Nick Middleton’s Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist (Macmillan, November 2015), a compendium of countries that fall outside the definition of an independent state for one reason or another, is reviewed in Geographical magazine by Chris Fitch. [via] Amazon U.K. | iBooks
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.
Wichita Navigation Company Profiled
Last October the Wichita Eagle profiled Ken Gebhart, the 79-year-old owner of Celestaire, a local company that sells navigation equipment, including sextants. The sextants are Chinese imports; Celestaire itself makes the navigation tables and almanacs that accompany sextant use. You might have thought that sextants had gone the way of horses and buggies, but apparently the U.S. Navy is reviving celestial navigation training, as a fallback in the event of a GPS failure. [via]
Fictional Maps International Conference
The Fictional Maps International Conference, which I mentioned on my personal blog last August, takes place next weekend in Katowice, Poland. Of course I can’t be there. But the conference program is now online; abstracts are also available in this ebook.
The Best New York City Maps of 2015
Over on Metrocosm, Max Galka has assembled his pick of the 10 best New York City maps of 2015. The list includes maps of buildings, trees and languages, pathogens and crime, housing and “interestingness,” among others. [via]
Dubrovnik Symposium
The 6th International Symposium on the History of Cartography will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia in October 2016. “The joint organizers invite contributions (papers and posters) on the dissemination of cartographic knowledge and the effectiveness thereof in diverse cartographic cultures and their related user groups around the globe. This includes the technological and conceptual aspects of cartographic production (maps, charts, globes, atlases, educational tools etc.), the usability of these techniques and the resulting products, as well as the conditions of the map trade as a changing network of private enterprises and official institutions, and the role of diverse audiences in the creation, circulation, consumption and ultimate preservation of knowledge.” Deadline for submissions is February 15. [via]
Phantom Islands
Here are two pieces on phantom islands (i.e., islands that appear on maps but were later proved never to have actually existed; some of them persisted on charts well into the 20th century) from Atlas Obscura and Intelligent Life magazine.
British Library Digitizing George III’s Map Collection
On New Year’s Eve The Arts Newspaper reported on the British Library’s efforts to digitize the 50,000 maps and plans that make up the King George III Topographical Collection. (George III was apparently quite the map collector, one not above choosing not to return maps he borrowed.) They’re about a quarter of the way through so far. The collection’s crown jewel, so to speak, is the ludicrously large (176 × 231 cm) Klencke Atlas.
Google Maps Updates
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.
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]