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.

Beinecke Acquires Map of Harlem Nightclubs

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
E. Simms Campbell, A Night-Club Map of Harlem, 1932. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has announced that it has acquired “the original artwork for a 1932 map of Harlem nightclubs drawn by E. Simms Campbell, the first African American illustrator to be syndicated and whose work was featured regularly in national magazines. The map, purchased at auction on March 31, provides a ‘who’s who’ guide of the nightclubs that drove Harlem nightlife during and after Prohibition, including the Savoy Ballroom, the Cotton Club, and Gladys’s Clam Bar. It was published in the inaugural edition of Manhattan Magazine and appeared in Esquire nine months later.” [WMS]

Vancouver Archives Digitizing Old Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
vancouver-1935
Guide Map: Vancouver-New Westminster, Burnaby and North Shore Municipalities, 1935. City of Vancouver Archives.

The City of Vancouver Archives: “Thanks to funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program, we’ve recently completed a project to digitize over 2100 maps and plans and made them available online for you to use and re-use. We’ve tried to digitize these maps with enough resolution to support future types of re-use and processing, including optical character recognition and feature extraction.” A selection is available on Flickr. [WMS]

Data Visualization’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and Choropleth Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham compares two choropleth maps of U.S. population growth: while they look rather different, they use the same data. “The difference between my map and Pew’s—again, they both use the exact same data set—underscores a bit of a dirty little secret in data journalism: Visualizing data is as much an art as a science. And seemingly tiny design decisions—where to set a color threshold, how many thresholds to set, etc.—can radically alter how numbers are displayed and perceived by readers.” [Andy Woodruff]

(Worth mentioning that this is exactly the sort of thing dealt with in Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps.)

Monterey Bay Area Seafloor Maps Released

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Bathymetry of Monterey Canyon and the Soquel Canyon tributary
Bathymetry of Monterey Canyon and the Soquel Canyon tributary
Geologic Map of Monterey Canyon and the Soquel Canyon tributary
Geologic Map of Monterey Canyon and the Soquel Canyon tributary

New seafloor maps of the Monterey Bay area have been released as part of the California Seafloor Mapping Program. The maps “reveal the diverse and complex range of seafloor habitats along 130 kilometers (80 miles) of the central California coast from the Monterey Peninsula north to Pigeon Point.” [Leventhal Map Center]

Previously: Mapping the California Sea Floor.

De Wit’s Planisphærium Cœleste

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Frederick de Wit, Planisphærium cœleste, 1670.
Frederick de Wit, Planisphærium cœleste, 1670.

As part of its regular “Map Monday” feature, Atlas Obscura looks closely at Frederick de Wit’s Planisphærium cœleste (1670), above. Like other celestial maps of the period, it’s as though the monsters on sea charts have been placed in the skies—especially true for constellations like Cetus, as the article shows.

This reminds me that there’s quite a lot about antique celestial maps in The Map Room’s archives: The Face of the Moon; Star Atlases; Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web; The U.S. Naval Observatory’s Celestial Atlases; Divine Sky: The Artistry of Astronomical Maps; Another Look at the Linda Hall Library’s Celestial Atlases; Christian Constellations.

kanaspb2ndedb.inddA book about celestial maps, Nick Kanas’s Star Maps: History, Artistry and Cartography, is now in its second edition (Springer, 2012). I own a copy of the first edition.

Previously about Frederick de Wit: A New Book About Frederick de Wit.

Topographic Map of Mars

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
machacek-mars
Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/ASU/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)/Daniel Macháček.

Daniel Macháček released his topographic map of Mars, based on the latest probe data, in November 2014. It uses the Mercator projection between 65° north and 65° south latitude and stereographic projections for the poles. It can be downloaded in insanely high resolution: 17,400×14,700 (78 MB JPEG, 106 MB PDF). His blog post (in Czech: use the translate button) has all the technical details. I particularly like the colour scheme he used for elevation data: the low-lying areas are coloured like deep oceans, which seems appropriate. [Maps on the Web]

Pluto Globe Gores

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
pluto-gores
Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Sarah J. Morrison. CC licence.

If you wanted to make your own globe of Pluto based on New Horizons imagery, now’s your chance: Sarah Morrison has created globe gores based on NASA’s photomosaic global map of Pluto.

