Bellerby & Co., the maker of expensive hand-made globes, is hiring again: this time they’re looking for a graphic designer/cartographer—a skill set more widely available than that for the apprentice globemaker they were looking for last year. They’re also looking for a woodworker to build the wood bases for their globes.
Mapzen Is Shutting Down
Mapzen announced today that they were shutting down at the end of January 2018.
Our hosted APIs and all related support and services will turn off on February 1, 2018. You will not be charged for API usage in December/January. We know this is an inconvenience and have provided a migration guide to similar services for our developer community. Our goal is to help as much as possible to ensure continuity in the services that you have built with us.
Fortunately, the core products of Mapzen are built entirely on open software and data. As a result, there are options to run Mapzen services yourself or to switch to other service providers.
No reason was given for the move.
The Great Map of Movieland
The Great Map of Movieland is a whimsical map that plots 1,800 movie titles on an imaginary terrain. Film genres appear as regions (Adventure Plains, Coming of Age Peninsula) and the films themselves appear as towns, with town size correlating to a film’s importance. (It’s a bit odd to see Star Wars and Star Trek in the Adventure Plains rather than the Sci-Fi Mountains, and I’m not sure what the significance of the highways are, nor why Casablanca and The Return of the King are right next to one another.) The brainchild of 31-year-old French designer David Honnorat, the map was a subject of a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall and is now available, via David’s store, as a 26×36″ print; the price is €40. [Boing Boing]
Debt in America
The Urban Institute’s interactive map of debt in America explores the geography of debt, paying particular attention to medical debt and the racial (white vs. nonwhite) breakdown of debt, down to the county level. [Kottke]
New Jersey Borough to Close Streets to Congestion-Rerouted Traffic
When your navigation app (e.g. Waze) suggests an alternate route to avoid congestion, that has knock-on effects on the communities you’re routed through, particularly when a lot of traffic gets pushed onto quiet residential streets. That’s the situation in Leonia, New Jersey, the New York Times reports, where later this month the police will be closing some 60 streets to non-local traffic in hopes of routing all that Wazer traffic somewhere else. Some of the somewhere elses aren’t happy with this move, naturally. [Engadget]
Number of blog entries posted: 386 (including this one).
Five most popular posts published in 2017: (1) The Medieval Fantasy City Generator (27 Jul); (2) World Life Expectancy (28 Dec); (3) ‘They Just Wanted to Fix Some Things About the State Borders’ (13 Oct); (4) Mapping the August 2017 Solar Eclipse (21 Jul); (5) The Territory Is Not the Map (27 Sep).
Two posts from 2016 that would have made the top five: Streetwise Maps Is Apparently Closing (31 Aug 2016); Mapping Star Trek (15 Sep 2016).
Least popular post published in 2017: Deadline Extended for Corlis Benefideo Award Nominations (4 Apr).
Books reviewed: 5.
Books received in 2017 that are still in my to-review queue: 1.
Bestselling book: Picturing America by Stephen J. Hornsby (my review).
Top five countries by page views: (1) United States; (2) United Kingdom; (3) Canada; (4) Netherlands; (5) Germany.
Countries generating a single page view in all of 2017: Afghanistan, Åland Islands, Angola, Bhutan, Côte d’Ivoire, Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Grenada, Guyana, Liberia, Sint Maarten, Somalia, U.S. Virgin Islands, Vatican City.
A Digital Cartographer Tries Drawing by Hand
Fresh from trying to replicate hand-drawn effects (or even papercut effects) digitally, John M. Nelson has crossed over and begun attempting actual hand-drawn maps. Here he documents how he created a hand-drawn map as a Christmas present; here he gives hillshading by hand a try.
Previously: Five Years of Drought; Cartographers’ Stories; The Earth at Night, Updated.
Early Radar Maps of Antarctica Digitized
Nature: “Glaciologists will soon have a treasure trove of data for exploring how Antarctica’s underbelly has changed over nearly half a century. An international team of researchers has scanned and digitized 2 million records from pioneering aeroplane radar expeditions that criss-crossed the frozen continent in the 1960s and 1970s. […] The digitized data extend the record of changes at the bottom of the ice sheet, such as the formation of channels as Antarctica’s ice flows, by more than two decades.” (Modern radar mapping of Antarctica apparently only began in the 1990s.) [WMS]
U.S. Wildfire Causes, 1980-2016
Jill Hubley has mapped the causes of wildfires in the United States from 1980 to 2016, based on Federal Wildland Fire Occurrence Data. The map toggles between main causes (human and natural) and specific cause; there’s also a chart ranking the causes.
