For example, the importance of wind. The opening chapter on physical geography includes a map of the average annual wind speed, maps showing the growth in wind turbine installations, and maps of tornado tracks and derecho intensities. It’s one thing to know, vaguely, that Iowa is in the Great Plains tornado belt, something else to see the implications of wind of all kinds in map form. The second chapter looks at Iowa’s history, and from a cartographic perspective is the most interesting, including several historical maps and maps showing the shifting territorial and state boundaries.

If Iowa is associated with anything, it’s agriculture, especially corn; and yes, agriculture gets its chapter, showing the rise and fall of various products—the rise in corn, soybean and hogs, the decline in horses, sheep, oats and wheat. But the following chapter looks at the urban and industrial side of Iowa, and the shift away from agriculture to other sectors. Between the chapters on demographics and political, religious and social patterns, a portrait emerges of a state whose population is aging, urbanizing, less and less foreign-born (once the first wave of settlement passed)—at least insofar as a series of county-level graduated symbol maps can depict it.

In the end, the Atlas of Iowa is a case study in how an interesting story can emerge from fairly ordinary maps. That said, it does seem like this atlas relies a bit too much on symbol and choropleth maps to tell that story, especially past the first couple of chapters, when we get into the demographic and economic nitty-gritty. The quintiles used in the ancestry maps, which are census-district-level choropleths, vary so much from map to map (the top quintile for French ancestry tops out at 8.32 percent and for German at 62.9 percent) that comparison is impossible—could other thematic methods have done the trick? Could the cultural maps have benefited from a more pictorial approach? And the political section is surprisingly limited to voting patterns for presidential elections and the change in congressional district boundaries: no state-level politics or congressional voting patterns.

To be fair, I’m not the target audience for this book. Its choices need to make sense to Iowans, not necessarily me. And no doubt there were space and time constraints on this project: at roughly 200 pages this is not a big book. Wishing it had been even larger or more ambitious—taking up even more time and resources to produce—is not normally the most useful feedback. Being left wanting more is not always a bad thing.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

Atlas of Iowa
by Robert C. Shepard, Patrick Bitterman, J. Clark Archer and Fred M. Shelley. University of Iowa Press, 30 Aug 2024. $40.
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape is the latest exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map and Education Center.

In More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape, we take a look at how questions of social justice and injustice are essential topics to confront when trying to understand the human landscape. These questions must also be at the center of our attention as we challenge ourselves to build better, healthier environments in the future. Through maps as well as photographs, images, and data visualizations, this exhibition encourages you to confront stories about how environmental conditions have sometimes served to worsen inequalities along lines of social division. At the same time, our shared environment offers the possibility to bring people together across differences and the inspiration to forge new kinds of common action.

This is a hybrid physical/digital exhibition that can be visited in person or viewed online. It opened on March 18 and runs until December 28. See the Boston Globe’s coverage.

More on the question of whether theatre maps accurately reflect the ground situation. Nathan Ruser’s maps have been used to argue that Russian forces are controlling roads rather than territory, but Ruser complains that his maps are being misinterpreted: they were never meant to show territorial control, just troop movements. See also this Twitter thread from Jennifer Cafarella, in which she explains the methodology and reasoning behind her team’s maps.

3D models of bombing damage.† Satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetric data are used to create 3D models of bombing damage in Ukraine. [Maps Mania]

A map of attacks on civilian targets† with photo and video documentation. [Nataliya Gumenyuk]

Where hot spots are literally hot spots. In a Twitter thread, Sotris Valkaniotis shows how military operations in Ukraine show up in Landsat spectral imagery: weapons fire turns up as hot spots showing “very high temperature in short-wave infrared band.”

A Ukrainian map of alleged Russian casualties† and where they were deployed from. [Michael Weiss]

A map of checkpoint traffic. More than two million Ukrainians have fled the Russian invasion. Overwhelmingly, they’re fleeing westward. This map shows how busy each border checkpoint is: Polish border crossings are extremely congested. [Kyiv Independent]

Meanwhile, Kenneth Field has been working on ways to map Ukraine’s refugees. Here’s his most recent iteration:

Update to my illustrative #Ukraine refugee map.

Adds more displaced grey dots to major populated areas.