(Globe gores for other planets and moons are available for download from the USGS’s Astrogeology Science Center.)

Previously: Globes of the Solar System.

Old Logging Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

North Country Public Radio’s Adirondack Attic: “Jerry Pepper, librarian at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, shows Andy Flynn a collection of maps that detail logging operations by the Finch Pruyn paper company in the town of Newcomb. The maps were used from the 1920s to about 1950, the year of the last river drive carrying logs from the Adirondack Mountains down the Hudson River.” [Tony Campbell]

My county’s archives has a collection of old logging maps; I blogged about them in 2007.

Putting Slums on the Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

kibera

In Smithsonian, Erin Blakemore explores the on-the-ground, amateur efforts to get disadvantaged communities—slums, shanty towns, whatever they may be called—on the map, like the Map Kibera and Mapillary projects, and the implications of such projects.

Sterling Quinn, who is earning his Ph.D. in geography at Penn State, notes that there are downsides to user-generated maps. Just because an underserved community makes its way onto the map doesn’t mean it becomes less vulnerable, says Sterling. “Putting yourself on the map may make you more vulnerable to people who want to exploit the area,” he tells Smithsonian.com.

[Dave Smith]

Previously: The Geospatial Revolution Project, Episode Four; Crowdsourcing Street Photos of Dar es Salaam.

A Geolocation Glitch Creates a ‘Technological Horror Story’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Not every geographic database uses Null Island. When MaxMind’s geolocation database, which matches IP addresses to physical locations, can only identify an IP address’s country, it uses a default location roughly at the centre of that country. In the case of the United States, it turned out to be Joyce Taylor’s farm in Potwin, Kansas. Fusion’s Kashmir Hill has the horror story that has ensued: MaxMind’s database is used by thousands of online services, whose users mistook a default location with a precise address.

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

As Hill’s article points out, Taylor is far from the only one to be hit by this problem. MaxMind is updating its database to correct this and one other case by moving the default location to a body of water. (I can’t help but think that we will soon start hearing stories about people driving into the lake as a result of this change.) There’s no such thing as a set of coordinates that can’t be represented precisely. What’s the solution?

McCutcheon’s 1908 Cartoon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

New York Times graphics editor Tim Wallace stumbled across a 1908 Chicago Tribune cartoon by John T. McCutcheon that’s older than other examples of “perception-based” maps he was aware of.

(Though my previous entry contained a link to a 1922 McCutcheon cartoon, which only moves the clock back only 14 years.)

The Syrian Civil War’s Amateur Mapmakers

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National Geographic looks at the 20 or so amateur mapmakers producing digital maps of the Syrian civil war. Some are neutral, some are partial to one side, all are dealing with the challenges of producing accurate, up-to-date information far from the front lines.

The rise of these next-generation mapmakers comes as many news organizations around the world are reducing their commitment to foreign coverage. And reporting from conflict zones remains as dangerous as ever. According to Reporters Without Borders, 50 journalists and 142 citizen journalists have been killed in Syria since 2011. The lack of on-the-ground coverage by journalists leaves an information gap that is being filled by these digitally savvy mapmakers.

[WMS]

Upcoming Symposium: Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Further to my post about China at the Center, the exhibition of rare maps now taking place at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco: Mark Stephen Mir, who wrote the exhibition catalogue’s chapter on the Verbiest map, writes to share the following about a symposium coming up later this month: Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange: From the World Maps of Ricci and Verbiest to Google Earth. 

The Ricci Institute is hosting a series of events connected with our exhibition China at the Center at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. One of these events is an international symposium held at the University of San Francisco April 22-24 with extra events at the AAM and in the Manresa Gallery on the USF campus. The topic of the symposium concerns the history of East-West scientific exchange through the medium of cartography beginning with ancient maps and continuing to the present with the latest technological innovations. Internationally known specialists in cartography and East-West cultural exchange will be invited to share their research, while experts from Google and NASA will discuss the latest technological developments in enriching our knowledge of the world and the cosmos.

Registration on-site is $85, or free for students and USF faculty and staff. The program has been posted online (PDF).

Previously: China at the Center.