An exhibition at the Chidō Museum in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture features a huge (11 m × 5 m) mid-17th-century map of northeastern Japan, the Asahi Shimbun reports: “It is a copy of the Dewa Ikkoku no Ezu picture map, which was jointly compiled by feudal domains controlling the region stretching from today’s Yamagata Prefecture to neighboring Akita Prefecture.” [WMS]
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.
Canadian Wildfire Maps
Yesterday wildfires swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, the population centre of the oil sands industry, forcing the evacuation of nearly all of its more than 60,000 residents. It therefore seems timely to point to the maps produced by the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. There are static maps of current conditions, fire danger maps providing an index of fire risk and potential damage (see above for today’s), and various forecasts, as well as an interactive version.
Bodleian Library Acquires Annotated Tolkien Map
A map of Middle-earth annotated by J. R. R. Tolkien himself that was discovered among the papers of illustrator Pauline Baynes last year and subsequently put up for auction has been purchased by Oxford’s Bodleian Library for its Tolkien archive. News coverage: BBC News, Guardian.
Previously: Map of Middle-earth, Annotated by Tolkien Himself, Discovered.
Worldly Consumers and the Historical Accessibility of Maps
I have a longstanding interest in the extent to which people throughout history could access cultural production: books, music and so forth. Essentially, the economics of cultural life. So when I was poking around the University of Chicago Press website last month (previously), I was very interested to stumble across a book that came out last year: Genevieve Carlton’s Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy (Amazon, iBooks), which examines the ways in which private individuals had access to maps. As you can imagine, very relevant to my interests.
It’s certainly not the only book relevant to those interests. There’s Susan Schulten’s and Martin Brückner’s work, of course; and I should also take a look at Christine Marie Petto’s When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Amazon, iBooks). Expensive monographs all; methinks I need a university library card.
Previously: The Social Life of Maps.
Burial Records Move from Window-Blind Maps to Digital Database
Nick Malawskey of Pennlive.com has the story of how the Newport Cemetery digitized its burial records, which had previously been recorded as hand-drawn maps on the back of window blinds.
It was, to say the least, an imperfect system. Caretakers essentially acted as the cemetery’s librarians, but without a Dewey Decimal system to guide them. Numbers were not necessarily sequential, or the system shifted over the years, making the maps essential to finding the older graves. And as time rolled on, the maps began to deteriorate, fraying at the edges or cracking apart.
[WMS]
Pluto Map Updated with Earlier, Lower-Resolution Imagery
An updated map of Pluto now includes lower-resolution imagery from earlier in New Horizons’ approach. “The map includes all resolved images of Pluto’s surface acquired between July 7-14, 2015, at pixel resolutions ranging from 18 miles (30 kilometers) on the Charon-facing hemisphere (left and right edges of the map) to 770 feet (235 meters) on the hemisphere facing New Horizons during the spacecraft’s closest approach on July 14, 2015 (map center). The non-encounter hemisphere was seen from much greater range and is, therefore, in far less detail.” See coverage from Universe Today and Wired (the latter has a nice loupe feature on the map).
NASA also released an elevation map of the area around Sputnik Planum (the left side of the heart-shaped feature).
Previously: New Maps of Ceres and Pluto.
And Now Some Map News from Texas
Running from 29 April to 5 September 2016 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State “is a once-in-a-generation, collaborative exhibition covering nearly three hundred years of Texas mapping. The maps, dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, document the birth of Texas, the evolution of the physical and political boundaries of the state and the rise of the Alamo and San Antonio Missions.” [WMS]
Meanwhile, the Texas General Land Office has acquired five rare maps from the 1840-1841 survey of the boundary between the then-Republic of Texas and the United States (see example above). Press release. [Tony Campbell/WMS]
‘What Happened to Google Maps?’
In an essay called “What Happened to Google Maps?” Justin O’Beirne notes that between 2010 and 2016 Google Maps has changed from emphasizing cities at the expense of roads to emphasizing the road network at the expense of cities—a turn he chalks up to the shift to mobile device usage—and turns to a 1960s-era paper map to demonstrate what he thinks a balanced Google Maps should look like. An interesting look at the design choices in online maps. [Cartophilia]
A Book About the Hydrographic Survey of Bermuda
Adrian Webb’s Thomas Hurd, RN and His Hydrographic Survey of Bermuda, a book about the hydrographic survey of Bermuda conducted by Royal Navy hydrographer Thomas Hurd between 1789 and 1797, has just been published by the National Museum of Bermuda, the Bermudian Royal Gazette reports. Not available on Amazon, no link at the Museum’s website. [WMS]
In the U.S., Toddlers Shoot People Often Enough That It Can Be Mapped
Of all the statistics related to gun violence in the U.S. that could be mapped, this has got to be one of the most bizarre: from the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, the number of times a toddler has shot someone since 2015, by state. [Landon Schnabel]
ICHC 2017
The 27th International Conference on the History of Cartography will take place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on 9-14 July 2017. Conference paper abstracts can be submitted until 15 October 2016. [Imago Mundi/WMS]
And Now Some Map News from Denver
The Denver Post has a piece that is simultaneously a profile of Christopher Lane, proprietor of the Denver-based Philadelphia Print Shop West (which sells its share of antique maps) and a look at the Rocky Mountain Map Society’s upcoming Map Month. Its theme, “Illusions, Delusions & Confusions,” will be explored by a series of lectures at the Denver Public Library running from 2 May to 9 June and two concurrent exhibitions on myths in maps at Denver’s Central Library and at the Map Library of the University of Colorado Boulder: brochure, program (PDF). [via]
Herb Lester, Travel Guide Publisher
Gear Patrol interviews Ben Olins and Jane Smillie, the founders of travel guide publisher Herb Lester Associates. “[A]fter designing three unique maps in three major cities, they realized there was something to the idea of curating small guides (nothing too expensive, or too ordinary) accompanied by hand-drawn maps. As the company celebrates its sixth birthday this month, we caught up with the founders to chat about maps with personality, curating entire cities and the pitfalls of travel.” Amazon [NLS Maps]
The RPG Maps of Dyson’s Dodecahedron
Dyson’s Dodecahedron started out as a blog about role-playing games that over time transformed itself into a source of dungeon maps; the impetus was a dungeon he’d written up for a one-page dungeon contest:
I wasn’t happy with the map I drew for that dungeon, and started looking at the maps drawn by other members of my various RPG groups. I started to develop a new style for my maps. Not an “original” style overall—it is strongly based in the cartography I enjoyed from old Palladium and Chaosisum products, but significantly less like the style of the traditional D&D map which is very grid-oriented.
Then I started to post maps drawn in this style. As I practiced the style, I challenged myself to draw a geomorph every other day until I had at least 100 geomorphs. The blog got pretty boring during this stretch, but I learned a lot about mapping and dungeon design, and the blog got a reputation as a mapping blog.
Dyson’s archive of maps is now quite extensive; the maps are generally free for personal use and available under various licences. He’s also got a Patreon page. [Boing Boing]
Using Clouds to Map Life
NASA Earth Observatory: “Clouds may seem like distant, ephemeral features that have little to do with life on Earth. In fact, they affect everything from the viability of ecosystems, to how much carbon plants absorb, to the reproductive success of reptiles. So by mapping clouds, new research shows, scientists can indirectly map life.”