The Map Men look at gerrymandering on U.S. electoral district maps. A reasonably comprehensive primer on the subject even if comes from a couple of Brits baffled by the subject. And they finish with a surprisingly sharp point: gerrymanderers wouldn’t know how to draw maps like these if voting intentions weren’t predictable.
Month: August 2024
Online Maps Roundup: August 2024
Apple Maps has launched real-time transit information for Tokyo. Meanwhile, MacRumors takes a look at what’s coming to Apple Maps in iOS 18, with an additional look at the upcoming “search here” function. Google and Waze updates announced at the end of the last month: Google Maps gets easier incident reporting and destination guidance (the building you’re heading to is highlighted on the map); Waze upgrades include new camera alerts, event-based (e.g. concerts and sporting events) traffic notification and reporting, and locked-screen navigation. Also, the Google Maps app now has a simplified tab bar. And they’ve changed the pin design too. What can I say: updates are a little less earth-shattering than they used to be.
A History of the Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration
“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.
Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart
The Library of Congress reports on how its Preservation Research and Testing Division used multispectral imaging to bring out previously illegible place names on a 16th-century portolan chart of the east coast of North America. Initially the PRTD was brought in to confirm that the chart was legit before the Library purchased it (which it did last fall), but the faded iron gall ink in some areas of the map suggested obscured details that further analysis could draw out and place names that could be made legible again. According to the article, this represents the first time the Library has posted an enhanced image of one of their holdings.
‘An Impossibly Heavy, Large Silver Globe’
“Of all the globes in the Geography & Map Division’s collections, there is one that has always caught my eye: an impossibly heavy, large silver globe tucked away in our stacks, that stands without any depiction of the earth’s physical features at all. The large silver orb instead displays only a coordinate system grid composed of unlabeled latitude and longitude lines.” Meagan Snow writes about the unlikeliest of globes in the Library of Congress’s collection: a precisely machined 34-inch blank metal globe. What on earth it was it used for? Answer unclear: “The intended use of the globe is described as ‘for earth study.’”
Geofence Warrants Found Unconstitutional by One U.S. Federal Court
A U.S. federal court has held that geofence warrants are unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, finding that they fit the definition of general warrants that are “categorically prohibited” by that Amendment. EFF, TechCrunch. Geofence warrants, you may recall, require a data provider (usually Google) to identify all users in a given area during a given time period. While ruling them unconstitutional, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal nonetheless allowed evidence collected under a geofence warrant in the case under consideration, citing the good-faith exception, given the novelty of such warrants at the time and the lack of legal guidance available to law enforcement: see the court’s decision.
Geofence warrants are now in something of a grey area: the Fourth Circuit upheld geofence warrants’ legality, at least under certain circumstances, only last month. The two cases may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, but even so the constitutionality of location data searches may take a while (and the Supreme Court, eventually) to sort out.
OpenStreetMap Is 20 Years Old
OpenStreetMap is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. It was originally created in response to restrictive Ordnance Survey licensing in the U.K., in a context that seems unrecognizable today. Founder Steve Coast writes about the anniversary (mirror link). “Allowing volunteers to edit a map in 2004 was simply anathema and bordering on unthinkable. Map data was supposed to be controlled, authorized and carefully managed by a priesthood of managers.”
Tim Walz Is a Huge GIS Nerd
Yesterday, U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Among other things, Walz is a former social studies teacher and early adopter of GIS as a teaching tool, and has nerded out on geography and GIS throughout his political career, both in the U.S. House of Representatives and as governor. Walz even spoke at the 2024 Esri User Conference in San Diego last month (as someone married to a high school teacher, I can say this: he totally talks like a high school teacher). See also this summary of the talk, and Walz’s map nerdery in general, in the Minnesota Reformer.
The Babylonian Map of the World
The British Museum has posted this video about the Babylonian Map of the World, a nearly 3,000-year-old clay tablet inscribed with Akkadian script and a schematic map that is often called the oldest map in the world. The video, part of the Museum’s Curator’s Corner series, focuses on the discovery in 1995 of a missing section of the tablet, and what the inscriptions mean. Here’s the Museum’s collection listing for the tablet.
Previously: An Ancient Map of the Mesopotamian World.
Null Island as Easter Egg
Null Island is an inside joke among cartographers: an imagined island situated at 0° latitude, 0° longitude, where maps suffering from data glitches point themselves. If your map is centred on Null Island, something has gone wrong. So of course mapmakers have been having some fun with it—after all, it’s not something you could stumble across by accident. In a blog post, Alan McConchie of Stamen Maps delves into the lore and history of Null Island and its status as an Easter egg on the Stamen Maps platform, where it takes the shape of the island from the Myst game.
(As an update to my 2016 post on Null Island: Alan reports that the buoy at 0°, 0° has ceased to be. Also, the Null Island website, complete with flag, has moved here.)
The Useless Grandeur of Coronelli’s Great Globes
Constructed in the 1680s for Louis XIV, and measuring nearly four metres in diameter and weighing a couple of tons apiece, Vincenzo Coronelli’s great globes “are a simply amazing celestial and terrestrial pair,” writes Matthew Edney, who saw them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2019. But, he goes on to say,
[T]he globes were effectively useless. Their imposing grandeur made them completely the wrong size to be used effectively. Smaller globes—made with diameters between 0.075–1.7m (3–67″)—could be easily turned to show specific parts of their convex surface. Or, people could enter within much larger globes, called georamas, turning themselves around as necessary to see all parts of the earth on the concave interior surface. Coronelli’s globes were far too large for the former, and far too small for the latter.
This unavoidable reality inverted the usual physical relationship between viewers and globes, undermining the viewer’s usual sense of intellectual domination and converting the globe-viewing experience to one of awe and amazement. As a result, no-one really knew quite what to do with them[.]
Their difficult size and limited utility is why they’ve spent most of their 340-year existence hidden from view, though they’ve been on display since 2005 at the BNF’s François-Mitterrand site (see the above BNF video, in French).