244 posts tagged with cartography.
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From mental health to minecraft and WTF, plus two more islands.
"This website shows a map of reddit. Each dot is a subreddit." A web page presents a map (Github) of part of the internet. There is, appropriately, a subreddit. [more inside]
City Illustrations
"Papertowns: well-crafted pictorial maps, detailed panoramic cityscapes, broad aerial vistas, intricate bird's-eye views, even full 3D reconstructions both digital and physical. We enjoy anything from the famed citadels of antiquity to the quaint towns of the middle ages and the vibrant metropolises of our time."
Naismith International Park
ESPN NBA Analyst Kirk Goldsberry (previously on MetaFilter) has created a wonderful topographic map of an NBA court (direct image link) that highlights some of the most iconic figures and moments in basketball history. [more inside]
Poems in a Scottish Setting
The Poetry Map of Scotland has more than 350 poems, each linked to a specific place in Scotland. The map is a standard Google map, and you can zoom in and click on the title of poems, which takes you to the poem itself. The map is a project of the Stanza Poetry Festival, and the poems have been submitted by living poets.
Gravity is not uniform
There are 4 different reasons objects fall faster in different places. Bouguer gravity anomaly maps like these show regional gravitational variation. [more inside]
Property of Hess Estate ... has never been dedicated for public purposes
If you've walked past the corner of 7th Avenue South and Christopher Street in New York City, you might have noticed a little triangular mosaic in front of Village Cigars (Google streetview) that reads "Property of Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes ▽". This is the tiny "spite triangle" that marks a century-old grudge against New York City (Mentalfloss). At 500 square inches, it is the smallest piece of private property in the city (Atlas Obscura). Bonus: 10 NYC Streets from the Original Dutch Colonial Street Grid (Untapped Cities).
Choose the center of the universe
Mercator: Extreme, by Drew Roos. “A single map encompassing the entire surface of the Earth, yet containing both human scale and global scale.” [more inside]
interpreting the visual language of cartography
Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Distortion to Deception "Instead of ranking maps on a linear spectrum with “true and objective” on one side, and “false and biased” on the other, Bending Lines instead encourages you to pay attention to the social, cultural, and political context in which every act of communication is situated. Just because every map is distorted in some way or another doesn’t mean that it’s no longer possible to speak about honesty and accuracy. Thinking carefully about motivations, meaning, persuasion, and presentation helps us to construct trust in an informed, critical manner." from the Boston Public Library's Leventhal Map Center
Stuff wot people have made
People keep creating stuff! Get inspiration for your own creations, or simply marvel at the amazing makers. [more inside]
In defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.”
Military Maps, 1532-1815
George III's collection of military maps comprises some 3,000 maps, views and prints ranging from the disposition of Charles V's armies at Vienna in 1532 to the Battle of Waterloo (1815). They are now available online. The index map viewer is here. [Story via The Guardian]
Emma Willard: 'mapping time' in the way that cartography mapped space
The current proliferation of visual information mirrors a similar moment in the early nineteenth century, when the advent of new printing techniques coincided with the rapid expansion of education. Schoolrooms from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi frontier made room for the children of farmers as well as merchants, girls as well as boys. Together, these shifts created a robust and highly competitive market for school materials, including illustrated textbooks, school atlases, and even the new genre of wall maps. No individual exploited this publishing opportunity more than Emma Willard, one of the century’s most influential educators. Emma Willard's Maps of Time (Public Domain Review) [more inside]
Panoramic maps at the Library of Congress
The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict cities and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. The Library of Congress has a large collection of digitized maps, including high resolution scans. You can filter by location, date, subject, etc.
"Hey! You got cartography in my art!" "You got art in my cartography!"
Anton Thomas, an artist and cartographer from New Zealand, has drawn a very big cartoon map of North America. [more inside]
Muddy America: Color Balancing the Election Map
The Trouble with the County Winner Map, and why this Muddy Map is better for determining vote populations and vote margins in the US election.
humans don’t behave based on administrative units
"Even though there are different place associations that probably mean more to you as an individual, such as a neighborhood, street, or the block you live on, the zip code is, in many organizations, the geographic unit of choice. [...] The problem is that zip codes are not a good representation of real human behavior, and when used in data analysis, often mask real, underlying insights, and may ultimately lead to bad outcomes." Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis
cartography is a weapon
"The goal of the MappingBack Network is to provide mapping capacity and support to members of Indigenous communities fighting extractive industries. Mapping has long been used as a tool for colonial dispossession; MappingBack seeks to reverse this by using mapping as a tool to fight back." Using maps as a weapon to resist extractive industries on Indigenous territories [more inside]
Maps of historic public transit systems and their modern equivalents
Artist Jake Berman maps old public transport systems and their modern equivalents, and generates 'swipe' images that allow you to compare them with each other. Jake's web site.
