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Newberry Library Digitizes Novacco Collection

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Untitled cordiform map in which a world map is placed inside a fool’s cap. 1590. Franco Novacco Map Collection, Newberry Library.
Franco Novacco Map Collection, Newberry Library

The Newberry Library has announced that it has digitized the 754 maps comprising its Franco Novacco Map Collection, which includes Italian maps from the 16th and 17th centuries.

A large portion of the collection includes world maps of all sizes, ranging from functional to more experimental. One 1590 cordiform map, for example, places the heart-shaped world inside of a fool’s cap, resulting in an unsettling visual commentary on previous conceptions of world geography. A 1555 map, alternatively, presents the world in gores, or segmented parts, which can be cut out and pasted onto a sphere to create a globe. This blend of art, science, and history is at the heart of the Franco Novacco Collection. […]

The Newberry Library acquired the Novacco Collection from the Venetian map collector Franco Novacco himself in 1967. Since then, the maps have only been available for viewing on-site in the Newberry’s reading rooms. In early 2022, the Newberry received generous funding from Mr. Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr. and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps to begin digitizing the entirety of the collection.

The Newberry Library is in Chicago.

Point Nemo

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A feature article by Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic’s November 2024 issue [Apple News +] explores the oceanic pole of inaccessibility—the point on the globe furthest from any land. Known as Point Nemo, it’s at a spot in the South Pacific nearly 2,700 km from the nearest island where the weather is beyond fierce, the water so lacking in nutrients it’s a biological desert, and the closest human beings are often the astronauts in the International Space Station, which passes 250 km overhead every day. (That’s not a coincidence, by the way: Point Nemo will eventually be the ISS’s final resting place. The surrounding oceans have become a spaceship graveyard, a preferred target for controlled deorbits, precisely because they’re so far from land.)

The How and Why of Measuring Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Edney poses an interesting question about measuring the physical size—i.e., the length and width—of paper maps: how do we do it, and why are we doing it? “There’s a philosophical question (how do we construe this thing that we need to measure?), the question of precision (how finely do we measure?), and a pragmatic question (what use is to be made of whatever measurements are recorded?), all of which influence the selection of which part(s) of an image are to be measured. Add to that a great deal of historical inconsistency in practice, and the question becomes difficult to answer.”

Hurricane Milton

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Hurricane Milton as seen from the International Space Station on 8 October 2024.
NASA

NASA Earth Observatory mapped the Gulf of Mexico’s above-average sea surface temperatures (6-7 October) and brightness temperature—“which is useful for distinguishing cooler cloud structures (white and purple) from the warmer surface below (yellow and orange)”—as Milton crossed Florida.

CNN maps the impact of Hurricane Milton across Florida.

Riley Walz’s Waffle House Index map: “FEMA officials informally track disaster impact by checking if Waffle House stays open. This site uses bots to check if each store is accepting online orders right now, offering a real-time view of how Hurricane Milton is affecting Florida.” [Maps Mania]

A Moving Border

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot from the Italian Limes website, showing the positions of solar powered GPS sensors on a glacier straddling the Austro-Italian border.
Italian Limes (screenshot)

Part research project, part art installation, the Italian Limes project explored a quirk about the Italian border that frankly boggles my mind a bit. Italy’s alpine frontiers with Switzerland and Austria generally follows the watershed line. Thanks to climate change and shrinking glaciers, that line has been shifting, so Italy entered into agreements with Austria (in 2006) and Switzerland (in 2009) to redefine their borders as moving borders, shifting as the watershed line changes. (This is not something I would have expected: see, for example, U.S. state boundaries remaining where the Mississippi River used to be, rather than its present course). Italy’s official maps are updated every two years. In 2014 and 2016 Italian Limes dropped solar-powered GPS sensors on the surface of a glacier to track the shifts in the border in real time; the accompanying art installations slash exhibitions allowed visitors to plot the border at that moment. A book followed in 2019. [Maps Mania]

Satellite Imagery Before Landsat

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Speaking of historical satellite imagery, Bill Morris went digging for satellite imagery of what preceded Manicouagan Reservoir before it was created in the 1960s by Quebec’s massive hydro dam projects. But since Landsat first launched in 1973, after the dam was completed, what imagery was there? Answer: CIA spy satellite imagery from 1965—when satellites took pictures on film that was then sent back to Earth—that was declassified in 1996. Read more.

The Truth About Harry Beck: A Play About the Tube Map’s Creator

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover image from The Truth About Harry Beck, a play now on at the London Transport Museum. It’s an outline cutout image of Beck with the London Underground map in the back.

The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.

Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.

