After Here Maps was sold to a consortium of German automakers, it announced that it was dropping support for Here Maps on Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile, with the workaround that kept those map apps going expiring at the end of this month. Yesterday Microsoft announced a major update to its native Windows 10 Maps app; among its new features is a tool to import favourites from the obsolescent Here apps. [Engadget]
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.
Hillary Clinton in the Primaries: 2008 vs. 2016
Geoffrey Skelley compares the percentage of the Democratic primary vote won by Hillary Clinton in 2008 with the percentage she won in 2016: among other things, she was up sharply in the Deep South and down sharply in the industrial Midwest and Appalachia. “While the universe of voters participating in 2008 and then 2016 changed considerably thanks to mobility, interest, and mortality, our map suggests that many ’08 Clinton voters became ’16 Sanders voters, and many ’08 Obama voters became ’16 Clinton voters.” [Daily Kos]
Fantasy Maps: Middle-earth vs. Westeros
In the latest instalment of Hannah Stahl’s series of posts on fantasy maps at the Library of Congress’s map blog (see previous entry), she takes as a starting point my argument that Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth is the progenitor map from which the modern fantasy map design is descended, and compares that map to maps of Westeros from George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series.
Previously: The Library of Congress Looks at Fantasy Maps; Review: The Lands of Ice and Fire.
The Princeton Braillists
The Princeton Braillists publish tactile maps and atlases for a blind readership. Several books of maps are available: world and regional atlases, maps of U.S. states, and others.
Maps and drawings are created by hand in an aluminum foil sheet. The metal is embossed with a variety of tools to produce raised lines and areas of varying height, texture and width. The maps are labelled with key letters that are identified on the pages preceding each map. The master drawing is duplicated by the Thermoform process to make clear, sharp copies. The 11×11½-inch plastic sheets are bound into volumes with cardboard covers and spiral plastic binders.
Mapchart
Mapchart is a quick and dirty way to make choropleth and other coloured outline maps for online use: choose a map (world, continents, some countries), assign a colour to the state, province or country, build a legend, export to image. [Boing Boing]
Unique Perspectives: Japanese Map Exhibition in Chicago
Opening this Saturday, 25 June at the Art Institute of Chicago and running until 6 November, Unique Perspectives: Japanese Maps from the 18th and 19th Centuries “showcases the beauty of Japanese printmaking. The 18th- and 19th-century maps on view feature the world, the Japanese archipelago, and the country’s major cities, including Osaka, Yokohama, Edo, Nagasaki, and Kyoto. Highlights include works from trustee Barry MacLean’s comprehensive collection.” [WMS]
Fast Company Profiles Ed Parsons
Fast Company profiles Google’s geospatial technologist Ed Parsons, whose name should be familiar to longtime Map Room readers. (I first encountered his work when he was still at the Ordnance Survey; he joined Google in 2007.) In some way the profile uses Ed to understand Google’s mapping ambitions, which Ed discusses at length. Understanding the corporate via the personal, as it were. (Parsons was also the subject of a similar profile in The Independent in 2014.) [Owen Boswarva]
Hennig and Dorling on ‘Seven New Maps of the World’
“Seven New Maps of the World,” a presentation by Benjamin Hennig (Views of the World) and Danny Dorling (People and Places), both renowned cartogrammers, will take place on the opening weekend of the Oxfordshire Science Festival Sunday, 26 June 2016 at 1 PM, at the Story Museum, Pembroke Street, Oxford. Tickets £5. [Benjamin Hennig]
Update, 20 June: And here are the seven maps in question.
Fifteen Years of Migrant Deaths
Moris Büsing’s interactive map chronicles the deaths of migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe over the past 15 years—more than 32,000 deaths in all. [Boing Boing]
The Library of Congress Looks at Fantasy Maps
The Library of Congress’s map blog, Worlds Revealed, has begun a series of posts about imaginary maps. “We’ll be exploring all of these types of maps and imaginary worlds this summer. Come revisit the Hundred Acre Wood and the other worlds of your favorite children’s stories, spend some time in medieval Europe, and run from White Walkers in Game of Thrones.” So far we have an introduction and a look at maps from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, with Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth next on the schedule. [WMS]
Historical Maps and Geographical Errors
Victor van Werkhooven’s cartographical pet peeve: historical maps of Europe that include Flevoland, which didn’t even exist until the 20th century. (Polders. Dikes. Land reclamation. You get the idea.) It’s not often that the physical shape of the world—the coasts, the shorelines—has to be taken into account when creating a historical map, but this is one such case. [Mapfail]
KQED on the Rumsey Map Center
More on the David Rumsey Map Center, which opened last April: KQED Radio’s Michael Krasny interviews David Rumsey and the Center’s head and curator, G. Salim Mohammed (28 minutes).
Previously: Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center Opens Today; David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Opens April 19.
3D Map of Mercury
Melown’s 3D map of Mercury presents MESSENGER mission data in a 3D digital globe: natural colour, monochrome morphology, false colour and enhanced colour modes are available. [Maps Mania]
Previously: The First Global Topographic Map of Mercury.
Oceania: The Truncated Continent
In “Cartographic ethics: Oceania, the truncated continent,” Dietmar Offenhuber complains about world maps of climate change that obscure the region of the world most affected by it: Oceania. It’s an important point both in specific and in general, as he goes on to say:
Oceania is mostly an invisible continent: its islands, islets, and atolls being too small to be printed on most world maps. On the outer fringes of most world maps, its territories are cropped or covered by a legend. With of our example, the world ends just after New Zealand, and the legend covers eastern parts of French Polynesia.
The thoughtless use of Mercator projections in world maps is generally frowned upon, but truncating the lobes of projections such as Mollweide and Robinson is just as bad. But even without such mistakes, all political maps struggle with a conflict of intent: on the one hand, accurate representation of territory, on the other hand, the appropriate representation of populations.
To get a better picture of Oceania, I made a simple map of all named islands and atolls, described in the remainder of this post.
(See map above.) [Boing Boing]
National Park Maps
As U.S. government publications, national park maps are in the public domain. Since 2013, park ranger Matt Holly has been uploading them to the unofficial National Park Maps site, which now has more than a thousand maps available for download as high-resoluation images or PDFs. [CityLab]