Adds same stippled symbology to Russian incursion to indicate fuzziness of invasion (neither lines nor areas).#cartography #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/QOyA8RaRi0

— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) March 8, 2022

Ukraine’s population density. More than 41 million people live in Ukraine. This map from Airwars shows the population density per square kilometre. Which shows how many people in an area are affected by a particular military strike.

Apple says Crimea is Ukrainian. Mashable: “Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute.” Apple had marked Crimea as Russian in 2019, which pissed Ukraine off at the time. [TechCrunch]

Finally, this striking bit of art:

By Ukrainian tattoo artist Eugene Anatsky pic.twitter.com/qVybeGYAuE

— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) March 5, 2022

At Worlds Revealed, the Library of Congress’s map blog, Tim St. Onge looks at, and provides the background on, a series of six maps prepared by Frederick E. Pierce for a report on living conditions in New York’s tenement housing in 1895, including a stunningly bizarre map of ethnic groups living in the city.

Pierce’s map of nationalities, however, is a more memorable, if confounding, centerpiece. Aiming to convey diversity among immigrant communities in New York, the map depicts the proportion of major “nationalities” in each sanitary district of the city. The result is a dizzying array of zigzag stripes and scattered points. As Pierce writes in his explanatory notes accompanying the Harper’s Weekly publication, the original map was produced in color and adapted to black and white for publication, but the reproduction “is almost as effective and quite as illustrative as the original.” Despite Pierce’s confidence, perhaps the average reader could be forgiven if they find the map to be more difficult to parse. In fact, the map seems to resemble more closely the dazzle camouflage, a design aimed at confusing the observer, used on British and American warships in the first half of the twentieth century.

Census Mapper maps the change in the U.S. population revealed by the 2020 census: the interactive map takes a county-by-county look at population growth (or decline) of the various ethnic/racial groups. [Maps Mania]

Previously: Mapping Racial Population Shifts in the United States.

As part of its extensive coverage of the 2020 census, the Washington Post maps the changes in the U.S.’s ethnic/racial makeup, and where it’s been changing.

Writing at The Conversation, geographers Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood explore African American examples of “counter-mapping,” from maps made by the Black Panthers proposing new police districts to modern interactive maps of lynchings and police violence. “Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.” [Osher]

Previously: ‘Counter-Mapping’ the Amazon.

Last year I told you about Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, a book collecting and analyzing the maps produced by Booth’s block-by-block survey of poverty and the social classes of late 19th-century London. Somehow I missed the fact that there has been an online, interactive version of said maps for several years now. [Open Culture]

Previously: Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps.

Related: Map Books of 2019.

Swiss broadcaster SRF has produced an interactive inequality map of Switzerland showing not only where incomes are high, but also where the income disparities are. In German only. [Maps Mania]

Data.Pour.Paris is a collection of interactive maps about the city of Paris. It’s a lot more interesting—and granular—than it appears at first glance, though. The traffic and real-time metro maps you might expect, but the map of street lights drills down to individual streetlights—and their wattage. Public order complaints are mapped individually, and there’s even a map of the 2018 Paris marathon that tracks the progress of individual runners. They’re the work of French engineer Benjamin Tran Dinh, and they’re neat. They speak as much to the availability of such data as the ability to map it. [Maps Mania]

Previously: Le Grand Paris en Cartes.

Update: The above is lacking in some detail; here’s the Toronto Star review to make up for it.

Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens, are able to travel freely between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, many of them sought refuge in Florida, New York and other parts of the U.S. Using anonymized cell phone location data for some 500,000 smart phones, data analysis firm Teralytics was able to map where Puerto Ricans moved from August 2017 to February 2018. CityLab has the maps and the story: “Between these months, nearly 6 percent of the Puerto Rican population left the island and is still living in the continental U.S. Another 6 percent left between October and September 2017 but returned to the island by February 2018.”

Datawrapper has added population cartograms to its map collections, and in its blog post discusses the advantages and disadvantages of cartograms vs. geographical maps, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of some of the different types of cartograms. Turns out that cartograms are kind of like map projections: each has its pros and cons; each is better suited to some uses than to others. [Caitlin Dempsey]

Maarten Lambrechts discusses how to make a dot density population map, in technical detail. He uses QGIS to process data for his home country of Belgium. The map above is one result (he also zoomed in on Brussels).

NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) has produced a population estimation service “for estimating population totals and related statistics within a user-defined region.” Basically, it provides a population estimate for an area drawn on a map. Available as data via map and GIS clients, it’s also accessible via a web app. I’ve noodled about with it; its population estimates are generally not insane. [Kottke]

One of the proposals in the new draft London Plan is to prohibit new fast food establishments within 400 metres of an existing school as a means of combatting childhood obesity.¹ This is going over about as well as you’d think. Dan Cookson has mapped the locations of London’s fast food establishments and the 400-metre exclusion zones around each school; his map suggests a problem: there would be few places in the city able to host a new fast food joint.

Related, via Maps Mania: the Guardian’s interactive map of fast food shops in England.

It’s in French, and the accompanying text is weighted toward Quebec examples, but Le Devoir’s interactive map showing neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood median income levels, based on recent census data, and how they relate to the national average is worth looking at even so. [Nathaniel Kelso]

It’s an even busier month than I thought for map book publishing. In addition to the eight books I told you about earlier this month, plus the two new editions of the Times Mini and Reference atlases, here are three more map-related books that were published this month:

1. Atlas of Nebraska by J. Clark Archer et al. (Bison Books). “Far more than simply the geography of Nebraska, this atlas explores a myriad of subjects from Native Americans to settlement patterns, agricultural ventures to employment, and voting records to crime rates.” [Amazon]
2. Bermuda Maps by Jonathan Land Evans (National Museum of Bermuda Press), a look at Bermuda’s cartographic history back to the 1600s. Available directly from the National Museum of Bermuda; I’m not sure where to get it off-island.
3. Explorer’s Atlas: For the Incurably Curious by Piotr Wilkowiecki and Michał Gaszyński (HarperCollins UK). Illustrated large-format book full of factoids. There’s an accompanying wall map. Published in the U.K.; available elsewhere through resellers. [Amazon UK]

Previously: New Map Books for October 2017; New Editions of Two Smaller Times Atlases (One Very Small Indeed).

Update (30 Oct.): Jonathan Land Evans writes with information on overseas orders for his book, Bermuda Maps: “The most direct way by which people overseas may order copies is by e-mailing bookmart@psl.bm, as the museum now uses The Bookmart bookstore in Bermuda for all order-fulfillment involving shipping to addresses outside Bermuda. The hardback book is a large one, handsomely illustrated in colour, and costs $65 plus postage.”

The Conversation has a piece on how indigenous peoples in the Amazon are using “counter-mapping” to reclaim not only their ancestral lands, but as a way to counter the colonial process of mapmaking itself.

Maps have always been part of the imposition of power over colonised peoples. While map-making might be thought of as “objective”, it is fundamentally political, a necessary part of controlling a territory. Maps inscribe borders, which are then used to include some and exclude others.

During a late 19th-century rubber boom, Amazonia became increasingly well mapped out as the young nations of Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia vied for territorial control. The rights and interests of Amazonian peoples were never included in this process and they would be continually denied rights, recognition and citizenship from these nations until the 1980s and 1990s. Even following legal recognition, their territorial rights—critical for their continued existence—are still often ignored in practice.

These marginalised people are now working together to reclaim the process of mapping itself. In the central Brazilian Amazon there has been a recent flurry of “counter-mapping”, used by forest peoples to contest the very state maps that initially failed to recognise their ancestral territorial rights.

[via]

Along with Regions and Seasons (previously), the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is hosting another exhibition, Who We Are: Boston Immigration Then and Now, which runs until 26 August. “This exhibition compares the landscape of today’s ‘new’ Boston with that of over 100 years ago. The maps and graphics on display here show where Boston’s foreign-born residents originate from, and where newer immigrant groups have settled, while celebrating who we are, and the vibrant diversity that is Boston.” Text is in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Vietnamese.

Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling spoke at the TEDx Exeter conference in April 2016. If you’re familiar with Dorling’s work, it will come as no surprise that he makes extensive use of cartograms to describe the world’s population. Video: TED, YouTube.

Previously: Hennig and Dorling on ‘Seven New Maps of the World’; People and Places.