Here’s another, more in-depth look at Null Island, a point at the intersection of the equator and prime meridian that shows up in the event of a geocoding error, this time from the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Lee Hotz. [WMS]
Previously: Null Island.
A schematic map of the Indian Railways network, produced by Arun Ganesh for the Indian Railways Fan Club. The Club has other maps as well. [Maps on the Web]
New World Cartography, a South Carolina firm that produces maps that are produced with a computer but coloured by hand, gets a brief profile in Garden and Gun magazine.
It’s an older map, but one I hadn’t seen before: the USGS’s map of the principal aquifers of the United States. [Christopher Tucker]
Previously: Global Groundwater Map.
On Canada Day, Nick Ross drew a map of Canada to help Americans out:
I drew a map of Canada to help Americans out. HAPPY CANADA DAY pic.twitter.com/nyPHDEr3jx
— Nick Ross (@NickBossRoss) July 1, 2016
On the Fourth of July, Nick Ross drew a map of the U.S. to help Canadians out:
I drew a map of America to help Canadians out. HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! pic.twitter.com/1l5M6Rq9QR
— Nick Ross (@NickBossRoss) July 4, 2016
Cartographer John Nelson, whose relatively new but infrequently updated map blog is Adventures in Mapping, recently posted the above map to Twitter: it shows the intensity and variability of drought in the United States over the past five years. It’s not necessarily an easy map to read at first glance, but it’s striking to look at nonetheless.
During the gold rush, San Francisco was literally built on top of abandoned ships, as its waterfront was extended out into the Bay. The above map, part of the SFgenealogy site’s section on buried ships, shows the position of those ships. More at UpOut. [Michael Kodysz]
This Taipei Times article suggests that some copies of the Ricci map—Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map of the world produced for the Chinese emperor—have been altered, possibly to support (or at least not contradict) the present-day Chinese territorial claim to the Spratly Islands (and the nine-dash line). In particular, the article claims, the James Ford Bell Trust’s copy of the map has been altered:
Part of the legend reading “between the 15th and 42nd parallels” had been erased, with ocean patterns painted over the erasure. […] Whether this is a recent defacement done to obliterate evidence that China’s historical primacy in the South China Sea is a modern fiction, or an ancient one done to eliminate an error, is a subject for further research. […] Nonetheless, several other 16th century copies of the Ricci-Li map exist in Europe, South Korea and Japan, and all display the legend intact.
To be honest, the article isn’t so much making a case as it is casting some aspersions. It has an agenda: to shoot down the argument that China’s claims to the Spratly Islands are supported by the historical record. The Ricci map—like so many other maps caught up in territorial disputes and conspiracy theories—is simply a means to an end. [WMS/Leventhal Map Center]
Spain held elections for its legislature, the Cortes Generales, on Sunday. Spain’s Congress of Deputies is elected via proportional representation, so the constituency map model we’re used to in anglophone countries doesn’t apply. How then are the results mapped? If the interactive maps from El Mundo (see screencap above) and El Diario are any indication, by municipality. El Mundo’s map also allows you to filter by political party and toggle between municipal and provincial results (Senate seats are by province); El Diario’s has some simple demographic filters. [Maps Mania/Maps on the Web]
Google’s low- and medium-resolution satellite imagery has gotten a comprehensive update with new imagery from the Landsat 8 satellite. It’s the first such update to its seamless, cloud-free mosaic in three years. The Atlantic has detailed coverage (that helpfully points out, among other things, that this doesn’t apply to the highest zoom levels: those images come from DigitalGlobe satellites and aerial photography).
The California Hiking Map is a poster-sized (40″×60″) map of California that purports to show all of the state’s hiking trails on a single map. “The trails shown generally include hiking trails, Class 1 bike paths, and fire roads closed to vehicles. This map also highlights select long distance trails and historical trails. Insets were made for some areas that have a high volume of trails in close proximity.” The result of two years work and a Kickstarter campaign, the map costs $20 plus tax and shipping. [Ryan Mik]
Always nice to see a familiar website turn up in book form. This time it’s Atlas Obscura’s turn. Altas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders comes out from Workman Publishing in September but can be pre-ordered now.
See my Map Books of 2016 page for other books of interest coming out later this year (several of which I have added within the last week or so).
Update, 19 September: My review of Atlas Obscura.
As part of an article looking at semi-automatic weapons being sold online, NPR produced the above map, which shows the locations of classified listings on Armslist (a website described as “the Craigslist of guns”) between 12 and 15 June 2016 (i.e., immediately after the Orlando nightclub shooting). About 90 percent of Armslist listings had location data; about one in four of these listings are for semi-automatic weapons. [Maps on the Web]
Previously: In the U.S., Toddlers Shoot People Often Enough That It Can Be Mapped.
Haud Oan is Scottish artist Jane Hunter’s response to the EU referendum results. It’s a textile map of the results, with threads leading off to Europe from pro-EU Scotland; the English threads have been cut.
Previously: Jane Hunter’s Textile Maps.
Maps of the results of the United Kingdom’s referendum on remaining in the European Union show several different ways of presenting the results.
The BBC’s election night map is bare-bones, showing which side won which local authority, but not by how much. Appropriate for the moment, and for finding your locality, but not necessarily very revealing.
The New York Times’s map, another example of the fine work done by their graphics department, is a choropleth map that indicates the margin of victory in each local authority. It shows the intensity of the win by each side. (The Times does something similar with a hexagon grid map.)
But the EU referendum isn’t like a general election, where each electoral district has roughly the same population, and counts the the same in parliament. In this case it’s the raw vote numbers that count, and local districts can vary in size by as much as a couple of orders of magnitude. So the Guardian’s approach (at right), a hexagon grid that combines a choropleth map with a cartogram to show both the margin of victory and the size of the electorate, is probably most fit for purpose in this case.
I’m actively looking for other maps of the EU referendum results. Send me links, and I’ll update this post below.
