The Map Room

The Return of Paper Maps, Again

Published on 24 January 202325 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

Every so often we see a story about how paper maps are making a comeback. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of paper maps have been going up in recent years—a story that NBC’s Today show picked up yesterday. One of the appeals of paper maps, these stories note, is that they provide context—the “bigger picture,” as the WSJ article puts it. Something that can be lost when focusing on getting to the destination.

I’m not remotely surprised that paper maps refuse to go away, that they keep showing signs of renewed life. I have a thought or two about this, and about the perennial question of paper maps in the digital age. There’s a reason this question keeps coming up—which these stories do get at. It’s that every new technology that supplants the old does so imperfectly and incompletely.

Continue reading “The Return of Paper Maps, Again” →

Maps on Stamps

Published on 24 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

Except for a couple of posts here and there, I really haven’t focused on the phenomenon of maps on postage stamps. But it’s very much a thing, and has been for some time: the CartoPhilatelic Society has been around since 1955. And there are a lot of examples of stamps with maps on them: the Society’s checklist has 41,300 entries, and there are 17,906 examples on the searchable database that is Gilad’s Maps on Stamps. Strange Maps gives the subject a proper writeup, grouping stamps by several themes.

The Unreal Ebstorf Map

Published on 24 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

The Ebstorf Map, a 13th-century mappa mundi, was destroyed by bombing during World War II; it survives only as black-and-white photographs and colour facsimiles of the original. Those images were used by the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg to create a digital version in 2008. And now that digital version has been used to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf Map using a video game engine. The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog has the details.

The British Library has collaborated with Escape Studios’ School of Interactive and Real Time to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf map. A team of students and graduates participated in the ‘Escape Pod’ incubator to create a 3D version of the map, using the digital facsimile created by Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.

The interactive map, created in Unreal Engine, has been set in a fictional medieval scriptorium to suggest the tone of the space in which it was created. All aspects of the room were imagined, researched and created by the students at Escape.

The interactive map ties in with the British Library’s ongoing exhibition, Alexander the Great: the Making of a Myth; the map’s 15 clickable points of interest relate to Alexander. Details here.

It sounds like overkill, albeit a fun kind of overkill. It’s a free download, but requires a PC with a graphics card (i.e., no integrated graphics) running Windows 10, so I can’t try it out. But if you can, and want to, you can download it here.

The Rationale Behind Overture

Published on 16 January 20233 February 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

A couple of links regarding the Overture Map Foundation announcement (previously) afford some context and background. James Killick chalks up the decision to launch Overture to a combination of needs to control costs and maintain control while ensuring interoperability: “the reasons for the birth of OMF seem to be valid and defensible.” Meanwhile, the Geomob Podcast interviews geospatial veteran Marc Prioleau, in which (among other things) Marc observes that the companies behind Overture (including Meta, where he’s currently at) and OpenStreetMap are not on the same page: OSM’s focus does not serve the companies’ needs, and changing that focus would harm the OSM community. (Since “why not just use OpenStreetMap?” is a recurring question.)

Update, 3 Feb 2023: Tom Tom is running with Killick’s take.

Imhof’s High School Atlas

Published on 16 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

A relief map of a part of Switzerland. From Eduard Imhof (ed.), Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas, 15th ed. (Zürich, 1969), p. 7. David Rumsey Map Collection. — Eduard Imhof (ed.), *Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas*, 15th ed. (Zürich, 1969), p. 7. David Rumsey Map Collection.

Well, would you look at that. The David Rumsey Map Collection has uploaded a copy of the 1969 edition of the Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas—a Swiss school atlas—edited by none other than Eduard Imhof. From the 1930s through the 1970s Imhof was responsible for Swiss school atlases at both the primary and high school level. And this example is, as you can see, just full of Imhoflichkeit. Just look at it.

The Lake District in Lego

Published on 16 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

BBC News has the story of Jon Tordoff’s 100-square-foot scale model of the Lake District, which he built during lockdown out of LEGO pieces.

New Boston-Focused Map Exhibitions at the Leventhal Center

Published on 13 January 202313 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

Atlas of the city of Boston, Roxbury: plate 14 (1931) — From *Atlas of the City of Boston* (1931). Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Opening today at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases is an exhibition that explores street-level changes to Boston in the period between the Civil War and World War II. Media release.

Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases features rare materials from the BPL’s historic collection of maps and atlases alongside lithographs, photographs, and sketches of familiar local landscapes. Visitors will discover how the atlas collections opens up a world of fascinating stories, with vignettes including the city’s first African Meeting House in the heart of Beacon Hill, landmarks of leisure like the “Derby Racer” and “Giant Safety Thriller” amusement rides in Revere, public health infrastructure on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, and many more.

