California Wildfire Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
San Francisco Chronicle (screenshot)

The San Francisco Chronicle’s 2018 California Fire Tracker is an interactive map of ongoing and contained wildfires—notably, at this moment, the Camp and Woolsey fires. It includes fire perimeter and air quality data. (Note: it’s glitchy on desktop Safari.)

Two Esri maps: a general wildfire map and a map of smoke from wildfires [Maps Mania]. Add to that a map of field damage reports in the area hit by the Camp Fire [Maps Mania].

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has produced a map of the damage from the Camp Fire based on satellite radar images. NASA Earth Observatory has maps and animations showing the impact of the Camp Fire on air quality and satellite images of the Woolsey Fire burn scar.

NOAA

The New York Times has a map tracking air quality in California. Smoke from the fires has reached the east coast: an outcome predicted by atmospheric models (see above map).

This interactive map from NBC News that superimposes the Camp Fire on any location to help people outside California get a sense of how big these fires are. [Maps Mania]

How America Mapped Its Meals

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A Fine and Fertile Country: How America Mapped Its Meals, an exhibition at the Harvard Map Collection, runs through 1 March 2019. “Harvard’s maps of American agriculture, ranging from the colonial period to current GIS data, demonstrate how food production has been a matter of concern ever since the first colonists arrived. The history of finding and farming food in the United States is a story of culture and convenience, capitalism and cattle drives. Academic arguments aside, once you see what the maps will show you, you might never look at apples and potatoes the same way.” No online version yet.

Antarctica at Eight-Metre Resolution

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (map poster)

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica is a terrain map of nearly the entire continent at eight-metre resolution, assembled from observations from polar-orbiting satellites (mostly in 2015 and 2016). Version 1 covers 98 percent of Antarctica, and observations are ongoing. Notably, each grid point is timestamped, which will allow researchers to track changes over time (useful when your continent is melting). Raw data is available for download, as are map posters; the data is also available via web apps. [Geographical]

Where Apple Maps and Google Street View Will Be Driving (or Walking) Next

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Apple now has a fleet of cars collecting data for Apple Maps. Since they’ve been making a point about consumer privacy lately, this page lists where their cars are going to be in the coming weeks. (AppleInsider notes that some of that data collection is pedestrian-based.) It turns out Google has a page for Street View data collection that includes similar information, though it’s far less granular: windows of several months, whereas Apple tells you where it’ll be within a two-week timeframe.

Earth Puzzle

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Earth Puzzle

This is wild. The Earth Puzzle is a 442-piece jigsaw puzzle with a difference: based on an equal-area icosahedral projection, the puzzle can be built from any starting point, and in any number of configurations: there is no defined centre or edge. One of Nervous System’s infinity puzzles (one for the Moon is also available), it costs $120 and (at the moment) ships in three weeks (so if you’re shopping for the holidays, get on it). All is explained at Nervous System’s blog. [Kenneth Field]

Atlas Obscura Shares Your D&D Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Remember how Atlas Obscura put out a call for Dungeons & Dragons maps? They’ve received a pile of entries and are featuring two dozen of them: “[Y]our D&D maps are more incredible than we could have imagined. Every single one calls out for exploration.” Some of them are familiar in form, others are really out there, which I appreciate.

Previously: Atlas Obscura Wants Your D&D Maps.

Galileo Approved in the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Galileo logoThe FCC has approved the use of the European Galileo satellite navigation system in mobile devices in the United States. Galileo is similar to GPS and the Russian GLONASS, but the satellite constellation won’t be complete until 2020 or so. Even so, devices like recent iPhones (from the 8 and X on) have support built-in. (Many smartphones have had GLONASS support for years.) FCC press release.

A History of America in 100 Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In my review Tuesday of Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library, I spent some time talking about the choices made when assembling a collection of maps. Susan Schulten’s third (solo-authored) book, A History of America in 100 Maps, out now from the University of Chicago Press in the Americas and the British Library in the U.K., also draws upon the British Library’s map collection, particularly in the early chapters. (This may come as a surprise, seeing as it’s a book about America.) In a few instances the same map makes an appearance in both books. But in terms of what the two books do with the maps, their approaches are quite different.

Schulten, a history professor at the University of Denver, is the author of The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). These are social histories of maps and mapmaking, which is very much my kind of thing, and I’ve been meaning to check out Schulten’s (and Martin Brückner’s) work for some time. From what I gather, Schulten’s work focuses on how maps were made and used—the function of maps.