The highest and lowest ranked causes are highlighted when the chart loads. These represent the cumulative ranking across all years. Lightning, a natural cause, often floats to the top, but that’s only because on the human side, the vote is split between more than twenty options. Lightning doesn’t predominate in all states, though. In Alabama, the number one cause is pyromania. In Indiana, it’s brakeshoes. In Minnesota, it’s field burning. There are a couple of overall trends, too. Smoking is going down as a cause, and powerlines are going up.
Canadian Geographic’s (and Chris Brackley’s) Best Maps
Canadian Geographic looks at the best maps it published in 2017. It did the same in 2016 and in 2015. The funny thing about the maps in these year’s-best posts is that they’re all by CG’s in-house cartographer, Chris Brackley, who the RCGS is clearly glad to have on board—and based on what I can see of his work, they should be.
Matthew Cusick Interviewed
I’ve blogged about Matthew Cusick and his art, which is based on collages of old maps, before, but this interview from last September in Dallas Innovates is long, in-depth and offers many insights into the artist and his work. [WMS]
World Life Expectancy
Here’s an animated map showing each country’s average life expectancy at birth for every year since 1960, posted by Reddit user DataFreelancer to the Data Is Beautiful subreddit. [Boing Boing]
#mappingfantasy
Cat Rambo livetweeted some of the good bits from the online class on creating fantasy maps she taught with Alex Acks and Paul Weimer earlier this month (see previous entry), using the #mappingfantasy hashtag. Most of those good bits were common sense worldbuilding advice; by and large the intended audience is authors creating their fantasy worlds. They’re the ones who benefit most from basic geological or geographical advice, such as:
"Even though ice is frozen water, it's still water, and it wants to go downhill." –@katsudonburi #mappingfantasy
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017
Other tips would be familiar to cartography students.
"Every map has a viewpoint, whether or not you're explicitly telling the reader that." @PrinceJvstin #mappingfantasy
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017
Here’s a point that makes sense from a worldbuilding perspective, but it has led to the cliché that every point on the map has to be visited:
Your maps should show the areas and features that are relevant to your story. If it's important to the narrative, it should appear on the map. @PrinceJvstin #mappingfantasy
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) December 16, 2017
On the other hand, there were some subversive bits that are so prosaic and pregnant with meaning that I’d love to know the context.
Examples of Multivariate Maps
Jim Vallandingham looks at multivariate maps:
There are many types of maps that are used to display data. Choropleths and Cartograms provide two great examples. I gave a talk, long long ago, about some of these map varieties.
Most of these more common map types focus on a particular variable that is displayed. But what if you have multiple variables that you would like to present on a map at the same time?
Here is my attempt to collect examples of multivariate maps I’ve found and organize them into a loose categorization. Follow along, or dive into the references, to spur on your own investigations and inspirations!
Jim’s examples of maps that display more than one variable include 3D maps, multicolour choropleth maps, multiple small maps, and embedded charts and symbols. Useful and enlightening.
Hurricanes and Aerosols
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center produced this visualization, based on computer modelling and data from Earth observing satellites, tracking how hurricanes transport sea salt, dust, and smoke across the globe.
During the 2017 hurricane season, the storms are visible because of the sea salt that is captured by the storms. Strong winds at the surface lift the sea salt into the atmosphere and the particles are incorporated into the storm. Hurricane Irma is the first big storm that spawns off the coast of Africa. As the storm spins up, the Saharan dust is absorbed in cloud droplets and washed out of the storm as rain. This process happens with most of the storms, except for Hurricane Ophelia. Forming more northward than most storms, Ophelia traveled to the east picking up dust from the Sahara and smoke from large fires in Portugal. Retaining its tropical storm state farther northward than any system in the Atlantic, Ophelia carried the smoke and dust into Ireland and the UK.
Video at the link, or here’s the YouTube version. [APOD/Kottke]