Northern’s historic network map, whilst representing the sheer size and scale of the train operator’s network, didn’t actually show you where you could travel to and from.
It represented the network as an amorphous blob of interconnected dark blue lines, but did nothing to communicate the intricacies of how to actually get between any two places.
That was our starting point.
How do you represent such a vast network, and make it make sense in a way that customers can quickly and easily understand?
Nick Pannell wants the Ordnance Survey to change the route of the Abbot’s Way path through Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. Pannell says his own research shows that medieval monks took a more northerly route between Buckfast and Tavistock, and that the path shown on OS maps since 1886 is wrong. The OS doesn’t dispute Pannell’s research, but says that the current route existed 130 years before the initial survey, and there are no currently existing paths along Pannell’s preferred route. This seems to be a case of the prescriptive vs. the descriptive: Pannell shows where the path used to be or ought to have been, the OS shows the current reality on the ground. Nor can OS change the map unless, per the article, Historic England changes the official route: it’s not OS’s call to make.
In this video, Paul Whitewick explores the strange case of Elkhams Grave, a name on the map that would normally refer to an old crossroad grave site—only it appears to be nowhere near a crossroad, parish boundary or other burial ground. It’s a place name with no apparent surviving evidence of the place named.
Mark Esper spent one and a half years drawing a map of Great Britain, Ireland and the dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands). He describes how he did it in this blog post. “In its finished form, this map contains over 280 cities, as well as a countless number of castles, ruins, and other buildings scattered over the map. All 21 National Parks are labeled, 12 different languages are present: English, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, French, Auregnais, Serquiais, Cornish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and all major bodies of water are labeled.” He’s selling it as a 24×36-inch print. “In the future, I plan on continuing to draw countries, states, continents and other regions of the world in a similar level of detail.”
Some coverage of two map books published earlier this year by Bodleian Library. First, Atlas Obscura interviews Kris Butler, whose Drink Maps in Victorian Britain looks at how the temperance movement used maps to fight excessive alcohol consumption. They were, apparently, directly inspired by John Snow’s cholera map. From the interview:
Drink maps were specific to targeting the U.K. magistrates, to try to get these lawmakers to stop granting licenses. So it had a really specific legislative, regulatory goal. […] In one case [in 1882, in the borough of Over Darwen in Lancashire, England], after looking at a drink map, the magistrates decided to close half of the places to buy alcohol. Their rationale was, even if we close half of these, you still don’t have to walk more than two minutes to buy another beer, which I just think is the most beautiful rationale I’ve ever read. It was challenged, and it held up on appeal.
Meanwhile, the Bodleian’s own Map Room Blog (no relation) points to Debbie Hall’s Adventures in Maps, a book about maps and travel and exploration. From the book listing: “The twenty intriguing journeys and routes featured in this book range from distances of a few miles to great adventures across land, sea, air and space. Some describe the route that a traveller followed, some are the results of exploration and others were made to show future travellers the way to go, accompanied by useful and sometimes very beautiful maps.” I reviewed Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (also no relation) in 2016.
There’s more than one way to depict data on a map. At the last Esri user conference, Sarah Bell, Kenneth Field and John Nelson demonstrated different ways to map the results of the last U.K. parliamentary election, and how they changed from the previous election. The video of their presentation is attendee-only, but Ken and John have posted about how they each went about their tasks: here’s Ken’s post and here’s John’s; plus, as is his wont, John has posted a video.
North Yorkshire council announced that apostrophes would be removed from street signs to avoid running into problems with geographical systems; as the Grauniad reports, this move has “provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike.” Okay, several things. One, the standard being cited, BS 7666, from what I can gather (I can’t actually find BS 7666 online, just several guides to it), doesn’t ban apostrophes and other punctuation marks, it just deprecates them as a best practice. Two, removing apostrophes breaks Irish names—no O’Reilly Street, for example—and as such in an English context is Not a Good Look. And three, any database that breaks in the presence of an apostrophe is incompetently done. [Brian Timoney]
Starkey Comics’s Map of British English Dialects took Ryan ages to research. “The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.” The rest of his post is a careful litany of caveats about what constitutes a dialect, whether it’s geographically specific and whether its boundaries can be sharply defined. “So yes, this map may be unsatisfying, arbitrary, and unfinished, and no amount of work on it will really change that. It exists mainly as a testament to the huge dialectal diversity of the English language within the UK, and as a way for me to express my fascination and love for that diversity.” [LanguageHat]
Historic England has posted some 3,600 aerial images of England, of a collection totalling more than 20,000, taken during World War II by USAAF reconnaissance aircraft. This was done as part of the crews’ training—their job was to collect aerial photos of Nazi Germany and occupied Europe, but they needed to practise first—and as so often happens in history, information collected for one purpose can pay unexpected and unrelated historical dividends: a wealth of aerial imagery from 1943 and 1944. The images are available via this interactive map. [PetaPixel]
The Economist looks at the history of the Ordnance Survey in an interactive feature that shows the progress of the first 19th-century maps across Great Britain. Of course the definitive history of the Survey’s first century, as the Economist article readily allows, is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation (2010), which I reviewed here. [Maps Mania]
The Ordnance Survey is asking its users to propose new symbols for its paper and digital maps, the Sunday Times reports [paywalled; News+]. “The national mapping agency is suggesting a list of potential updates, such as cafés, dog-waste bins and bicycle repair shops, as well as annotations to alert wheelchair and pushchair users about paths that have stiles. It may also include defibrillators once there is a reliable register.” Symbols were last updated in 2015. The Times article quotes a number of people who point out that the OS map could stand more radical change: among other things, there are still no separate symbols for non-Christian places of worship. See also the Guardian’s coverage.
