Bloomberg maps what political ads are talking about in 210 local television markets, and finds some intriguing patterns in terms of what each party chooses to focus on in each local market. [Nathaniel Rakich]
Mapping What Local Campaign Ads Focus On
Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War
Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War is an interactive map of more than 1,000 wartime wrecks along England’s south coast. Like much of the material and personal history of that war, the wreck sites—”which include merchant and naval ships, passenger, troop and hospital ships, ports, wharfs, buildings and foreshore hulks”—are degrading; this is a project designed both to raise awareness and preserve information. Selecting a wreck site brings up a wealth of detail about the ship, its current state, and the circumstances of its loss. More at the project page and from BBC News. The map itself is a basic Mapbox affair, with a layer that only looks vintage (there are motorways). [Kenneth Field]
Scotland: Defending the Nation
In Scotland: Defending the Nation (Birlinn, 4 October), Carolyn Anderson and Christopher Fleet “explore the extraordinarily rich legacy of Scottish military mapping, including fortification plans, reconnaissance mapping, battle plans, plans of military roads and routeways, tactical maps, plans of mines, enemy maps showing targets, as well as plans showing the construction of defences. In addition to plans, elevations and views, they also discuss unrealised proposals and projected schemes. Most of the maps—some of them reproduced in book form for the first time—are visually striking and attractive, and all have been selected for the particular stories they tell about both attacking and defending the country.”
For more on the book, Chris Fleet has a post on the National Library of Scotland’s blog that focuses on maps made by military aggressors; and there’s a page on the NLS website with a sample chapter and images. [WMS]
Along with Manchester: Mapping the City (see previous entry), which came out at the same time, this is the latest in a series of map books from Birlinn, many of which focus on Scotland: see, for example, Scotland: Mapping the Nation (2012), Scotland: Mapping the Islands (2016), The Railway Atlas of Scotland (2015), and books about maps of Edinburgh (2014), Glasgow (2015) and the Clyde River (2017). There’s also a Scottish maps calendar for 2019.
Electing the House of Representatives, 1840-2016
There’s a lot of stuff relevant to our interests on the website of the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and it’s hard to know what to begin with. One of the more recent projects, which CityLab saw fit to link to yesterday, is an interactive map showing elections to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1840 to 2016. It’s the kind of project that the user can get very, very lost in. In addition to the usual map of U.S. congressional districts, the site can also visualize the districts as a dot map to minimize the empty-land-doesn’t-vote problem (they call it a cartogram: it isn’t). There’s also a timeline showing the overall results over time at a glance; selecting a district gives shows how the district voted in past contests as a line graph. In other words: quite a lot of data, economically presented.
An Interactive Map of the Quebec Election Results
CBC News’s interactive map of last month’s provincial election in Quebec gives us a detailed look at who won each poll, and by how much (percentages, not raw numbers), and compares those results with those from the 2014 election. The map highlights where the pockets of support for each of Quebec’s parties can be found; comparing those pockets with the 2014 results is quite revealing. (The 2018 election was a bit of a watershed, as support bled from the established Liberal Party and Parti Québecois to the upstart CAQ, which won, and Québec Solidaire.) Here’s the accompanying story from CBC News.
Previously: Mapping the Quebec Election Results.
What If Only … Voted: 2018 Edition
FiveThirtyEight looks at the polling data for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections and imagines the results for the U.S. House of Representatives if only women, men, nonwhite voters and white voters by education level voted. It’s a thought exercise they’ve indulged in before, with the presidential race in 2016, and it serves to indicate the demographic divide in voting intentions. (Cartographically, the maps suffer from the usual problem of U.S. election maps of congressional districts—large, sparsely populated districts in the middle of the country dominate the map.)
Previously: Trump, Clinton and the Gender Gap; What If Only … Voted?
Joseph E. Schwartzberg, 1928-2018
The History of Cartography Project notes the passing of Joseph E. Schwartzberg, who died on 18 September at the age of 90. A geographer, peace activist and world federalist, he specialized in the cartography of south Asia, editing the 1978 Historical Atlas of South Asia and serving as associate editor for books one and two of the third volume of The History of Cartography, for which he also wrote eleven chapters. Obituary in the Star Tribune.
