Spanning one-ninth of the earth's circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents. Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.
For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
posted by Blasdelb
on May 11, 2012 -
57 comments
Harold Cooper’s
Extend New York takes New York City to extremes, by extrapolating every street and avenue of the Manhattan grid to whole planet. What subway line stops at your front door, wherever you are? Why do all Avenues terminate in
Shaytankuduk?
posted by migurski
on Nov 14, 2011 -
19 comments
Jerry's Map: a short film about the fictional world of Jerry Gretzinger, which he has been building for decades through a process of procedural cartography.
His website.
posted by avocet
on Aug 24, 2011 -
20 comments
Comic Book Cartography is more than
maps of
make-believe lands. It also covers
cutaways ga-
lore,
robot schematics, and
diagrams of
Batman's utility belt. In the same vein, there was The Marvel Atlas Project (M.A.P.), and though it is now offline,
some pictures have survived. There is also the
two-
part Marvel Atlas, a subset of the
Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The
Atlast of the DC Universe is limited to Earth, (sourced from
the DC Heros RPG book and
Secret Files & Origins Guide to the DC Universe 2000), and
Mapping Gotham is a single blog post which collects some maps from Batman's world, as found from a variety of sources.
The Map Room collected a few more, some which
require some
digging into
the archives. [
more,
previously]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 15, 2010 -
28 comments
Powhatan's Mantle was the emblem of kingship worn by Wahunsenacawh, also known as Chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas. A deerskin cloak ornamented with shell beadwork, it may at first appear to be only clothing but in fact it is also a map of the Powhatan Confederacy, which ruled most of eastern Virginia when the English first settled there. The mantle was acquired by one of the
John Tradescants whose
collection was the foundation of Oxford University's Ashmolean Collection and the mantle resides there
still today. The
first linked article is a fascination article about the mantle as well as a gallery of images of and related to Powhatan's Mantle.
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 12, 2009 -
5 comments
a Google Maps view of NYC, centered on Central Park Google Maps has started displaying subway stops (with the names of the lines that serve each each stop) in New York City. Clearly this is a work in progress (full building outlines are available only in some parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and some subway stops currently list only one of the multiple trains that serve the stop). Still, this is excellent news not only for natives but also for tourists (whose only subway-map reference may be the significantly, sometimes radically "not to scale" version put out by the MTA).
posted by allterrainbrain
on Feb 9, 2007 -
46 comments
A9 Maps now combines Amazon's BlockView images in another ajax map interface (with the maps by Mapquest, interestingly). Amazon has been driving around major cities taking photos of each block and now as you browse the map, street-level images come up alongside. The interface isn't quite intuitive, but it is nice to see the
idea coming together.
posted by pithy comment
on May 16, 2006 -
17 comments
Mappr demonstrates the potential of open web APIs by plotting recently uploaded
Flickr photos onto their locations using an interactive map of the US.
Map24 mixes Mapquest and
Keyhole (previously discussed
here) by doing realtime zooming on your driving directions; good for not losing context on those tricky merges.
The National Map lets you see overlaid info from the US government's geologic surveys. What are some of the best designed interactive map sites?
posted by acid freaking on the kitty
on Jan 12, 2005 -
19 comments
Piri Reis Map I am a sucker for those books that hypothesize that Earth was visited by extra-terrestrials in the distant pass. One artifact that is brought up in nearly all of them is
The Piri Reis Map, a document that seems to be a map includes parts of the world (such as Antarctica's ice-covered mountains) that were thought to be very recent discoveries. But, are they a
hoax?
posted by synecdoche
on Apr 21, 2004 -
14 comments
Finally... something good has come from a newsfilter post! In a trackback to a recent
post on something-or-other (aren't they all the same?) I discovered a gem of a site dedicated to maps.
posted by silusGROK
on Jul 9, 2003 -
11 comments
The ThreeRing Web Mapping project adds a dot to a blank canvas showing your geographic location (or that of your ISP, as best it can guess based on your IP address). They've also got a code snippet to put on your own site that automagically adds your visitors to the map. The US is already clearly defined, Europe is getting there, and Oceania is coming into view. (They've also got one of them
Tag-Board thingies, which is painful to read for any length of time.)
posted by gleuschk
on Apr 5, 2002 -
26 comments
Remember the movie "
The Day After?" Back in the Cold War days, we were all worried about someday being vaporized by a nuclear blast. Well now, in this post-Cold War era you can relive those wonderful memories with PBS'
Nuclear Blast Mapper. I popped in the coordinates for MetaFilter's server location, set the bomb to a 25 megaton blast and
this is the result. Think about that the next time you hear a country gets their first nuclear weapons.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 3, 2000 -
5 comments
![The World [Map] According to America](http://www.deevah.com/america.gif){kind=link}