The National Library of the Netherlands has an online version of Ortelius’s 16th-century atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. In Dutch only. (From what I understand it’s not the only digitization of this work available online: see the atlas’s Wikipedia page for links to additional sites.) [Maps Mania]
Meanwhile, among the many many Wordle variants and games-inspired-by-Wordle out there is one that map aficionados ought to appreciate: Worldle. Every day you have six chances to guess the name of a country based on an outline map. If you guess wrong, you’re given the distance and direction to the correct answer.
The problem with this is that if you know your geography it’s astonishingly easy, at least in default mode. It’s rare for me to need more than one try—unless, for a totally hypothetical example that has nothing at all to do with one stumper last week, it’s a nondescript atoll in the middle of the ocean, and then it’s as much because you didn’t think it was on the list, like a Scrabble set that unexpectedly includes þ, ð and ß. But you can increase the difficulty level by rotating the country image, or by hiding it: then you have to rely on the distances and directions alone. I should try it that way.
WordTips maps Wordle scores. Using Twitter data—what, you thought someone couldn’t do something with all those Wordle results you keep tweeting out?—the word finding site looks at which countries, U.S. states, and cities are the best (and the worst) at the viral game. The country with the best average scores? Sweden. The U.S. state? North Dakota. The U.S. city? Saint Paul, Minnesota. You know, I’m sensing a trend there. [Toronto Star]
Content warning: Some of these links contain disturbing images: I’ve marked them with a †.
More on the question of whether theatre maps accurately reflect the ground situation. Nathan Ruser’s maps have been used to argue that Russian forces are controlling roads rather than territory, but Ruser complains that his maps are being misinterpreted: they were never meant to show territorial control, just troop movements. See also this Twitter thread from Jennifer Cafarella, in which she explains the methodology and reasoning behind her team’s maps.
3D models of bombing damage.† Satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetric data are used to create 3D models of bombing damage in Ukraine. [Maps Mania]
A map of attacks on civilian targets† with photo and video documentation. [Nataliya Gumenyuk]
Where hot spots are literally hot spots. In a Twitter thread, Sotris Valkaniotis shows how military operations in Ukraine show up in Landsat spectral imagery: weapons fire turns up as hot spots showing “very high temperature in short-wave infrared band.”
A Ukrainian map of alleged Russian casualties† and where they were deployed from. [Michael Weiss]
A map of checkpoint traffic. More than two million Ukrainians have fled the Russian invasion. Overwhelmingly, they’re fleeing westward. This map shows how busy each border checkpoint is: Polish border crossings are extremely congested. [Kyiv Independent]
Meanwhile, Kenneth Field has been working on ways to map Ukraine’s refugees. Here’s his most recent iteration:
Update to my illustrative #Ukraine refugee map.
Adds more displaced grey dots to major populated areas.
Adds same stippled symbology to Russian incursion to indicate fuzziness of invasion (neither lines nor areas).#cartography #StandWithUkraine 💙💛 pic.twitter.com/QOyA8RaRi0
— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) March 8, 2022
Ukraine’s population density. More than 41 million people live in Ukraine. This map from Airwars shows the population density per square kilometre. Which shows how many people in an area are affected by a particular military strike.
Apple says Crimea is Ukrainian. Mashable: “Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute.” Apple had marked Crimea as Russian in 2019, which pissed Ukraine off at the time. [TechCrunch]
Finally, this striking bit of art:
By Ukrainian tattoo artist Eugene Anatsky pic.twitter.com/qVybeGYAuE
— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) March 5, 2022
Areas vs. lines. I’ve seen several reminders that the areas shown in some maps as being under control by Russian forces are not necessarily under Russian control. Since Russian columns have to stick to major roads and cannot, under current conditions, move cross-country, the argument is to visualize Russian incursions as lines rather than areas, as Nathan Ruser does in maps for his Daily Ukraine Brief (above).
The New York Times maps the Russian invasion. This regularly updated New York Times page includes their maps of the on-the-ground situation in Ukraine. Areas rather than lines though.
Where the trains are still running. Ukraine’s rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia has posted a map (above) showing which stations are still operating—at least at that particular moment. [Christopher Miller/ТРУХА]
Captured maps and other documents carried by Russian troops are being posted to Twitter.
Previously: Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Air-Raid Shelters in Kyiv; A Crowdsourced Map of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
My article “Maps in Science Fiction,” which attempts a taxonomy of the maps that appear in science fiction novels, stories and media, has just been published in the February 2022 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Maps are a central part of our experience of the fantasy genre: “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one,” wrote Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland; fantasy maps “are only much noticed when they’re absent,” notes The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It’s easy to forget that maps are also found in science fiction. They don’t turn up as frequently, nor are they expected to, and we don’t talk about them or think about them nearly as often. But they do exist. I’ve been writing about fantasy maps for years, and even I didn’t give science fiction maps the same consideration at least until 2014, when during a presentation about fantasy maps at Readercon, I had to extemporize in response to a question about science fiction maps. My off-the-cuff response led me to look into where and how maps are used in science fiction and from there to write this article on the subject.