The in-person exhibition at the BPL’s Central Library opens today; a digital version will follow online. Runs until 19 August 2023. A curatorial introduction will take place next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition, Becoming Boston: Eight Moments in the Geography of a Changing City, also opens today at the Leventhal: “In the eight cases of this exhibition, we follow the changing spatial forms of the place we now call Boston—from before the landscape carried that name all the way through the struggles, clashes, and dreams that continue to reshape the city today.”

See the Leventhal’s exhibitions page and their preview of 2023 events for more details.

New Fantasy Novel: The Map and the Territory

Published on 12 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

I’m always interested in fantasy novels in which maps play a role beyond the endpapers—where maps or mapmakers are a key element of the story. So I’m noting for future reference The Map and the Territory by A. M. Tuomala (Candlemark and Gleam, Dec. 2022), which has a wizard and a cartographer as its protagonists. Nerds of a Feather has a review.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The Overture Map Foundation

Published on 29 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Announced earlier this month, the Overture Map Foundation is an initiative founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta (i.e. Facebook), Microsoft and TomTom to build an ecosystem of interoperable open map data—an ecosystem, note, that does not at the moment include Apple, Esri or Google, so presumably this is a way for smaller owners of map data (at least for TomTom values of smaller) to ~~form Voltron~~ punch above their weight by making it easier to combine and share resources. From the press release:

Multiple datasets reference the same real-world entities using their own conventions and vocabulary, which can make them difficult to combine. Map data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. Open map data can also lack the structure needed to easily build commercial map products and services on top.

Making it easier to combine data—one of Overture’s aims is to create “a common, structured, and documented data schema”—sounds an awful lot like a way to address James Killick’s complaint about the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards (previously). It also sounds like TomTom’s map platform, announced last month, is part of something bigger.

Given the talk about open map data, it’s not surprising that the OpenStreetMap team has some thoughts about the announcement, and about how Overture and OSM might work together in the future.

A Christmas Map Roundup

Published on 24 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Detail from Willem Barentsz, <em>Map of the Polar Regions</em>, 1598, showing a man wearing a red suit in a sleigh being driven by reindeer. — Detail from Willem Barentsz, *Map of the Polar Regions*, 1598. Newberry Library.

The Newberry’s David Weimer explains the presence, in a 1598 map of the Arctic Circle, of a man in a red coat riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Maps Mania links to two Santa trackers: NORAD’s and Google’s.

In a post from last year, James Cheshire notes how Indian and Chinese laws about depicting their contested borders are reflected in Christmas ornaments made in each country. [Mappery]

Projection Connections: A Genealogy of Map Projections

Published on 22 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Projection Connections: a diagram showing the relationships between various map projections by Daniel Huffman — Daniel Huffman

Fresh off of producing a (now sold-out) line of map projection trading cards, Daniel Huffman has produced a 16×24-inch poster showing the surprisingly close and entangled relationships between the various map projections.

I first learned about a couple of these connections several years ago. I don’t quite remember how or where, but I found out that the Mercator projection was equivalent to a Lambert Conformal Conic with the standard parallels set opposite each other across the Equator. And that if you moved both those parallels up to a pole, you got a Stereographic. My mind was suitably blown, and I saved it as a fun fact to share with people. This year, while working on The Projection Collection, I spent a lot of time on daan Strebe’s site looking up details, and I often saw his notes (usually derived from Snyder/Voxland) about how projections were related to each other. I started to realize there were a lot of these connections out there, and I thought it might be fun to diagram them in some way.

The diagram is digital-only (PDF) and donationware.

Field’s Favourites for 2022

Published on 22 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Speaking of end-of-year lists, here’s the 2022 edition of Kenneth Field’s favourite maps of the past year, which he’s been doing for the last decade or so. As usual, there’s a lot of range here.

Previously: Maps at Year’s End.

Map History Books Published in 2022

Published on 22 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Edney lists the books about map history that (to his knowledge) were published in 2022. He’s been compiling such lists since 2017: see also 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Georeferencing Familiar Places

Published on 22 December 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

On the Leventhal Map Center’s website, Ezra Acevedo describes what it’s like to georeference a century-old atlas of your hometown. “Spending many hours poring over maps of such a well known place was really exciting. My knowledge of the town coupled with its resistance to change meant that the historic maps of Ipswich weren’t all that difficult to line up with the modern map. However, I did learn four important lessons while georeferencing my hometown.”