On the Library of Congress’s map blog, a post about the women cartographers employed by the military and government during World War II—the so-called “Military Mapping Maidens.”
The Guardian has a brief item on ocean mapper Marie Tharp.
CityLab’s Laura Bliss presents a selection of maps by women mapmakers like Mary Ann Roque, the Haussard sisters and Shanawdithit, the last known member of the Beothuk people.
Previously: Women in Cartography.
Another online map of Mars, this one titled (Is There) Life on Mars? and produced by Kenneth Field using ArcGIS. On the information pane he says, cryptically, “There’s a hidden element on the map that explains why I really made it. Happy hunting.” [via]
Point Google Maps or OpenStreetMap at a city like Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and you’ll get a reasonably good map. What you won’t get is Street View or street-level imagery—or, necessarily, the data that comes from a street-level understanding of the territory. NPR’s Nadia Whitehead looks at a joint project of the World Bank and Mapillary, a company that crowdsources street-level photos, to produce those images. “Volunteers are mounting camera rigs to their tuk tuks—three-wheeled motor-powered vehicles—to snap pictures as they cruise Dar es Salaam’s dirt roads. Others download the Mapillary app on their smartphones and capture images as they walk or hitch rides on motorbikes. In all, more than 260 people have volunteered.” [via]
The Electric Map of the Battle of Gettysburg, once a mainstay of Gettysburg National Military Park, closed in 2008; in 2012 it was purchased at auction for $14,000 by Scott Roland, a businessman who planned to reopen it as a tourist attraction in downtown Hanover, Pennsylvania, about 16 miles east of Gettysburg. Renovating and reassembling the map has taken Roland longer than he originally expected, the Evening Sun reports, but he believes the map will be ready by the end of the school year. [via]
A copy of an 1853 map of Texas by Jacob de Cordova found in a $10 box of ragtime sheet music sold at auction last weekend for $10,000. The map, once owned by surveyor James M. Manning, who died in 1872, was bought, along with a related letter, by Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi, whose library houses the Manning papers. [via]
The New York Times maps the impact of Russian airstrikes on the Syrian civil war. Using several maps to indicate the impact on each faction—government, rebels, ISIS and Kurds—strikes me as quite effective, as is the use of colour-highlighted text in the headings, rather than a legend, to indicate each faction.
Also in Lisbon, also in June: the third symposium of the International Society for the History of the Map. Its theme: Encounters and Translations: Mapping and Writing the Waters of the World. It takes place 3-4 June 2016 at the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon—just before the portolan chart workshop. [via]
In the 48 hours since I posted on how to support The Map Room, 18 readers have contributed a total of $166. That’s tremendous given the size of my audience: there may not be many of you, but you’re hardcore. The split between buying me a coffee (it’s a tip jar, actually) and contributing to my web hosting was 28:72. Contributions to the latter are sufficient to pay for 10 months of web hosting on my current plan; they’d take a big bite out of the additional cost of the upgraded plan, which I will now look into. I deeply appreciate the support. Thank you.
The program for the First International Workshop on the Origin and Evolution of Portolan Charts, which takes place 5-6 June 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal, is now live. The conference focuses on the history of portolan charts and the analytical techniques used to study them. [via]
Coming next month from Policy Press, the third edition of People and Places: A 21st-Century Atlas of the U.K. by Danny Dorling and Bethan Thomas. The Independent has a long profile of the book, which makes extensive use of cartograms to illustrate data about the British population, and one of its co-authors, Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling. Pre-order at Amazon (direct Amazon U.K. link—it’s more likely to be in stock there). [via]
Jason-3 is the latest earth observation satellite tasked with measuring global sea surface height; its data will be used in weather and climate research (e.g., El Niño, climate change). Launched on January 17, it’s now in its six-month checkout phase and has produced its first complete map, which corresponds well with the map produced by the still-operational Jason-2 satellite, so that’s a good sign. [via]
Is Sexism a Problem in GIS? Caitlin Dempsey Morais of GIS Lounge grapples with a thorny subject. “Over a two week period in September of 2015, I opened a survey on GIS Lounge to those working in the geospatial industry in order to take a look at the question of, ‘is sexism in the workplace an issue for women (and men) working in GIS?’ This article reports back on the results from that survey.”
Map as Metaphor is the theme for this year’s History of Art series, hosted by the New York-based Center for Book Arts. Starting tomorrow and running on three consecutive Friday evenings, a series of panels will investigate “how the map can be understood as a metaphor, both as material artifact and cultural object as well as an artistic tool”: The Socio-Political Map: Control and Power (18 March); The Eco-Techno Map: Data and Online Initiatives (25 March); and The Artist Map: Appropriation and Creation (1 April). Each panel takes place at the Center for Book Arts, 28 W 27th St, 3rd Floor, New York, and begins at 6:30 PM. Reservations recommended; donations requested. [via]
Saman Bemel Benrud, a designer at Mapbox, looks to print maps for inspiration. “I like looking at print maps because they remind me how far web map design has to go. Even an average print map involves a designer making thousands of small decisions about where to place individual features and how to kern and size each label,” he writes. “You can’t work like that with web maps that are global and zoomable.” Still, he provides some favourite design elements from paper maps; it’d be interesting to see how they might be rendered online.
Dave Delisle of Dave’s Geeky Ideas has been doing transit maps in the style of Super Mario Brothers 3; the latest to receive the SMB3 treatment is Ottawa (a city I’m familiar with, since it’s only an hour away). Posters are also available for sale (in non-animated versions, obviously).
