Recent Google Maps updates include driving mode, an Android-only navigation mode that, as Android Police describes it, “uses your location history and web searches to make assumptions about where you’re going and give traffic updates and ETAs as you travel” [via]. Also this week, the world’s largest model railway, Hamburg’s Minatur Wunderland, was added to Street View. Quite engrossing if you’re into model trains.
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.
World Metro Map
The World Metro Map is a digital collage of every metro system and station—well, 214 systems and 11,924 stations—overlaid on top of one another. A Kickstarter project, it’s available as a poster in two different sizes. [via]
Japanese Municipal Economy Map
An online map of Japanese municipalities that uses census data to measure their relative economic health. [via]
Mapping The Drowning Eyes
To mark the publication this week of a new fantasy novella, The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster, the artist hired to create the map, Tim Paul, wrote an essay on how he did it. I’m struck by the lengths he took to “avoid making the map look too European” and by the careful consideration of what a map from that world should look like, which is almost unheard of in the fantasy map business, where maps invariably conform to a very specific style. The end result is a map that evokes portolan charts, replete with windrose lines and looking like it was drawn on vellum. As fantasy maps go, it’s one of the finer executions I’ve seen.
Amazon: paperback (Canada, U.K.), Kindle (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks
For the audiobook version (Amazon, iTunes), the publisher has taken the map and made it interactive: clicking on a location gives you an excerpt from the book. It might not quite be “[the] newest in map technology” but it’s a small and interesting innovation as far as fantasy maps are concerned.
3D Printed Planetary Globes
On Shapeways, a site where users can upload and sell 3D-printed items, George Ioannidis is selling globes of the planets and moons of our solar system. There are individual globes, globes that take into account moons’ irregular topography (e.g. Phobos and Diemos, Iapetus), all in different sizes (none of which are very big: 50 to 200 mm), and collections where each planet and moon is to scale (as seen above, this can be somewhat unwieldy, but it’s neat for Jupiter’s Galilean moons, for example). I’m unreasonably enthusiastic about this sort of thing. [via]
Previously: Globes of the Solar System.
Mapping Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso’s maps hadn’t been updated in 50 years. The PC200 Burkina project aimed to change that. [via]
Monmonier on Critical Cartography
Mark Monmonier has posted an essay sharply critical of critical cartography and its distance from its own subject. It was originally commissioned as part of the forthcoming Cartographic Grounds but cut for reasons of space. Very incisive; I could quote you some but I’d end up quoting the whole damn essay. Go read. [via]
Transit Explorer
Yonah Freemark’s Transit Explorer is an online map of existing, planned and under-construction transit projects in cities across North America—“fixed-guideway transit,” which means bus rapid transit, light rail and commuter rail. I’ve spotted a couple of omissions (Montreal’s commuter rail and Winnipeg’s busway don’t appear) but that might be a problem with the underlying OpenStreetMap data. [via]
Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Hyperallergic has a review of Cities of the World (Taschen, November 2015), a reprint of colour plates from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, which appeared in six volumes between 1572 and 1617. From Taschen: “Featuring plans, bird’s-eye views, and maps for all major cities in Europe, plus important urban centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this masterwork in urban mapping gives us a comprehensive view of city life at the turn of the 17th century.” Maps from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum can also be viewed online here and here. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Cyber Squirrel 1
Cyber Squirrel 1, a map that tracks electrical outages caused by squirrels, birds, raccoons and other critters, is only semi-satirical. Its point is that animals disrupt the power grid more than hackers ever have. (The number caused by the latter may be one. Or two.) As Popular Science puts it, “If there is a cyber war happening, it’s one fought between humanity and nature, not nations against each other.” Gizmodo, Washington Post.
Added a link submission page, a page with details on how to subscribe, and a page about how to send me review copies.
Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands
Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands first appeared (in English translation) in 2010. Since then it seems to have achieved a longevity few books of any sort manage. A pocket edition came out in 2014. On Wikipedia (of all places) there’s a companion to the book, linking to entries for each of the Atlas’s essays. And just last week it was featured on The Paris Review’s blog. (See also this 2013 interview with Schalansky at, appropriately enough, The Island Review.) Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Cartographic Design Principles
A couple of years ago the Ordnance Survey posted a series of cartographic design principles to inform and promote “good map design.” The principles are understanding user requirements, a consideration of the display format (e.g., paper vs. web), simplicity, legibility, consistency, accessibility (everything from data format to colourblind inclusiveness to licensing), a clear visual hierarchy, and good composition. (Last year the Ordnance Survey’s blog published a series of posts on these principles, using mostly similar text but different examples.)
Book Riot on Fantasy Maps
This Book Riot piece on fantasy maps from last September touches on a number of subjects I can never get enough information on: the editorial decision on whether to include a map, how one becomes a fantasy map maker, what information from the author does the map maker have to work with, how the maps are created. Practical subjects, in other words. Includes quotes from two people in publishing and two map makers: Tim Paul and Rhys Davies. [via]
Previously: Robert Lazzaretti, Fantasy Mapmaker; Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; How to Make a Fantasy Map.
Mapping the Refugee Crisis
Here are two interactive maps that show the scale of recent refugee migrations. Lucify’s interactive map (screenshot above) shows the flow of asylum seekers to European countries since 2012. And this interactive map, compiled by The Conversation from UNHCR data, shows the size of refugee populations originating from or residing within each country from 1975 to 2010. In each case, the numbers grow with each passing year. More from Scientific American’s SA Visual blog. [via]