Continue reading “A History of America in 100 Maps” →

Vintage Toronto

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Vintage Road Atlas (detail)

It looks like every map style is doomed to be replicated in ArcGIS Pro. See, for example, Warren Davidson’s Vintage Road Atlas: which renders Toronto and its surrounding area in the style of a 1950s tourist map. It’s double-sided and is designed to be folded (which is to say that there are some upside-down bits). The ArcGIS Pro style—which is called Are We There Yet? and can be downloaded here—even simulates the creases and weathering of an old folded map, though it does so a little too regularly if you look closely. (Also there are some inconsistencies in road lines and highway markers: the map is prisoner of its data.)

Previously: Mapping with Style; Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS.

Restoring a 150-Foot Map of Australia in the English Countryside

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

During World War I, Australian troops staying at nearby Hurdcott Camp carved a gigantic map of Australia into a Wiltshire hillside. Chalk gravel was used to fill shallow trenches to create an outline map some 150 feet wide with 18-foot-tall letters. Since then, despite a restoration in the 1950s and its designation as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the map has faded, but for the past four years the Map of Australia Trust has been working on restoring the map. It was finished in time for Armistice Day. More from BBC News (video) and Historic England. [Jonathan Potter]

Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every year, at about this time of year, gorgeous hardcover collections of maps start appearing in bookstores. The timing is not coincidental: map aficionados need gifts bought for them, after all. But there’s something about these books, usually assembled from a single library’s massive collection, that’s worth thinking about. The British Library, for example, has more than four million maps in its vaults—how does an author preparing a book based on that collection decide which of those maps to include? (Some maps will be no-brainers: they cannot not be included.) And less obviously, but more critically, how do you organize the book, if it has no specific theme or focus? If you’re going to put out a book that says, essentially, “look at all these maps we’ve got locked up here,” you have to decide on some kind of order.

There are several ways to do it: Treasures from the Map Room, Debbie Hall’s 2016 collection of maps from the Bodleian Library (reviewed here), organizes itself by subject, for example. Whereas the book under consideration here, Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library (The British Library, 11 October), curated by the Library’s Tom Harper, organizes its many interesting and beautiful maps by continent. This is exactly the structure of a world atlas, and explains Harper’s choice of title. The chapters on each continent are bookended by chapters on the universe, world maps, seas and oceans, and fantasy worlds; and the continents are deliberately and pointedly arranged in alphabetical order, with Africa leading and Europe last.1

Continue reading “Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library” →

Stanfords Is Moving

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

British map and travel bookstore Stanfords is moving its London store from its venerable Long Acre location, where they’ve been since 1901 (!), to a new building on Mercer Walk, all of 200 metres away. They cite a need for more back-office space for their online business. The new store is officially scheduled to open in January, but the ground floor will be open as a gift boutique later this month. [TimeOut London/MAPS-L]

A 1947 Diagrammatic Map of London’s Trolley Routes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Trolleybus & Tram Routes (1947)

Maps of bus, tram and trolley networks are, I think, more likely to use geographical maps of the city’s road network as their base layer than subway and rail maps. That’s not always the case—nor has it always been the case. Take this 1947 map of London’s trolleybus and tram routes, executed by Fred J. H. Elston. Cameron Booth finds that it has “more in common with modern best practices for transit diagrams than with something that’s now 70 years old.” On the other hand, Ollie O’Brien, writing at Mapping London, thinks that this map proves that “the simplicity of the tube map doesn’t translate very well to London’s complex road network. So perhaps this is why the idea almost didn’t survive for above-ground networks, and London’s more modern bus maps (now discontinued) have always used the actual geographical network.” Christopher Wyatt, sharing the map on Twitter, notes a big, Westminster-shaped hole in the trolley network that matches London’s speed limit map: “It does seem as though there is a historical pattern of aversion to transportation equity from Westminster.”

The First Ordnance Survey Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The first map produced by the Ordnance Survey, their blog reminds us, was this map of Kent. Published in 1801 at the scale of two inches to one mile (1:31,680), it took three years to complete; the OS started in Kent over fears of a French invasion. As such, the map “focused on communication routes and included hill shading to ensure men at arms could interpret the landscape with precision. Over time, this map design became less focused on these elements and was developed to appeal to a much wider audience.”

The definitive history of the early years of the Ordnance Survey is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation, which I reviewed in 2012.