I’ve been told that scheduled maintenance will be taking place on my server some time today (1 March 2016) between 7 AM and 9 AM Pacific Standard Time (10 AM to noon Eastern, 3 PM to 5 PM UTC.) A brief period of downtime of up to 30 minutes (but usually less than that) is expected.
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.
Maps and Portraits: The Art of Ed Fairburn
Ed Fairburn’s art combines portraiture with maps, in which the faces, drawn in ink over an existing map, seem to emerge from the topographic or urban features. Here’s a short video feature on Fairburn from Arts District, a Rocky Mountain PBS program. [via]
‘Here There Be Robots’: Eleanor Lutz’s Map of Mars
Eleanor Lutz’s map of Mars isn’t exactly medieval in style (that’s not the right word for it), but it applies an ostensibly old aesthetic to a very modern map subject. “I thought it would be fun to use their historical design style to illustrate our current adventures into unexplored territory. […] Since the base map is hand-drawn I also added an overlay of actual NASA topographic imagery. This way even if some of my lines are a little off, you can still see what the actual ground looks like underneath.” Whatever you call it, it looks amazing. [via]
The Art of Illustrated Maps
The Scituate Mariner has a profile of local resident John Roman, an illustrator whose book, The Art of Illustrated Maps, came out from HOW Design Books last fall. If “illustrated maps” sounds redundant to you, Roman means by it maps that are illustrations, maps that are conceptual rather than geographic—art rather than geometry. Buy at Amazon. [via]
New York Subway Line Posters
Andrew Lynch has created posters of individual New York subway lines. Each poster contains ridership and historical data, and the lines are geographically accurate but are otherwise blank.
When I look at the subway map I always want to know where the lines really go. The VanMaps take this wish to a ridiculous extreme. A fully geographic map would be cluttered and difficult to read. I stripped that all away. All you have now is the essence, the subway itself and nothing else. In trying for the most geographic accuracy the map now becomes totally abstracted. The subway line exists on a blank plane. Totally accurate, totally useless. But damn does it look good.
[via]
3D Printed Maps for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Rutgers University: “Using a high-tech 3-D printer, a Rutgers undergraduate and his professor created sophisticated braille maps to help blind and visually impaired people navigate a local training center.” [via]
Here’s a short video about the project from Rutgers:
Are Transit Maps Too Complicated?
Are transit system maps too complicated? Human beings can only process a finite amount of information at once (eight bits, or yes/no decisions—on maps that would mean 28 or 256 connection points); researchers examining the transit systems of 15 large metropolitan areas found that many trips exceeded that eight-bit limit, especially when multi-modal trips (e.g. subway plus bus or tram) are involved (subway-only trips tended to fall under the limit). System maps with too many data points are overwhelming. “We have found that, in the largest cities, the addition of bus routes with maps that are already too complicated to be used easily by travelers implies that the cognitive limit to urban navigation is exceeded for multimodal transportation systems.” A single map, in other words, is no longer sufficient or useful in such cases. [via]
The Correspondence of Abraham Ortelius
A catalogue of the correspondence of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), the Flemish cartographer responsible for the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, is now available. Ortelius’ letters are scattered about the world in various collections; the catalogue is just that, a catalogue, not a digital archive—where digital copies do exist there are links to them, but otherwise in-person library research is still required. (The principal researcher, Joost Depuydt, recently published an article on Ortelius’ correspondence in Imago Mundi.) [via]
Plans for a Rebuilt London After the Great Fire of 1666
The BBC’s Britain series looks at the plans and proposals to redesign London’s streets after the city was gutted by the Great Fire of 1666. [via]
London’s Population Versus …
There’s a certain kind of map found all over the Internet that drives me nuts. It’s the map that compares two geographic regions by labelling one with the other: show that this U.S. state has the same GDP as that country by labelling with that country (or better yet, its flag). But the comparisons can get awfully recondite: labelling the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul with Zimbabwe’s flag because they have similar populations is cute but ultimately useless, unless you have some familiarity with both Rio Grande do Sul and Zimbabwe. They’re bad maps because they’re not really informative—they’re just showing off.
But the problem isn’t necessarily the format. For an exception to the above, see TimeOut London’s maps of London. The first map (above) shows London’s population size by illustrating how many other cities’ populations could be crammed inside London’s boundaries; the same is done with greater metropolitan areas, U.S. cities, Scotland and Wales, and other countries. These maps work because a British-based reader will have some sense of what’s being compared to London: they’re not, in other words, esoteric comparisons. [via]
Fuller: London Town
Fuller’s London Town is a pen-and-ink masterpiece of detail that took ten years to create. Unveiled last October, it’s been making the exhibition rounds and is currently at the Hoxtown Gallery in Holborn, London until April 30th. It’s also included, along with his map of Bristol, in Mind the Map, a collection of map art that came out last September from Gestalten. Prints of his work are also available: a print of London Town costs £600 or £2,500 depending on the size. More about Fuller (whose real name is Gareth Wood) here. [via]
Paula Scher: U.S.A.
U.S.A., a new exhibition of Paula Scher’s map art, opened last week at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. From the press release:
For this exhibition, Scher has created a body of large-scale cartographic paintings focusing on the United States. Paintings as tall as seven feet depict the country swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundary lines, place names, and commentary. Different sets of data—population demographics, transportation flows, geography, and climate—are employed to make connections and establish patterns. While the information can in no way be interpreted as literal fact, the expression of it demonstrates a personalized understanding of the diversity of the United States.
The exhibition runs until March 26. More on the exhibition from Slate and Mental Floss. The New Yorker has a new profile of Paula Scher, a renowned graphic designer who’s been painting these distinctive maps in her spare time.
A book of her map art, Paula Scher: MAPS, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011.
Previously: New Paula Scher Exhibition; Paula Scher: The Maps.
The North Carolina Civil War Atlas
The result of a decade’s worth of research, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas, written by Mark Anderson Moore with Jessica Bandel and Michael Hill, is now available. The book “is a comprehensive study of the impact of the war on the Tar Heel State, incorporating 99 newly prepared maps. The large format (17″ by 11″) volume highlights every significant military engagement and analyzes the war’s social, economic and political consequences through tables, charts and text.” Produced by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, it can be ordered through their online store, at the North Carolina Museum of History or selected state historic sites. Read historian John David Smith’s review in The News & Observer. [via]
BatiParis: Mapping the Age of Paris’s Buildings
Japanese Rail Network, 1936
Scans from a colourful Japanese rail network map from 1936. Because it’s 1936, the map includes Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. [via]