A seventeenth-century map of Falmouth, Cornwall lost for more than a century has turned up in the private collection of a local historian who died last June. Created by George Withiell in 1690, the map, titled A True Map of all Sir Peter Killigrew’s Lands in the Parish of Mylor and part of Budock Lands, was last on public display in the 1880s and had gone missing since then. The historian, Alan Pearson, found it for sale in Bristol 10 years ago. The map is now on display at the Cornwall Record Office in Bristol. BBC News, West Briton. [via/via]
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.
A Snowstorm Revealed Through Traffic Delays
NPR graphics editor Alyson Hurt discovered that this month’s blizzard was showing up in Google Maps as traffic delays, and whipped up a little script that took regular screencaps of Google Maps’s traffic layer. She then created an animated GIF from the screencaps. The end result (above) dramatically shows the storm sweeping across the mid-Atlantic states.
Andy Woodruff then took Hurt’s script and created an animation of an ordinary day of Boston traffic. For a “quick, crude” script it certainly seems to have potential. [via]
‘We Are One’ in Colonial Williamsburg
We Are One: Mapping America’s Road from Revolution to Independence, an exhibition by the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center (it ran from May to November last year) is going on tour. First stop: Colonial Williamsburg. From March 2016 to January 2017 it will appear at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. From the press release: “More than 30 unique objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collections will be included in the exhibition, which were not shown when it initially opened at the Boston Public Library in May 2015. […] Many of the objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collection to be seen in We Are One are on view for the first time or are rarely exhibited.” [via]
Previously: Mapping the American Revolution.
Literary Selections on Cartography
Literary Selections on Cartography was a series of letterpress broadsheets published by the History of Cartography project. A total of 23 appeared between 1992 and 2015; they included poetry and snippets from longer works, and were sometimes accompanied by commentaries. The move of Silver Buckle Press from the University of Wisconsin—Madison to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum will put an end to any future Literary Selections, in letterpress form at least, but the complete set so far is available online. [via]
Previously: Maps and Poetry.
North America
Middle East
Southeast Asia
Mapping Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution
A decade’s worth of data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument aboard the Aura satellite reveals the change in global nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution from 2005 to 2014: down significantly in some areas, due to stricter emissions controls, but up sharply in others. More at NASA Earth Observatory.
More on ‘A Map of Every City’
Without question, the most popular post on The Map Room so far this week—by two orders of magnitude—was this post pointing to Chaz Hutton’s “A Map of Every City.” Hutton’s map went kind of viral, and not just here. He’s since announced that a print of the map will be available at some point; he’s also written a post on Medium explaining some of the background behind the map.
History of the Miami Map Fair
The Miami International Map Fair is just around the corner: it runs from February 5th to 7th. Relatedly, Joseph H. Fitzgerald has just published a short (64 pp.) history of the fair: The Miami Map Fair: The First 20 Years. From the excerpt I saw on Amazon it looks like one of those dry institutional histories, but there are people for whom this will be interesting. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Update: Miami Herald coverage of the Fair [via].
Ian’s 3D Relief Maps
Planetary globes aren’t the only map-related 3D-printed items being sold on Shapeways; Ian Grasshoff writes to say that he’s flogging 3D relief maps there as well. “I have made it a focus to only use Open Data (LiDAR where available) and Open Source GIS/modeling software,” he writes. “I think the results speak for themselves.”
Books About the Tabula Peutingeriana
I’ve blogged about the Tabula Peutingeriana before. It was a medieval copy of a fourth- or fifth-century map of the Roman road network. Combined, its 11 sheets form a scroll 6.82 metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, with territories elongated beyond modern recognition; it was basically the classical period’s equivalent of a TripTik or Beck network map. The sole remaining copy is held by the National Library of Austria: it’s too fragile to put on display, though an exception was made for a single day in 2007.
Anyway. During my online meanderings today I stumbled across two academic books about the Tabula that I was previously unaware of: The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire by Emily Albu (2014) and Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (2010). Both from Cambridge University Press, neither cheap.
Buy The Medieval Peutinger Map at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Buy Rome’s World at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Antiquity à la Carte
The Ancient World Mapping Center—formerly the Classical Atlas Project, the team behind the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, the expensive atlas later reborn as an iPad app (iTunes link)—has a web-based map interface to classical/late antiquity geographic data. The original (2012) version of “Antiquity à la Carte” is kind of old school and clunky; the (2014) beta version shows a bit more promise. [via]
INAT London Metro Map
Jug Cerović has reimagined the map of London’s transit network. It’s one of several transit maps that share a common design language. Mapping London calls it “a lovely map of the London system that manages to combine the tube and commuter rail networks into a single map that is clear and pleasant to read, unlike the official ones. The INAT London Metro Map is a lesson in simplifying and making attractive a complex topological map.” Though I think the rhetoric about moving away from Beck is a bit overdone—it’s not like we’re completely abandoning diagrammatic map design here.
Previously: A Geographically Accurate Tube Map.
Adventures in Academic Cartography
Pulling back the academic veil can be fascinating. I remember one day 25 years ago in my first year of university, when my history professor paused to tell us about his current research project (a biography of an early 20th-century French politician). For a half hour he held the class rapt as he detailed the long effort required to nail down one specific detail in his subject’s life. For me it was a revelation: history was detective work, and therefore exciting stuff. That may have been the moment that sent me to graduate school in history (and not just me—that professor generated more graduate students than anyone else in that department).
I was reminded of that day as I was reading Mark Monmonier’s memoir, Adventures in Academic Cartography, which does much the same thing as my prof did back then: pull back the veil to reveal an entire academic career that was hidden from our view. Monmonier is a familiar name to those of us interested in maps, having published a dozen books—scholarly, erudite but accessible to the lay reader—over the years. (I’ve reviewed three of them myself: How to Lie with Maps, his essential text on how maps persuade and deceive; Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, a look at the politicization of the Mercator projection; and From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, on the politics and controversies behind place names.) But, like my professor, we are largely aware of only one aspect of his career: in Monmonier’s case, the books. Adventures in Academic Cartography, which he self-published in the fall of 2014, fills in the blanks.
NWS National Mosaic
The National Weather Service’s National Mosaic provides an uninterrupted look at the Doppler weather radar for the 48 contiguous U.S. states. Full-size version. [via]
When Map Errors Hurt Small Businesses
We’ve all seen business listings on online maps that don’t quite jibe with reality: the map marker’s on the wrong place, and driving directions don’t get you to your destination. The Wall Street Journal reports on how businesses deal with online map errors. Getting a wrong listing fixed is a rather high priority (a lost customer is a lost customer, if you follow me), but it turns out to be a more time-consuming—and expensive—process than I thought: there are firms that charge thousands of dollars to solve this for you. [via]
How to Cite GIS Materials
“How to Cite GIS Materials” is an older post (Caitlin Dempsey Morais first posted it to GIS Lounge in 2012, but retweeted it recently) but all the same a perennially useful one: it demonstrates proper citation format for GIS data sources as well as maps, whether paper or online.