The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data and maps showing the estimated rate of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. on a county-by-county basis. The data is based on a question in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey that asked respondents whether they’d get a vaccine for COVID-19 once it was available to them. Methodology and datasets here. [Boston.com]
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.
French Rail Services as Network Diagram
Metropolitan France—mainland France without Corsica and its overseas territories—is often referred to colloquially as l’Hexagone. Jug Cerovic, whose work we are familiar with here, has taken that metaphor and run with it with this network diagram of France’s main passenger train lines: the grid is hexagonal, and it works. Lines are colour-coded: TGV lines are blue if they start in Paris and red if they route around it or connect regions directly (a relatively new development; intercity lines are blue-grey, regional lines are orange, and night trains are grey. International routes are also included. It’s actually quite easy to see what cities and towns get what kind of train service, and what services exist between two points—exactly what a network map should do.
Bharat Mata Mandir Marble Map of India
I was unaware of Bharat Mata Mandir temple’s map of an undivided India until Mappery pointed to it. It’s another one of those giant relief map installations, only this one is made of marble; it sits in the temple in lieu of an idol. India is shown undivided—i.e., it doesn’t show the post-partition boundaries—because the temple was built in 1936.
Fuchida’s Map of Pearl Harbor
After Mitsuo Fuchida commanded the air attack on Pearl Harbor, he drew a map to report on the damage his planes inflicted on the U.S. ships. That map, held by the Library of Congress, is the subject of an interactive story map from the Library: “This is the story of how Fuchida made the map, the history surrounding it, and an opportunity for the reader to interactively explore the map’s contents.” [Maps Mania]
Apple and Google Updates: AI Improvements, Airport Health Measures
Last week Google announced “over 100 AI-powered improvements to Google Maps” would be coming this year; these include bringing Live View indoors, a new air quality map layer, eco-friendly routing, and support for curbside pickup in business listings.
Meanwhile, Apple Maps is now displaying airport COVID-19-related health measures based on data from Airports Council International: press release. [AppleInsider, MacRumors]
The Spherical Cow Projection
Today is The Map Room’s 18th anniversary. When I started this blog back in March 2003, it was as an exercise in self-education: I liked maps a lot, but knew very little about them, and thought that the blogging process would enable me to learn things and share what I learned with my readers. The idea that I’m some kind of map expert is just silly: I have no professional credentials whatsoever, not in cartography, not in geospatial, not even in illustration. (I haven’t even taken geography since high school.)
But that’s not to say that I haven’t picked up some knowledge: I’ve turned my longstanding interest in fantasy maps into a few published articles (with more still in the works or in press), so I will concede the point on that front. But in general what I do have is exposure. Over the past 18 years I have seen just about everything to do with maps, and so I know a little bit about just about everything. Not enough to be employed at any map-related job, but 18 years of paying attention, of synthesizing everything I’ve seen and read, has afforded me some perspective.
Enough to call out obvious horseshit when I see it.
The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
Something I often do when reviewing a book is talk about it in terms of the expectations of its potential readers—particularly if readers might come to a book with expectations that the book does not meet, because the book is doing something different. If you’re expecting The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps, written by the art historian Jessica Maier and published last November by the University of Chicago Press, to be basically A History of Rome in 100 Maps, it isn’t: the count is more like three dozen. This doesn’t mean that The Eternal City is a slight book—it most certainly is not, though at 199 pages it’s a bit shorter than, say, A History of America in 100 Maps (272 pages).
But counting maps would miss the difference in Maier’s approach. To invoke xkcd, this is depth-first rather than breadth-first: there are fewer maps here, but they’re discussed in much more depth than the two-page spreads of the hundred-map books, and provided with much more context. This is a history of Rome in maps in which history, Rome and maps all get their proper share of attention.
Continue reading “The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps”
New Exhibition: Mapping the Islamic World
A new online exhibition at Stanford Libraries’ Rumsey Map Center: Mapping the Islamic World: The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires. Curated by guest curator Alexandria Brown-Hejazi, the exhibition, which opened last week, “explores maps of the Islamic World, focusing on the ‘Gunpowder Empires’ of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India. […] A rich cartographic exchange took place between these three empires and European powers, as maps were used to chart their expansive territories, military campaigns, and trade routes.”
Upcoming Workshops
Two workshops/courses coming in June:
Australian author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings will teach a workshop on fantasy mapmaking in June: the focus of Map Making and World Building is “on story and art,” the mapmaking illustrative rather than cartographical, and in general it seems to be about the relationship between map and story. The workshop will take place on 19 June both in-person (at the Queensland Writers Centre in Brisbane) and via livestream; tickets range from A$35 to A$100, depending.
A History of Maps and Mapping, a short introductory online course taught by Katherine Parker as part of the London Rare Books School’s program of summer courses, “will challenge students to destabilize and broaden the traditional definition of ‘map’, and to recognize maps as socially constructed objects that are indicative of the values and biases of their makers and the cultures that created them. Students will learn how to analyse and catalogue maps for a variety of research purposes, and to discuss changes in map technology and style without recourse to a progressive narrative of scientific improvement.” Matthew Edney will supply a guest lecture. The course runs from 29 June to 2 July and costs £100 (student) or £175.
Mapping Partisan Sorting in America
The New York Times maps partisan sorting in America—the tendency for voters to self-select into areas where people think and vote the same way they do—down to the neighbourhood level.
The maps above—and throughout this article—show their estimates of partisanship down to the individual voter, colored by the researchers’ best guess based on public data like demographic information, voter registration and whether voters participated in party primaries.
We can’t know how any individual actually voted. But these maps show how Democrats and Republicans can live in very different places, even within the same city, in ways that go beyond the urban-suburban-rural patterns visible in aggregated election results.
It goes beyond racial, urban vs. suburban vs. rural and house vs. apartment splits, to the point where researchers are wondering whether Americans are “paying attention to the politics of their neighbors” when they decide where to live. This has implications not only in terms of electoral targeting (e.g. gerrymandering, voter suppression), but in terms of basic social cohesion.
The maps are based on research by Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos published earlier this month in Nature Human Behavior.
Previously: Red and Blue vs. Gray and Green.
Edney Reviews ‘When Maps Become the World’
Matthew Edney reviews Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther’s When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a philosophy of science book that engages with maps and representation—with what Winther calls “map thinking.” Edney isn’t convinced by Winther’s approach: “Winther remains committed to outmoded and deeply flawed concepts of the nature of ‘the map’ that, to be honest, call into question the entire project.”
Mapping 500,000 Lives Lost to COVID-19
On February 21 the U.S. reached a grim milestone: half a million deaths due to COVID-19. This NBC News interactive map visualizes the scale of this tragedy with a county-by-county dot map of those deaths, and offers narrative detail in certain places. [Maps Mania]
Why Transit Maps Mislead
RMTransit, a transit enthusiast YouTube channel, looks at some of the shortcomings of transit maps: how maps tend to fail at things like mode (tram vs. subway) or frequency. Very much from a rider perspective rather than from the perspective of map design.
How Black Cartographers Have Mapped Racism in America
Writing at The Conversation, geographers Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood explore African American examples of “counter-mapping,” from maps made by the Black Panthers proposing new police districts to modern interactive maps of lynchings and police violence. “Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.” [Osher]
Previously: ‘Counter-Mapping’ the Amazon.
100 Million Edits to OpenStreetMap
The 100 millionth edit to OpenStreetMap was uploaded today, the OpenStreetMap Blog reports. “This milestone represents the collective contribution of nearly 1 billion features globally in the past 16+ years, by a diverse community of over 1.5 million mappers.”