“Where are Hogwarts, Bleak House and the 100 Aker Wood?”
Fake Britain is a map of fictional locations in England, Scotland and Wales by Matt Brown and Rhys B. Davies for the Londonist, featuring places drawn from literature, film and television. Eva Snyder compiled an index [Google Docs].
Emma Willard: Inventing the Map, illustrated with care and charm
Even without further context, we'd find Frances Henshaw's 1823 "Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy" imaginatively and artistically remarkable. But this 14-year-old girl's textually-derived maps and cartographically-arranged texts also provide some of our best direct evidence for the teaching practices of famed women's educational reformer Emma Willard. Willard founded Frances Henshaw's school at a time when geography was taught almost entirely through prose, and there she developed a new, visual and experimental pedagogy. This led her to assert her own impact on spatial and historical understanding in the early American republic unblushingly: "In history," wrote Emma Willard, "I have invented the map." [more inside]
Persuasive Cartography
A collection of maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs - to send or reinforce messages - rather than to communicate objective geographic information. Browse by subject. [more inside]
travels in space, travels in time
Seven Weeks To Venice: Isochronic Maps. Want to find travel times? 24 hrs of traffic data anywhere? The Shape of Transit in Singapore? [more inside]
Made up places and costly mistakes: a history of unfortunate maps
The map just might be the territory
Counter Mapping: “To assume that people would look at the earth only from a vantage point that is above and looking straight down doesn’t consider the humanity of living on the landscape." ... The Zuni maps have a memory, a particular truth. They convey a relationship to place grounded in ancestral knowledge and sustained presence on the land.Modern maps don’t have a memory: ‘More lands have been lost to Native peoples probably through mapping than through physical conflict.’
SpeculationWorld and other photos
Arrested Development: "In his predominately aerial photographs, Daniel Kariko evaluates the landscape of Florida’s many stalled residential developments, most of which were initiated and abandoned in the previous decade’s housing crisis." SpeculationWorld: Topography of Real Estate Crisis in Florida, a photography series. [more inside]
Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica
"The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) provides the first, high resolution (8-meter) terrain map of nearly the entire continent." Check it out online with the REMA Viewer. "If you’re someone that needs glasses to see, it’s a bit like being almost blind and putting on glasses for the first time and seeing 20/20."
New Atlas of (Map) Designs; Vintage City Maps
Incredible new map designs from around the world, in pictures. And interesting vintage city maps from around the world, in pictures: Forbidden City to Convict's Landing maps
The Elsewhere Visitor's Guide, with dark IDM soundtrack by Face Culler
The Elsewhere Visitor's Guide is a service of The Lostlands Travel Council, designed to provide more information about some of the locations in Elsewhere*, with a mood-setting soundtrack of gothic dungeon synth, IDM and breakbeats by Face Culler in 12 tracks on Bandcamp, plus 2 tracks on Soundcloud (Castelo de Marcela and Ferryman Acid (tape)). You can also browse the map and location descriptions on Face Culler's Facebook gallery. [more inside]
An Underground Atlas of the District of Columbia
DC has many tunnels, only some of which are on fire. Using historical maps and the DC Public Library's newspaper archive, local history buff Elliot Carter will take you on a (ongoing) survey of the District's underground domain. [more inside]
The Secret Soviet Map of Seattle
During the Cold War years, the Soviets ran a secret, massive program that produced a million maps of cities and places around the world. They were remarkably accurate and contained information not found on local maps — like the “explosive devices” factory in Ballard.
