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.

The Selden Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Selden Map
The Selden Map (Bodleian Library)

The Nation has a long article by Paula Findlen on the Selden Map, a Chinese watercolour map acquired by the 17th-century jurist and scholar John Selden and bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in 1659. Findlen recounts the origins of the map and its rediscovery in the Bodleian’s vaults in 2008, and describes it in intricate detail. [via]

The map’s rediscovery has set off a flurry of interest and publications (see book list below). Findlen also looks at the scholarly debates about the map. “Brook and Batchelor have both written books about the Selden map, and each scholar takes a somewhat different approach to framing the story and to interpreting a reconstruction of the document’s origins. Yet they concur that this is a Chinese maritime map and a product of late-Ming ambitions, enterprise, and mobility,” she writes.

The Bodleian has a website dedicated to the Selden Map, which includes an online viewer (Flash required). See also Robert Batchelor’s page.

selden-books

Books About the Selden Map:

  • The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty by Hongping Annie Nie (Bodleian Libraries, 2014).
    Available as a PDF in English and Chinese.

Previously: More Map Books; Two More Map Books.

Lake Poopó Dries Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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Lake Poopó has become the Aral Sea of the Andes. Thanks to drought, water diversion and mining activity, the lake—long, wide, shallow, saline and the second-largest in Bolivia—has basically dried up, as this comparison of 2013 and 2016 Landsat 8 images demonstrates. CBC News, The Independent.

Online Map Updates

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Yesterday’s updates to Apple Maps include four new Flyover cities, traffic data for Hong Kong and Mexico, public transit data for Los Angeles, and Nearby search for the Netherlands.

Google Earth Blog reports on the mid-January imagery update for Google Earth.

Google Earth Blog also reports that version 1.0 of ArcGIS Earth is now available. Announced last June and previously available as a series of public betas, ArcGIS Earth appears to be aimed at filling the gap left by Google when Google Earth Enterprise was discontinued last year.

Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is now in Street View.

Le Grand Paris en Cartes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

grand-paris

Le Grand Paris en Cartes is a collection of interactive maps and infographics about the Grand Paris Express, a multi-billion-euro project to extend Paris’s Metro and rapid transit network deep into the surrounding Île-de-France region (if you can read French, the official site and French Wikipedia page provide a lot more information). These maps not only illustrate Parisians’ commuting routes and Metro usage, but also (see above) the kind of sociological data that underpins transit planning: employment centres, population density and so forth. In French. [via]

Cities and Memory

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Cities and Memory is an exercise in sound mapping: a map of ambient sounds from hundreds of locations. Stuart Fowkes writes, “Every location and every faithful field recording on the sound map is accompanied by a reworking, a processing or an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can choose to explore locations through their actual sounds, or explore interpretations of what those places could be—or to flip between the two different sound worlds at leisure.” It’s open to submissions.

Early Maps of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

agas-map

Google Maps Mania has a post on the earliest maps of London. First, the Copperplate Map (ca. 1550s) of which no prints survive: only three copper printing plates, out of 15, are known to exist, two of which are held by the Museum of London. On the other hand, the Agas Map (above), which appears to be a close copy of the Copperplate, is available in an online interactive version.

Urban Scratchoff

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Using an interactive interface to compare present-day and historical maps and aerial imagery is done all the time—on this website I use a slider plugin—but Chris Whong’s Urban Scratchoff uses a familiar metaphor to compare present-day aerial images of New York City with imagery from 1924. Give it a try. More on how Chris did it. [via]

Andy Woodruff’s Islands of Boston

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

boston-population-islands

Andy Woodruff imagines Boston neighbourhoods as islands, where any unpopulated areas—commercial districts, industrial areas, highways, parks—are represented as water. “Some neighborhoods of the Boston area are actual islands, or were at one point. Others, however, can feel that way even when connected to each other by land. Water isn’t the only thing that can create a gulf between neighborhoods; sometimes it’s created by features of the urban landscape and the experience of passing through them.” [via]