Time’s John Patrick Pullen compares how easy or difficult it is to send driving directions to your phone using maps from Apple, Google and Microsoft before coming up with a surprise winner: “I pulled up MapQuest for a punchline on this story, but the joke’s on all of us. MapQuest is, by far, the easiest way to get maps from your desktop to your phone.” I really ought to try this out myself and see if I agree with him.
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.
New Year’s Flooding in the Midwest
[sciba leftsrc=”https://www.maproomblog.com/xq/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/new-year-flooding-1.jpg” leftlabel=”8 Dec 2015″ rightsrc=”https://www.maproomblog.com/xq/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/new-year-flooding-2.jpg” rightlabel=”1 Jan 2016″ mode=”horizontal” width=””]
These two Landsat images illustrate the extent of flooding along the Wabash and Illinois Rivers at the end of last year, as 6-10 inches of rain fell over the midwestern United States. The image from 8 December 2015, above left, shows normal water levels; the image from 1 January 2016, above right, shows the rivers in flood. Use the slider to compare the two views. Original image. [via]
Air Strikes Against ISIS
Interactive maps from The Guardian chronicling the U.S.-led air strikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. [via]
Upcoming Talks
January 14, London. Maps and Society lecture. University of London PhD candidate Nydia Pineda De Avila (PhD Candidate, Queen Mary, University of London) will speak on “Experiencing Early Lunar Maps through an Eighteenth-Century Collection.” Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Woburn Square, London WC1H OAB. 5:00 PM. Free admission.
January 19, Washington, DC. The authors of Mapping the West with Lewis and Clark (Levenger, 2015) will discuss their book. “Ralph E. Ehrenberg, chief of the Library’s Geography and Map Division, and his co-author, Smithsonian Institution curator emeritus Herman J. Viola, retrace the expedition with more than 100 images reproduced in exquisite detail.” Library of Congress, James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC 20050. Noon. Free admission.
January 26, New York. Andrew Kapochunas of LithuanianMaps.com will give a talk entitled “How Maps and Map Collecting Helped an Immigrant Find His Place in the World.” “Andrew will take attendees on a journey through time, beginning with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 13th Century, and through space, as he discusses his struggle to find his place in the world.” New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, South Court: Classroom A, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018. 6:30 PM. Free admission.
Mapping CDRC Datasets
Data available through the Consumer Data Research Centre’s map interface include age of residential properties (modal age and percent built after 1945) and top method of travel to work (screenshot above) for the U.K.
Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream
Though the effects of the Gulf Stream were known to seafarers for centuries, Benjamin Franklin was the first to name it and chart it. The Library of Congress’s map blog has a post about the maps of the Gulf Stream produced by Franklin with his cousin, Timothy Folger, a ship captain who knew the currents. “Folger and Franklin jointly produced a chart of the Gulf Stream in 1768, first published in London by the English firm Mount and Page. The Geography and Map Division holds one of only three known copies of this first edition (see above), in addition to a copy of the ca. 1785 second edition.”
The Biomes of a Tilted Earth
Uploaded by Reddit user Lowtuff to MapPorn, this map imagines the Earth’s biomes if the continents were rotated 90 degrees, with the North Pole somewhere in North Africa. It mines more or less the same territory as Randall Mundroe does in this What If? answer. [via]
Mapping Indiana
Mapping Indiana: Five Centuries of Treasures is an exhibition of maps from the collection of the Indiana Historical Society. “Featuring several original—and some never before seen—pieces from our collection, Mapping Indiana explores the ways we think about maps, how we use them and how they have helped to shape Indiana.” From January 16 to April 2 at the Society’s Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center in downtown Indianapolis. [via]
Metropolis: Mapping the City
Nicolas Crane reviews Jeremy Black’s Metropolis: Mapping the City (Conway, October 2015) for Geographical magazine. “The aim is to explore through time the visualisation of cities, so we start with a terracotta plan of the Mesopotamian holy city of Nippur, in what is now Iraq, then travel through Renaissance cities, New World cities, Imperial cities and mega cities. […] If you’ve ever wondered why cities work, you’ll find the answer in this beautiful book.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Mapping Aid Worker Attacks
An interactive map of attacks on aid workers since 2000. IRIN: “This map, a joint product between IRIN and Humanitarian Outcomes, is the first time ever the full scope of aid worker security events has been presented in visual form, which can be searched and filtered and browsed. It shows events from the beginning of 2000 until the end of May 2015. It’s a sobering testament to the dangerous work of saving lives.” [via]
Ji Zhou’s Civilized Landscape
Civilized Landscape was an exhibition of Ji Zhou‘s photographic art at New York’s Klein Sun Gallery. The Beijing-based Zhou merges physical art and photography in his work: “Ji Zhou collects maps, hand-sculpting them into peaks and troughs to mimic mountaintops. He includes books that are assembled into cantilevered towers resembling city skyscrapers. These ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ illusions are then photographed, further augmenting reality.” The exhibition apparently ran from September to October 2015, but the Huffington Post got hold of it this week, and it’s gone viral from there.
NYPL Offers High-Quality Downloads of 180,000 Public-Domain Documents
Yesterday the New York Public Library made available high-quality downloads of some 180,000 public-domain photographs, postcards, maps and other items from its digital collection—of which more than 21,000 are maps, based on my quick search. I can see spending an awful lot of time poking around in there, can’t you?
Pacific Ocean Time Lapse
The Railway Atlas of Scotland
Also from Birlinn, The Railway Atlas of Scotland: Two Hundred Years of History in Maps by David Spaven, which came out last October.
Previously: British Railways, Past and Present.
Glasgow: Mapping the City
The National’s Alan Taylor reviews Glasgow: Mapping the City by John Moore (Birlinn, October 2015), an illustrated book of maps of the city dating back to the 16th century (via). This is one of several map books published by Birlinn that cover the history of Scotland in maps: previous volumes include Edinburgh: Mapping the City by Christopher Fleet and Daniel MacCannell (2014) and Scotland: Mapping the Nation by Christopher Fleet, Charles W. J. Withers and Margaret Wilkes (2012).