Links

Tien Shan and Other Panoramic Maps by Eric Knight

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Eric Knight, “Tien Shan” (2022).

Eric Knight’s amazing panoramic maps aren’t the mountain panoramas you’re used to (if, that is, your point of reference is Berann or Niehues). Knight, who’s produced detailed relief and panoramic maps for National Geographic (see this page for examples of his work) gives us maps of vast regions, viewed in some cases from such a height that the Earth’s curvature is visible: see for example the Alps, the Caucasus, and Tien Shan (above). Available in online zoomable versions and for sale as prints. [Cartoblography]

Lost Mines, Buried Treasure, and a Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A 1952 pictorial map purporting to show the locations of lost mines and sunken treasures in the Americas led L. A. Times reporter Daniel Miller, who acquired a copy of said map a few years ago, down two separate rabbit holes: one in which he unburies the history of the mapmaker, John D. Lawrence, who was colourful in a very California way; the other in which modern-day treasure hunters are prospecting at one of the locations shown on Lawrence’s map: Mount Kokoweef. Miller speculates as to what Lawrence knew about the Kokoweef site; me, I’m always skeptical about reading too much into maps like this, which are often retellings of retellings of stories. Still a fascinating story.

Poems on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Leventhal Map Center looks at poems on maps. Not about maps, on maps. “It just so happens that many of the maps in our collection have poems inscribed on them, in legends, around borders, and hidden away in overlooked corners. We find them primarily on pictorial maps, and the poems are mainly by men from the 20th century literary canon, but the maps they are on cover a wide geographic range.”

Historical Highway Maps of Wisconsin

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Wisconsin Official State Highway Map (1953)
Wisconsin Official State Highway Map (1953). Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation has released scans of every edition of its official state highway map back to 1918.1 Available for download at that link. Also available for download: this 12-page guide discussing the evolution of the state’s highway map (PDF). It covers all sorts of paratextual things such as safety messaging, the governor’s welcome message, tourism and slogans in addition to the development of the map itself. Well worth a read.

The most recent map available at the moment is the 2019-2020 edition; a 2023 edition of the map is at the printer’s and will be released this summer.

Previously: Historical Highway Maps of Manitoba.

The Rand McNally Road Atlas at 100

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Rand McNally Road Atlas: 100th Anniversary (cover and sample pages)I spent an astonishing amount of my childhood just staring at an out-of-date copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas. I suspect not a few of you did the same. The Atlas is still being published; the company argues that they provide a better understanding of route options (it gives the big picture to a fault) and serve as a backup when GPS or cell service fails. In fact, a special 100th anniversary edition of the Atlas is being published next month. It including some retrospective features looking back at its 100 years of publication and comes in the usual formats: standard, large scale (more pages) and easy to read (less detail). Not nearly as nostalgic as that retrospective book of atlas covers that came out in 2018, but then it’s just a collector’s edition of a working atlas.

Pre-order links:

The Moon in LEGO

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A poster map of the Moon rendered in LEGO by Marc Sloan.
Marc Sloan (LEGO Ideas)

On the LEGO Ideas website, user-submitted projects that reach the 10,000-supporter level are evaluated by LEGO to determine whether it can become a shipping product. Which is to say that Marc Sloan’s 2,360-piece “The Moon: Earth’s Companion,” a Moon map poster rendered in LEGO, stands at least some chance of being something one could buy at some point. [Universe Today]

A Martian Mosaic at Five Metres per Pixel

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Global CTX Mosaic of Mars (screenshot)

The Global CTX Mosaic of Mars, produced by CalTech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization, is a 5.7-terapixel mosaic of the Martian surface at a resolution of five metres per pixel. The mosaic is available in a number of different formats (via ArcGIS Online, KML, shapefiles), as well as via this online viewer; and the Lab is quite transparent about how they constructed it from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera (CTX) data. [Maps Mania/La Cartoteca]

How Google Deals with Fake Content on Google Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In a blog post last Friday, Google offers some detail on how it combats fraudulent user-submitted content on Google Maps. These include fake business profiles, fake reviews, contributed photos with fake phone numbers—it’s basically about business listings. (There was a time, of course, when fake user-submitted content was to the map itself.) They report something like 115 million reviews, 200 million photos and 20 million fake business profiles—no wonder they’re using machine learning to deal with it all. (Compare with Google’s February 2021 post on the same subject: the numbers are up.)

Previously: Millions of Business Listings on Google Maps Are Fake: WSJ; How Many Fake Business Listings Are There on Google Maps?

The Michigan Mitten, Orthorectified

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The lower peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan is often called the mitten, for its resemblance to a human hand, and apparently Michiganders indicate where they’re from by using their hands as a rudimentary map of the state. The upper peninsula too. See Strange Maps. Now John Nelson has taken this entirely too far: he’s made the Michigan hand map geographically accurate.

Some Map How-to Videos

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Most of their videos are a few years old, but I only recently stumbled across the YouTube channel of New World Maps. They have a number of short, practical videos aimed at map buyers and map owners who want to display their maps: tips for framing maps, for flattening maps so they can be framed (above), for dealing with small chips and tears (at least on inexpensive maps), among other subjects. Useful—and not just for maps.

Confused by Cartographic Conventions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Daniel Huffman writes that “there are certain cartographic conventions out there for which I don’t understand the logic.” (Such as that thematic or choropleth maps should be on equal-area projections.) “I do not suggest that these conventions are wrong; only that I lack a clear, intuitive rationale for following them, and so haven’t always incorporated them into my own practice. Maybe you can help explain them, or maybe you’re confused, too.”