Category: Cartography

When Maps Lie

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Andrew Wiseman’s “When Maps Lie” was posted on CityLab last year, but its importance is evergreen: it’s about map literacy, and how to avoid being fooled by confusing, misleading or simply bad maps. This is very much what Mark Monmonier did in How to Lie with Maps (see my review; Amazon, iBooks); Wiseman updates it for the social media age.

Maps are big these days. Blogs and news sites (including this one) frequently post maps and those maps often go viral—40 maps that explain the world, the favorite TV shows of each U.S. state, and so on. They’re all over Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and news organizations are understandably capitalizing on the power that maps clearly have in digital space: they can visualize a lot of data quickly and effectively. But they can also visualize a lot of data inaccurately and misleadingly.

It’s a must-read. [via]

Women in Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Something worth mentioning on International Women’s Day: the Boston Public Library’s exhibition, Women in Cartography: Five Centuries of Accomplishments, opened last October and runs until 26 March at the Central Library’s Leventhal Map Center. The exhibition can also be viewed online.

A few books about women in cartography:

women-cartography-books

Previously: Two More Map Books; Soundings: A Biography of Marie Tharp; The Urban Legend of Phyllis Pearsall; Phyllis Pearsall.

Maptorian Plus Kickstarter Campaign Launched

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Three years ago Alejandro Polanco (who blogs about maps in Spanish at La Cartoteca) launched Maptorian, a collection of editable vector maps aimed at graphic designers, journalists, teachers, students and others who need to make maps, know how to use applications like Adobe Illustrator but don’t have a GIS background. Now a Kickstarter campaign has launched for the improved-expanded-updated sequel, Maptorian Plus. Read Alejandro’s post (in Spanish).

Null Island

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
zero-zero

Zero degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude is literally nowhere: situated in the middle of the open ocean, off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, the only thing to mark its presence is a weather observation buoy [via]. But it’s also a significant set of coordinates, in that it’s the location you might get in the case of geocoding errors.

Hence the invention of Null Island, an imaginary place to flag geocoding failures. It shows up in version 1.3 of Natural Earth, for example, as an island one square metre in size, but coded so that it would never appear in an actual map. Gary Vicchi explains Null Island in more detail. As is the way of fictional places, Null Island has grown in the imagination: it has its own website, replete with sections on its history, geography, people and economy, and its own flag.

Copper Plates Used to Make Topo Maps on Display

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

msu-copper-plate

The Michigan State University Map Library now has on display three copper plates used to make the 1912 USGS topographic map of the Lansing, Michigan area. “From the 1880s to the 1950s, the U.S. Geological Survey used engraved copper plates in the process of printing topographic and geographic quadrangle maps. Copper alloy engraving plates were inscribed with a mirror image of the points, contour lines, symbols, and text that constitute a topographic map. Each plate was inscribed with details for a single color of ink.” [via]

The End of Maps in Seven Charts

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Here’s a short talk from last year by Washington Post graphics editor Darla Cameron, who points out that many maps actually show population density rather than the data they purport to show. “Just because you have geographic data, that doesn’t mean that a map is a best way to tell the story.” She offers some alternative ways to present information—non-cartographic ways—that in some cases do a better job than a map could. (Heretical, I know.) In a similar vein, read the blog post by Matthew Ericson that she refers to at the end of the talk: “When Maps Shouldn’t Be Maps.” [via]

Weekend Read: Denis Wood

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Inverse has an interview with iconoclastic cartographer Denis Wood, in which he is as thought-provoking as ever (e.g., “Maps are arguments about the way we think the world should be or could be. They are arguments made in graphic form.”). [via]

Not mentioned in the interview—but mentioned in this 2014 Wired piece and in Unmappable, a short documentary about Wood that is currently making the rounds of the film festival circuit—is Wood’s 1996 conviction for sex with a minor and subsequent prison term, a fact that is public but not necessarily talked about openly (despite blogging frequently about his work, I only learned about it through the Wired piece) and makes discussing Wood and his work rather complicated: mention the fact and it overshadows, fail to mention it and it’s conspicuous by its absence. Either way, ignoring Wood is difficult.

Best Maps from the Journal of Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

TJOM_Best_Map_2015Since 2008 the online Journal of Maps has been giving an award to the “best map” published in its virtual pages; 2015’s winner is a map of municipalities in the Czech Republic created by Vít Pászto, Alžběta Brychtová, Pavel Tuček, Lukáš Marek and Jaroslav Burian for their article “Using a fuzzy inference system to delimit rural and urban municipalities in the Czech republic in 2010.” Past winners are available for purchase as prints (of various sizes). [via]

The Journal of Maps launched in 2005. I believe it was open-access at that point; since coming under the umbrella of Taylor & Francis in 2012, it no longer appears to be.

Monmonier on Critical Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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]

Cartographic Design Principles

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.)

Designing Better Maps Reviewed

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

DesigningBetterMaps_lg Gretchen Peterson reviews the second edition of Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (Esri Press, December 2015). “I’d say it’s much better than the previous edition. All the images have been updated and are now in keeping with modern cartography practices. All the typical things that you need to know are covered from fonts and labels to color and layout.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)