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, Palestine, and the Unbiased Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

As the Disputed Territories site, which catalogues how Google manages various contested borders, points out, “Google’s maps of disputed territories differ depending on who’s looking at them.” As we’ve seen recently with regard to Crimea, that doesn’t always keep Google out of trouble. An online petition asking Google to label Palestine on Google Maps has garnered more than 300,000 signatures since March. The petitioners accuse Google of removing Palestine at Israel’s insistence; but, as the Guardian reports, “the truth is, it was never labelled by Google in the first place.” (The West Bank and Gaza Strip had their labels removed by a bug; Google’s restoring them.)

In a follow-up piece for the Guardian, Leigh Alexander writes:

The swiftness of the backlash, though, is not just about the wish for justice on behalf of an occupied people, but about the belief—now punctured—that our technology is neutral, that it presents an unbiased, infallible version of the world. […]

While it might seem imperialistic for Google to decide how the US should see the rest of the world, perhaps it would be equally troubling to see the company wade into global verdicts on the righteousness of every international occupation. That it allows its sketch of the geopolitical climate to reflect the perspective of who is viewing it, rather than impose the prevailing popular opinion in the west, may not be neutral or unbiased, but it is probably the most fair.

Previously: Slate on the New Look of Google Maps; The Universal Map.

Mapping the Rio Olympics

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

rio-interactive-screenshot

Fiasco Design’s Rio 2016 Interactive Map (screencap above) is a cheeky game-style enviroment that mixes Olympic venues with local controversies.

This Esri Story Map looks at the Olympic venues in detail. [Glenn Letham]

What3words, a company that assigns a three-word mapcode to every location in the world—useful in places like favelas that have no formal addresses—has partnered with an official Olympics app, Rio Go (iOS, Android) to provide locations for Rio visitors. More: Reuters, the Telegraph.

metro-map-olympics

Not a map in the strict sense, AirTravelGenius’s metro map of Olympic cities (above) is clever in how it manages cities that have hosted the Games more than once.

A Globe of Percival Lowell’s Mars

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

pkm-mars-globe

Hand-made globes are increasingly a thing, apparently. As Atlas Obscura reports this week, Michael Plichta’s company, Planetenkugel-Manufaktur, is producing a hand-crafted globe of Mars with a twist: it’s based on Percival Lowell’s maps, which (erroneously) showed the Martian surface covered in canals. It’s delightfully retro and I love it. Here’s a video:

Nowhere on the website is a price mentioned, which tells me that I won’t be able to afford one, damn it.

The Illustrated Map of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

illustrated-map-london

Illustrator Cally Lathey has produced a second edition (I hadn’t seen the first edition before now) of her Illustrated Map of London. This extraordinarily detailed and whimsical hand-drawn map is the result of five months’ effort; this short video chronicles the process.

It’s available as a limited edition print in two sizes, prices ranging from £110 to £140. Maps of central, north, west, southwest, southeast and east London are also available. More about the map at Londonist and Time Out London. [WMS]

Another Look at Persuasive Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Frederick W. Rose, “Angling in Troubled Waters,” 1899. P. J. Mode Collection, Cornell University Library.

Writing for Hyperallergic, Allison Myers explores Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography, the collection of propagandistic maps I told you about last January.

“We made significant changes to all of our development processes because of it,” says Cue, who now oversees Maps. “To all of us living in Cupertino, the maps for here were pretty darn good. Right? So [the problem] wasn’t obvious to us. We were never able to take it out to a large number of users to get that feedback. Now we do.”

Apple senior vice president Eddie Cue, quoted in this Fast Company profile of Apple, on how the Apple Maps debacle changed Apple’s famously insular culture, opening things up to the point that they now have a public beta program. [James Fee]

Indian Railways Reachability Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

indian-railways-reachability

Sajjad Anwar and Sanjay Bhangar have been playing with train, station and schedule data from Indian Railways, one result of which (so far) is this reachability map—all the destinations reachable by a single train (i.e., without a transfer) from a given station. [Sajjad Anwar]

Previously: A Map of India’s Railway Network.

Olaus Magnus’s Sea Monsters

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
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Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina, 1539. Detail. James Ford Bell Library.

Speaking of map monsters, here’s a piece in the Public Domain Review from 2014 that I only encountered this month. It’s a look at the sea serpents found in Olaus Magnus’s 1539 Carta Marina: “The northern seas of the marine and terrestrial map teem with fantastic sea monsters either drawn or approved by Olaus,” writes the author—none other than Joseph Nigg, who literally wrote the book on the Carta Marina’s sea monsters. [WMS]

Previously: Sea Monsters and the Carta Marina.

A New Academic Book on Renaissance Map Monsters

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

renaissance-ethnographyA new scholarly book about the use of monsters on early modern maps has been brought to my attention. Surekha Davies’s Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, June) explores the use of both monsters and indigenous peoples on Renaissance maps. “Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing.” Buy at Amazon. [sourdoughchef]

Previously: Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps.

Slate on the New Look of Google Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps’s new, cleaner look, which rolled out last month and replaces clusters of points of interest with coloured “areas of interest,” “represents the company’s ongoing efforts to transform Maps from a navigational tool to a commercial interface and offers the clearest proof yet that the geographic web—despite its aspirations to universality—is a deeply subjective entity,” writes Henry Grabar in Slate.

Wonderground Map Calendar

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

wonderground-calendarHere’s a coincidence for you. On Saturday, the day after I posted about an exhibition of MacDonald Gill’s pictorial maps, I discovered, while shopping at a local stationery store, that there was such a thing as a MacDonald Gill Wonderground Map of London calendar. (It’s also available on Amazon.)

Previously: MacDonald Gill Exhibition in San Diego; MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground Map.

MacDonald Gill Exhibition in San Diego

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

gill-wonderland

Art Meet Maps: The World of MacDonald Gill is an exhibition of nine of MacDonald Gill’s pictorial maps at the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla in La Jolla, San Diego, California. The exhibition also includes pictorial map art by Dolodes d’Ambly, Lucien Boucher, Jo Mora and Ruth Taylor White. Admission is free, but the museum is only open on Wednesdays and Thursdays, as well as the first and third Saturdays of each month. It runs until 20 May 2017. Coverage from the La Jolla Light. [WMS]

Previously: MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground Map.