Excellent Twitter thread from Jeannette Ng talking about old maps in the context of fantasy map design. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart: fantasy maps are essentially modern maps whose design language post-dates 16th- or 17th-century mapmakers like Olaus Magnus and Joan Blaeu; Ng talks about what are essentially the non-geographic purposes of old maps, and as I understand things she is entirely correct. Start here and scroll down.
Drawing Maps for your Fantasy World, aka Maps Aren’t Always About Landscape Geography: A thread. pic.twitter.com/1mDrtn6cSK
Atlas of Nebraska by J. Clark Archer et al. (Bison Books). “Far more than simply the geography of Nebraska, this atlas explores a myriad of subjects from Native Americans to settlement patterns, agricultural ventures to employment, and voting records to crime rates.” [Amazon]
Update (30 Oct.): Jonathan Land Evans writes with information on overseas orders for his book, Bermuda Maps: “The most direct way by which people overseas may order copies is by e-mailing bookmart@psl.bm, as the museum now uses The Bookmart bookstore in Bermuda for all order-fulfillment involving shipping to addresses outside Bermuda. The hardback book is a large one, handsomely illustrated in colour, and costs $65 plus postage.”
“Bird’s-eye View of the Eastern Railroad Line to the White Mountains and Mt. Desert.” Boston: Rand Avery Supply Co., 1890. Harvard University Library.
Opening today at Harvard University in front of the Map Collection in Pusey Library and running until 28 February, Look but Don’t Touch: Tactile Illusions on Maps looks at the use of simulated textures in maps.
Beginning particularly in the eighteenth century, philosophers began to debate what role each of our senses has in this experience. For eighteenth-century philosophers, the crucial distinction was between sight and touch. Would we, they asked, be able to experience depth and understand size without our sense of touch? George Berkeley and Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, among others, hypothesized that touch, in fact, was primarily responsible for our experience and understanding of space. All visual knowledge about depth and size, they suggested, derived from tactile experiences. In other words, we needed touch to teach us to see. But what happens to the map if we take seriously this challenge to a visual understanding of space?
All maps in this exhibition toy with the relationship between touch and sight. For some, their interest in touch and sight is ornamental. Either by delighting in the visual illusion of tactility or by referring to a visual cliché, these maps enliven their design—and attract buyers—by appealing to our hands. For others, their interest in touch and sight is about knowledge itself. Either by depicting cartographers’ tools and materials or by tempting us to touch what is not there, these maps play with our sense of what a map is and where it comes from. Paradoxically, they teach us visually about particular places while also questioning the basis for their own visual instruction.
This NOAA article looks at three kinds of imagery provided by the GOES-16 geostationary weather satellite: GeoColor, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (!), and full disk infrared imagery from the Advanced Baseline Imager. GOES-16 launched last November and is currently in the checkout phase before it replaces GOES-13 at 75° west latitude.
On 1 September Michelin announced that it had acquired the assets previously held by Streetwise Maps, in an all-cash deal. Streetwise announced that it was closing last year. Michelin will continue to publish maps under the Streetwise name; their publishing wing already produces a ton of travel guides, restaurant guides and maps (my Michelin map of Paris was essential during my trip there). [MAPS-L]
This seems as good an excuse as any to take a closer look at You Are Here: NYC. Past time, actually, since I’ve had a review copy in my hands for a year now.
Geographical magazine reviewsThe Red Atlas, the survey of Soviet-era topo maps of the world by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent out this month from University of Chicago Press. National Geographic’s All Over the Map blog also has a feature on The Red Atlas. I’ve received my own review copy of The Red Atlas and hope to have a review for you … at some point (I’m rather backlogged).
Audubon Alaska, Ecological Atlas of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas.
Audobon Alaska’s Ecological Atlas of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas maps the environment, biota and wildlife in the three seas surrounding the Bering Strait, as well as the human activity that puts them at risk. The cartography is by Daniel Huffman and not by coincidence excellent. It’s available for download as PDF files, either chapter-by-chapter or a whopping 125-megabyte single download; a print copy costs $125 with shipping and handling. [NACIS]
Hotspots: Conservation Targets. Atlas for the End of the World.
The Atlas for the End of the World collects a series of world maps that measure our planet’s environmental well-being. More specifically, they examine the amount of protected area in our planet’s biological hotspots, especially relative to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2020 conservation targets. Created by landscape architects, the accompanying text (by project lead Richard J. Weller) tends toward the abstruse and verbose, but the maps themselves are quite interesting. (I note that they make extensive use of the Goode homolosine projection, which is refreshing.) [Geo Lounge]
Though I haven’t seen it, the most recent issue of Maps and History reports on the discovery of a fragment of an early portolan chart in the departmental archives of the Vaucluse. The so-called Avignon Chart (Carte d’Avignon)1 dates to around 1300, making it one of the earlier portolan charts known to exist. If you can read French, the Brussels Map Circle’s website has a lengthy article about the chart by Jacques Mille and Paul Fermon that discusses, among other things, the chart’s provenance and how its approximate age was determined. (I don’t know whether this is the same article that appears in Maps and History.) [Tony Campbell]
Carelton University’s library has an online collection of Ottawa transit maps from OC Transpo and its predecessor agencies, dating as far back as 1929 (above). The originals scanned as PDFs, with SHP and KML files if the vectorized transit routes are what you’re really after. [Transit Maps]
Though I haven’t seen it, 