Review: Atlas of Design, Vol. 6

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Late last year I received, as a review copy, the sixth volume of the Atlas of Design. Things being what they are around here, there has been somewhat of a gap between receiving it, reading it, and saying something about it. But it’s worth saying something about that volume now, and the Atlas of Design in general, for at least one small reason I’ll get to in a moment.

I’ve mentioned the Atlas of Design series before, but it’s worth introducing it properly. Published every two years since 2012 by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the Atlas of Design is powered by volunteer editors and contributor submissions. Nobody’s getting paid for working on or appearing in these volumes—though it must be said that many of these maps are commercial ventures (posters available for sale at the mapper’s website) or works for hire (National Geographic and the Washington Post are represented in volume six), so the mapmakers aren’t doing this just for the exposure.

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NOAA’s Aurora Forecasts

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NOAA aurora forecast map
NOAA

It turns out that auroras are a thing you can generate weather maps for. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has this experimental Aurora Dashboard that predicts the visibility of the aurora borealis and australis for the next two nights.

(And space weather is in fact something that NOAA tracks: the term covers the effects of solar phenomena, cosmic rays, the ionosphere—think aurora sunspots, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and their impacts on climate, communications, the power grid, GPS.)

Wildfires in Alberta

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Here are some links to maps and satellite imagery of the wildfires devastating Alberta right now. The Alberta provincial government’s Alberta Wildfire Status Dashboard shows active wildfires and historical data; CBC News has produced four maps that distill and simplify data from that dashboard. NASA Earth Observatory has images of the wildfires from the Terra satellite’s MODIS instrument.

Updated Satellite Imagery of Ukraine Reveals Russian Fortifications, Damage

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Recent satellite imagery reveals the extent of Russian defensive fortifications built in the past few months in occupied territory in anticipation of Ukraine’s spring counteroffensive: see coverage from CNN and Reuters. Meanwhile, Maps Mania reports that Google Maps’ updated satellite imagery of Ukraine shows the damage inflicted by the Russian invasion.

Google Maps as Social Space (and Time Waster)

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Writing for The Atlantic, Will Peischel suggests an alternative to wasting all your time on social media: wasting all your time poking around in Google Maps.

Google Maps’ main purpose is to enable people to get directions and look up businesses. But along the way, it has become a social space too. Sort of. To fill out the world map it created, Google invited people to add snippets to all the digital places. You upload your photos; you leave your reviews; you look at the artifacts others have left behind. The pictures of a restaurant on Google Maps are often a mismatched succession of interior-design shots, flash photos of messy plates, and outdated menus. There’s plenty of detritus too: irrelevant photos, businesses that don’t exist, three-star reviews without an explanation.

The result is random and messy in a way that is different from the rest of the social web. […] But especially as algorithmic content has taken over the web, many of the surprises don’t feel fresh. They are our kind of surprises. Google Maps offers something many other platforms no longer can: a hodgepodge of truly unfamiliar stuff that hasn’t been packaged for your taste or mine. […] Because zooming out and scrolling around are so easy, you can bump into little treasures at every turn that would never land on an Instagram feed.

The Economist’s Interactive History of the Ordnance Survey

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Economist looks at the history of the Ordnance Survey in an interactive feature that shows the progress of the first 19th-century maps across Great Britain. Of course the definitive history of the Survey’s first century, as the Economist article readily allows, is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation (2010), which I reviewed here. [Maps Mania]

Tien Shan and Other Panoramic Maps by Eric Knight

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Eric Knight, “Tien Shan” (2022).

Eric Knight’s amazing panoramic maps aren’t the mountain panoramas you’re used to (if, that is, your point of reference is Berann or Niehues). Knight, who’s produced detailed relief and panoramic maps for National Geographic (see this page for examples of his work) gives us maps of vast regions, viewed in some cases from such a height that the Earth’s curvature is visible: see for example the Alps, the Caucasus, and Tien Shan (above). Available in online zoomable versions and for sale as prints. [Cartoblography]

Lost Mines, Buried Treasure, and a Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A 1952 pictorial map purporting to show the locations of lost mines and sunken treasures in the Americas led L. A. Times reporter Daniel Miller, who acquired a copy of said map a few years ago, down two separate rabbit holes: one in which he unburies the history of the mapmaker, John D. Lawrence, who was colourful in a very California way; the other in which modern-day treasure hunters are prospecting at one of the locations shown on Lawrence’s map: Mount Kokoweef. Miller speculates as to what Lawrence knew about the Kokoweef site; me, I’m always skeptical about reading too much into maps like this, which are often retellings of retellings of stories. Still a fascinating story.

Poems on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Leventhal Map Center looks at poems on maps. Not about maps, on maps. “It just so happens that many of the maps in our collection have poems inscribed on them, in legends, around borders, and hidden away in overlooked corners. We find them primarily on pictorial maps, and the poems are mainly by men from the 20th century literary canon, but the maps they are on cover a wide geographic range.”

Historical Highway Maps of Wisconsin

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Wisconsin Official State Highway Map (1953)
Wisconsin Official State Highway Map (1953). Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation has released scans of every edition of its official state highway map back to 1918.1 Available for download at that link. Also available for download: this 12-page guide discussing the evolution of the state’s highway map (PDF). It covers all sorts of paratextual things such as safety messaging, the governor’s welcome message, tourism and slogans in addition to the development of the map itself. Well worth a read.

The most recent map available at the moment is the 2019-2020 edition; a 2023 edition of the map is at the printer’s and will be released this summer.

Previously: Historical Highway Maps of Manitoba.

The Rand McNally Road Atlas at 100

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Rand McNally Road Atlas: 100th Anniversary (cover and sample pages)I spent an astonishing amount of my childhood just staring at an out-of-date copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas. I suspect not a few of you did the same. The Atlas is still being published; the company argues that they provide a better understanding of route options (it gives the big picture to a fault) and serve as a backup when GPS or cell service fails. In fact, a special 100th anniversary edition of the Atlas is being published next month. It including some retrospective features looking back at its 100 years of publication and comes in the usual formats: standard, large scale (more pages) and easy to read (less detail). Not nearly as nostalgic as that retrospective book of atlas covers that came out in 2018, but then it’s just a collector’s edition of a working atlas.

Pre-order links:

The Moon in LEGO

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A poster map of the Moon rendered in LEGO by Marc Sloan.
Marc Sloan (LEGO Ideas)

On the LEGO Ideas website, user-submitted projects that reach the 10,000-supporter level are evaluated by LEGO to determine whether it can become a shipping product. Which is to say that Marc Sloan’s 2,360-piece “The Moon: Earth’s Companion,” a Moon map poster rendered in LEGO, stands at least some chance of being something one could buy at some point. [Universe Today]