything about this. See also Stan’s follow-up post from last March. (Thanks to Natalie for finding this.)
2016 Map Gallery Results
Esri has announced the results of their 2016 Map Gallery competition. The top three maps in a number of different categories are posted on this page. Nearly 700 maps were submitted for the contest by attendees at last month’s Esri User Conference. [Esri]