An island is anything surrounded by difference
Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores (Rodríguez de Montalvo, 1510).European explorers knew California was not an island as early as 1529, so why did they resume depicting it as one on their maps around 1622? [more inside]
Lines of longitude and latitude define and refine my altitude
National Geographic has digitally archived the six-thousand-plus maps they've published over their 130-year history. Although the entire archive isn't available to the public, staff cartographers will be sharing their favorites over various social media outlets. [THANKS JESSAMYN]
Model that dirty water
The Boston Planning and Development Agency has built a 3D online city model that includes every building (and many trees) in the city.
I am the procgen map admirer
I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery. I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored. Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.
Imaginary cities down to the square inch
A Japanese graphic designer has made it his life’s work to design an improbably realistic and detailed map of a city that doesn’t exist. [more inside]
New Orleans, debunked
Cartography is democratizing but not equitable
Who maps the world? Why women cartographers are important.
Google, the ultimate cartographer
Google Maps is Different in Different Countries - especially when it comes to disputed territories.
the notion that they’ve turned the weathermen against us seems unlikely
The BBC is launching a new look for its weather map - and Scots will be happy to know that the map of the UK will now be flat. Says the BBC: With this new modern look, lots more data and the latest in technology and forecasting science, this is the biggest change to BBC Weather, both for UK and international audiences, for more than ten years.
How well do you know the world?
From where the church used to be, 2 blocks south, 1 block east
The London Time Machine
The Morgan Map of 1682 vs today. Compare London of 1682 with aerial imagery from today, street by street. [more inside]
The map is a little smaller...and less chill
Mapzen, providers of open-source cartography/GIS tools, have suddenly announced their shutdown down at the end of the month, and provided a brief guide to migrating to other tools or downloading their code.
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GOOGLE MAPS’S MOAT
How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps? A rather fascinating analysis of Google Maps' present and future, by Justin O’Beirne.
The fabled San Buenaventura river: it must exist because it had to
In 1776, two Franciscan missionaries Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante sought to find a land route between Santa Fe in Nuevo México to Monterey in Alta California. They were part of a ten-man expedition including Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (Meira) acting as the cartographer. On September 13, they encountered a southwest-flowing tributary of the Colorado and named it San Buenaventura after the catholic saint Bonaventure. From there, the initial depiction of the river (large copy) was repeated and warped, extending west to the Pacific Ocean, repeated in various forms up through 1844 (Google books preview). Given the lengthy history of the river's existence on maps, even President Polk was reluctant to let the fabled river disappear. [more inside]
Mapping race and segregation
How Is Digital Mapping Changing The Way We Visualize Racism and Segregation? A new project from the University of Iowa uses interactive maps to show segregation patterns in Washington, D.C., Omaha, and Nashville in the late 19th century. [more inside]
Ain’t nothing more special than… house twins
Ecological Cartography of the Anthropocene
The Atlas for the End of the World is a collection of maps visualizing various global dangers and changes, such as rising sea levels, human displacement from conflict, and deforestation, and related issues such as land use for raising meat, ecotourism, and access to water, also other more abstract matters like biological diversity and the human effect on it. You might want to start by reading the introduction and FAQ before checking out the photos of creatures that have tried to adapt to the changing world and the opening essay, Atlas for the End?, and the concluding one, Atlas for the Beginning.
Staying on top of the -ography in a digital age
It wasn't displayed to the public with its pages open until 2010, but now the 1660 Klencke Atlas - one of the world's largest books, measuring 1.76 m by 2.31 metres when open - has been digitized and is now available for viewing online from the British Library. Watch a timelapse video showing how curators and imaging technicians photographed it (the Klencke Atlas, previously). This is part of the library's ongoing project to catalogue and digitize King George III's topographical collection of over 30,000 maps and views - with the goal of having it available online in 2018. Meanwhile, the library has a parallel project called Transforming Topography underway, which is examining the role of topography in historical scholarship. [more inside]
Trap Streets, Ghost Words, and Mountweazel - see: Fictious entries
Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately fabricated items and listings in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, and other directories. There are terms for specific types of entry, such as trap or paper streets, paper towns and phantom settlements, phantom islands, ghost words (nihilartikel), and specifically, (Lillian Virginia) Mountweazel. Fictitious entries are included either as a humorous hoax or as a copyright trap to reveal subsequent plagiarism or copyright infringement, unlike intentional forgeries or unintentional mistakes. Except, sometimes those fake things are real, in a way. For example, Londonist found some "real" trap streets, and Urban Ghosts Media identified two almost-real phantom settlements.