This article took a while to come to fruition. I put out a call for examples of science fiction maps and pitched the idea to the NYRSF’s editor back in July 2014—and then life got thoroughly and fundamentally in the way. It was still thoroughly and fundamentally in the way when I finally, finally finished it and sent it off to NYRSF in the summer of 2020. Life was thoroughly and fundamentally in the way at their end, too—thanks, pandemic!—so it’s taken until now to see print at last. I’m glad it has: science fiction maps don’t get a fraction of the attention fantasy maps do, and I think I might have come up with some useful frameworks in this piece.
From the examples explored here, we can discern several functions science fiction maps can perform on behalf of both text and reader. Maps may have a thematic purpose as in the case of maps of Pern or Majipoor in that their style signals a science fantasy environment, the use of fantasy reading protocols, and a text of likely interest to fantasy readers. They may have a storytelling purpose as with the maps from Dune, the Steerswoman series, and the Mars trilogy: the maps separate the known from the unknown, the transformed from the untouched, the colonized from the indigenous. Or they may have a conceptual purpose by giving the reader a big-picture understanding of structures, solar systems, networks, or empires.
I will post the complete text of the article later. In the meantime, if the teasers above have left you unwilling to wait even a little bit, you can buy the NYRSF issue here; it costs just $2.99 in the usual electronic formats.
Update: You can read the article here.
AppleInsider looks at how online maps (Apple Maps, Google Maps), especially their traffic layer, inadvertently revealed Russian troop movements at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The sheer volume of mapping data now available at our fingertips means it was possible for civilians half a world away to see when Russian forces began moving. Specifically, that data pinpointed a traffic jam starting on the Russian side of the border, actively moving into Ukraine in the first few minutes of the Russian and Ukraine conflict.
Just as with any cartography, this information required interpreting. Google Maps did not specifically say that it was troop movements, nor was its satellite imagery up to the minute. During the process of researching this story, we’ve confirmed that Apple Maps presented similar inbound troop movement information—but it wasn’t setting out to do that either.
What these services did, though, was register all of the smartphone users whose driving was slowed or halted by unusual traffic conditions. Wherever the majority of the data came from, it was possible to determine what was happening when coupled with known details of Russian troop locations.
Adam Engst of TidBITS: “I’ve been working with mapping services a lot of late and wanted to share some of my experiences in the hope that they’ll help you boost your mapping game beyond simple navigation.” Mostly focuses on fitness-related mapping, but also on how to correct errors on online maps.
In a Twitter thread, Lisa Charlotte Muth provides a comprehensive list of maps and infographics about the Russian invasion of Ukraine produced by news organizations.
This NASA Earth Observatory video looks at the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier since 1986. Transcript here.
The city of Kyiv has posted a map of public air-raid shelters in the Ukrainian capital, including basements and cellars, metro stations, underground parking, even underpasses. [Politico EU]
John Hardyng’s map of Scotland is now on display at the University of St. Andrews’s Wardlaw Museum. The 15th-century map was the first to show Scotland in any detail; it was included in Hardyng’s 1457 chronicle, in which he hoped to make the case for an English invasion of Scotland. Held by the British Library, the map is being made available via the Library’s Treasures on Tour program. It’s at the Wardlaw Museum until 3 July 2022. More from the University’s press release and the British Library.
The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map “is a crowdsourced effort to map, document and verify information in order to provide reliable information for policymakers and journalists of the on-the-ground and online situation in and around Ukraine. […] The pins on this map represents open source material such as videos, photos and imagery that have been cross-referenced with satellite imagery to determine precise locations of military activity.” It’s produced by the Centre for Information Resilience. [Boing Boing]
If Lego’s 11,695-piece world map was not enough for you—and believe me, I understand—then they have something else for you: a 2,585-piece globe that’s 40 cm (16 inches) tall, comes with glow-in-the-dark labels, and costs US$200/
A new historical study reattributes a rough sketch of treaty lines in what is now Missouri to William Clark (of “Lewis and” fame), implicating the legendary explorer in the dispossession of some 10.5 million acres of land assigned by treaty to indigenous peoples. The article by Cambridge historian Robert Lee, who studies Indigenous dispossession in the 19th century and discovered the map misfiled in another fonds, appears in the latest issue of William and Mary Quarterly. The DOI doesn’t appear to work yet, nor is the article available online at this point, but here’s the abstract and the press release.
