“The Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration was one of the first and most well-wrought private institutions in aerial photography in the first half of the 20th century. Its short institutional life at Harvard was replete with materials, stories and scandal, and its pieces remain scattered today throughout the Harvard Archives and Libraries system and beyond.” Ana Luiza Nicolae tracks down what records, photos and other materials can still be found on the Harvard campus that once belonged to Alexander H. Rice’s HUIGE, which was not closely affiliated with Harvard’s geography department but was shut down at roughly the same time.
Category: Geography
Geography Awareness Week, GIS Day, and the 2020 U.S. Census
In raising-public-awareness news, the third week of November is Geography Awareness Week, and since 1999 the Wednesday of that week is GIS Day.
For this year’s GIS Day, the Library of Congress is holding a virtual event focusing on the 2020 Census, featuring a keynote by Census Bureau geography chief Deirdre Bishop as well as three technical papers. The program will be (or was, depending on when you read this) streamed on the Library of Congress’s website and on their YouTube channel on Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 1 p.m. EST, and will be available for later viewing.
The Atlas of Unusual Borders
Out today: Zoran Nikolic’s Atlas of Unusual Borders (Collins), a book that “presents unusual borders, enclaves and exclaves, divided or non-existent cities and islands.” Another compendium of geographical curiosities: a genre we’ve seen before (see, for example, the Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas Obscura, the Atlas of Remote Islands, the Atlas of Cursed Places, Beyond the Map or Unruly Places/Off the Map) except this time it’s about borders.
Geographers on Film
The Library of Congress’s Geographers on Film collection is a video archive of interviews with cartographers and geographers conducted during the 1970s and 1980s. About 300 interviews were apparently conducted; 28 are online so far. Interview subjects include Walter Ristow, Arthur Robinson (in 1972 and 1984) and Waldo Tobler, among others.
Waldo R. Tobler, 1930-2018
The influential geographer Waldo R. Tobler died last month at the age of 88. Tobler, who taught at the University of Michigan and UC Santa Barbara, was best known for his First Law of Geography, which he coined in 1970: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” See obituaries from the AAG and UC Santa Barbara.
Update, 8 March: Obituary in the Santa Barbara Noozhawk.
Update, 27 July: Obituary in Cartography and Geographic Information Science.
Alastair Bonnett’s Beyond the Map
Alastair Bonnett’s latest book, Beyond the Map, is out today in the U.K. from Aurum Books. An exploration of “thirty-nine extraordinary places, each of which challenges us to re-imagine the world around us,” including disputed enclaves, emerging islands and other idiosyncracies of geography, Beyond the Map looks like a follow-up to his 2014 book, Off the Map (published in North America as Unruly Places), which I reviewed in February 2015.
Related: Map Books of 2017.
An Economic Geography of the United States
In a paper published in PLOS One, Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae explore whether megaregions—i.e., a region centred on a major metropolitan area—can be determined algorithmically, using commuter flow data. In the end they conclude that “any division of space into unit areas will have to take into account a ‘common sense’ interpretation of the validity and cohesion of the regions resulting from an algorithmic approach. For this reason, the visual heuristic method coupled with the algorithmic method offers a good combination of human interpretation and statistical precision.” In the process, they’ve generated a series of maps that are fascinating on several levels, including a final map of megaregions that combines algorithmic results with visual heuristics (i.e., human judgment). [Atlas Obscura]
Amazon, Race, and Same-Day Delivery
Last month a Bloomberg story looked at the racial implications of Amazon’s same-day delivery service, which, the story demonstrated in a series of maps, tended to exclude predominantly black ZIP codes.
The exclusions were basically driven by the data: where their customers were, driving distance to the nearest fulfillment centre, that sort of thing. But the issue, it seems to me, is that the demographics behind the data are not racially neutral (something that Troy Lambert’s analysis for GIS Lounge, for example, fails to address): Amazon basically failed to ask its data the next question. Be very careful of why your data is the way it is. In the event, Amazon has since announced that excluded neighbourhoods and boroughs in Boston, New York and Chicago will get same-day service.
(Full disclosure: The Map Room is an Amazon associate.)
Six Maps from Connectography
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has an interview with Parag Khanna that features six interesting maps from his book Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (Amazon, iBooks); each map is discussed in some detail. [Cartophilia]
Previously: The U.S. as Seven Mega Regions.
Benjamin Hennig calls on social scientists to “rediscover maps and other forms of geographical visualization”:
It is interesting to consider how far the discipline of human geography appears to have distanced itself from maps over recent times, resulting almost in a form of cartophobia. Several papers over the last years showed a decline in map use and mapping practices in high-profile geographic journals. Cartographic skills as a natural expertise of a geographer seems to have vanished in many places, as have the theoretical and practical elements of geographic data visualization. Do many geographers ‘prefer to write theory rather than employ critical visualizations’, as Perkins (2004: 385) notes?
An Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist
Nick Middleton’s Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist (Macmillan, November 2015), a compendium of countries that fall outside the definition of an independent state for one reason or another, is reviewed in Geographical magazine by Chris Fitch. [via] Amazon U.K. | iBooks