Some Google Maps Updates

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps imagery updates include improved satellite imagery thanks to an AI model that removes clouds, shadows and haze, plus “one of the biggest updates to Street View yet, with new imagery in almost 80 countries—some of which will have Street View imagery for the very first time.” The web version of Google Earth will be updated with access to more historical imagery and better project and file organization, plus a new abstract basemap layer. [PetaPixel]

Meanwhile, The Verge reports that Google Maps is cracking down on business pages that violate its policy against fake ratings and reviews.

NASA’s More Accurate Eclipse Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A map showing the umbra (the Moon’s central shadow) as it passes over Cleveland at 3:15 p.m. local time during the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse. (NASA SVS/Ernie Wright and Michaela Garrison)
NASA SVS/Ernie Wright and Michaela Garrison

For the 2017 solar eclipse, NASA published eclipse maps that took the irregular umbral shadow of the moon into account: the umbra is neither circular nor oval but irregular—more polygonal—thanks to the uneven topography and elevation of both the moon and the earth. Not accounting for that introduces errors into the map that could make the difference between observing a partial rather than a total eclipse. The process behind those more accurate eclipse maps, which involves computer processing of both lunar and terrestrial elevation models, has now been published in The Astrophysical Journal. [Bad Astronomy]

New Gravity Map of Mars Reveals Subsurface Variations

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Gravity map of Mars. The red circles show prominent volcanoes on Mars and the black circles show impact crates with a diameter larger than a few 100 km. A gravity high signal is located in the volcanic Tharsis Region (the red area in the centre right of the image), which is surrounded by a ring of negative gravity anomaly (shown in blue).
Gravity map of Mars, from Root et al.

A study presented earlier this month at the Europlanet Science Congress maps the variations in Mars’s gravitational field.

Dr Root and colleagues from TU Delft and Utrecht University used tiny deviations in the orbits of satellites to investigate the gravity field of Mars and find clues about the planet’s internal mass distribution. This data was fed into models that use new observations from NASA’s Insight mission on the thickness and flexibility of the martian crust, as well as the dynamics of the planet’s mantle and deep interior, to create a global density map of Mars.

The density map shows that the northern polar features are approximately 300-400 kg/m3 denser than their surroundings. However, the study also revealed new insights into the structures underlying the huge volcanic region of Tharsis Rise, which includes the colossal volcano, Olympus Mons.

Abstract, press release, Universe Today.

Previously: New Gravity Map of Mars.

China’s GPS Shift and Online Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

If the road grid in online maps of China doesn’t line up with the aerial/satellite imagery layer, Anastasia Bizyayeva explains in a Medium post earlier this year, it’s because China’s map data uses a different geodetic datum, GCJ-02, rather than WGS-84. “GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m.” Chinese map companies are obliged to use GCJ-02 so their maps and imagery line up; outside China, companies can choose to use Chinese data and imagery and have alignment artifacts at the Chinese border, or use Chinese data with images aligned with WGS-84 and have the roads appear offset from the imagery. [Kottke]

Atlas of Ungulate Migration

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of the Atlas of Ungulate Migration, showing the migration paths of mule deer in Wyoming.
Screenshot

The U.N. has launched an online Atlas of Ungulate Migration. “Driven by tracking data on ungulate migrations, the Atlas of Ungulate Migration serves as a repository for up-to-date migration maps that can inform conservation planning, infrastructure development and policy making. The maps detail high, medium and low-use migration corridors for a diversity of species, ranging from the iconic Serengeti wildebeest and African elephant, to the saiga of the Central Asian steppe. Most importantly, the maps illustrate where critical migration routes intersect with linear barriers like roads or railways. This atlas represents the best available science for extant migrations, with downloadable maps each accompanied by a factsheet describing the migration in detail, the data analysis, and its specific threats. The atlas is living, and continually updated.” News release.

Two Map Books from the Bodleian

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Images of two books showing their jacket covers: Kris Butler's Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (left) and Debbie Hall's Adventures in Maps (right).

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.

Adventures in Maps by Debbie Hall: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

See also: Map Books of 2024.

New Leventhal Exhibition: Processing Place

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An exhibition exploring the history of computerized mapping, GIS and remote sensing opened at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center last Friday. Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World runs until March 2025.

In the long history of mapmaking, computers are a relatively new development. In some ways, computers have fundamentally changed how cartographers create, interpret, and share spatial data; in others, they simply mark a new chapter in how people have always processed the world. This exhibition features objects from the Leventhal Center’s unique collections in the history of digital mapping to explore how computers and cartographers changed one another, particularly since the 1960s. By comparing maps made with computers to those made before and without them, the exhibition invites us to recognize the impacts of digital mapping for environmental management, law and policy, navigation, national defense, social change, and much more. Visitors will be encouraged to consider how their own understanding of geography might be translated into the encodings and digital representations that are essential to processing place with a computer.

The online version of the exhibition is here.