Rethinking the Cone of Uncertainty
A feature of hurricane maps is the so-called cone of uncertainty, which shows the range of likely paths the hurricane is forecasted to follow. The problem is that the cone of uncertainty is easily misinterpreted by the reader. The MIT Technology Review’s Karen Hao looks at five ways the cone can be misinterpreted, along with some alternative methods of visualizing a hurricane’s projected path. [Gretchen Peterson]
More from (and on) The Writer’s Map
On Monday I received a review copy of The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, a collection of essays edited by Huw Lewis-Jones. It’s out this week from the University of Chicago Press. It’s very much up my alley, relevant to my interests, et cetera, and I’m looking forward to reviewing it, though the to-be-reviewed pile it’s sitting on top of is getting very large.
In the meantime, another book excerpt has been reprinted online: Literary Hub has Lev Grossman’s wide-ranging piece on fantasy maps. It joins the essays by David Mitchell, Frances Hardinge, Robert Macfarlane and Miraphora Mina we’ve seen before. The book isn’t all text, though: as you might expect, there are rather a lot of maps in it. Those maps are the focus of Atlas Obscura’s look at the book.
Previously: David Mitchell on Starting with a Map; Essays on Literary Maps: Treasure Island, Moominland and the Marauder’s Map.
Navigating New York: An Exhibition at the New York Transit Museum
An exhibition at the New York Transit Museum, Navigating New York, got a writeup in Curbed New York. “The exhibit, which has been in the works for about a year, draws heavily on the NYTM’s extensive collection of objects related to the transit system—subway maps, yes, but also cartographic tools, renderings, and other ephemera. There are also items that might be familiar even to those who aren’t transit wonks, like the New Yorker’s 2001 ‘New Yorkistan’ cover by Rick Meyerowitz and Maira Kalman.” Vignelli’s famous 1972 subway map also makes an appearance. The exhibition runs through 9 September 2019; there’s no dedicated web page for it.
Map of Indigenous Canada Accompanies People’s Atlas
The map accompanying the Indigenous People’s Atlas of Canada is a map of Indigenous Canada: as iPolitics’s Anna Desmarais reports, “Dotting the map are the names of Indigenous languages, including Cree and Dene, and the geographical location where each language is spoken. The size of the word, officials said, depends on how big the Indigenous population is in a given region.” Meanwhile, the names and borders of provinces and territories are apparently absent, and the only cities that appear on the map are the ones with substantial Indigenous populations. It sounds marvellous. [WMS]
Previously: The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada.
Mapping Natural Disasters in France
In response to the latest round of flash floods in France, The Local has a piece looking at natural disasters in France that points to a set of interactive maps from France Info (in French; page doesn’t work well in Safari) that show the number of natural disasters, by commune, since 1982, as well as the number of disasters due to flooding and drought. The maps indicate where the disaster hot spots are in France and (to some extent) where they aren’t: only 3.5 percent of French communes have never had a disaster declaration in that period. Sixty percent of the disasters were due to flooding; The Local also points to the Global Flood Map: zooming in sufficiently shows the zones for high and moderate risk of flooding. [Gretchen Peterson]
Equal Earth Gets a Wall Map
It was announced today at NACIS that the Equal Earth projection is now available as a wall map—which is a necessary thing if it’s going to go toe-to-toe with the Peters map. The political wall map is only available as a download (three versions, centred on Africa and Europe, the Americas, or the Pacific): the 19,250 × 10,150-pixel, 350 dpi file results in a 1.4 × 0.74 m (55″ × 29″) print—assuming you have access to a large-format plotter. Not everyone does, so it’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before they have prints available for sale.
The map shows countries and territories in surprising detail (it includes Clipperton, for example); and while it does show disputed regions as such, its choices of boundaries and nomenclature won’t make it many fans in South Korea or India.
Previously: The Equal Earth Projection; Equal Earth Updates; More on Equal Earth.
The BBC on the Ordnance Survey
Speaking of the Ordnance Survey, here’s a potted history of the OS from the BBC’s Bethan Bell. The definitive history, of course, is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation (2010), which I reviewed in 2012, but it only covers the first century or so. Bell’s piece is full of factoids—scattershot, random access—from both the 19th and 20th centuries. [A-Z Maps]
The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book
Today is the publication date for The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book (Trapeze), a collection of map quizzes and puzzles—a “mix of navigational tests, word games, code-crackers, anagrams and mathematical conundrums” contrived by Gareth Moore—based on some 40 Ordnance Survey maps dating as far back as 1801. It’s out in the U.K. only; North Americans will have to try third-party sellers on Amazon (or elsewhere) or order directly from British vendors.