Month: November 2023

Thoughts on Google Maps’ New Design From a Former Google Maps Designer

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Among the recent updates to Google Maps is a new colour palette, which has been rolling out incrementally to users. Elizabeth Laraki, who worked on the design of Google Maps 15 years ago, has some thoughts.

It seems the goal was to improve usability and make the maps more readable. Admittedly, I do think major roads, traffic, and trails stand out more now. But the colors of water and parks/open spaces blend together. And to me, the palette feels colder and more computer generated. But color choices aside … If the goal was better usability, the team missed a big opportunity: Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map.

[Daring Fireball]

‘Where Comedy Meets Geography’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geographical magazine has a profile of the Map Men—that is, Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, who’ve been posting funny videos on YouTube that explain some cartographical or geographical silliness since 2016, on and off.

‘As little as ten years ago, maps were something that you just had to live with and everybody had an A-to-Z in the car,’ says Jay, who is the main comedic influence behind the channel, having already found success with a series on London’s architecture called Unfinished London. ‘But now that everyone has a sat nav, I think maps have become, for want of a better word, more geeky. You get people who didn’t realise that they were interested in maps or geography until they see an episode of Map Men and they’ll say: “Oh, yeah, maps are my guilty pleasure.” And I don’t think people would have necessarily talked like that about maps ten years ago, because they used to be something that we depended on. And now they have become something that we enjoy.’

(See previous posts.)

A New Edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Product photo for The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 16th editionThe 16th edition of the granddaddy of world atlases, the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, is out this fall. It was published last month in the U.K. (on 12 October) and will ship in North American next month (on 12 December). It comes five years after the publication of the 15th edition (my review of that edition is something I’m still rather proud of). As with everything else, the price has gone up a bit, edition to edition: £175 in the U.K. (up from £150 for the 15th), $260 in the U.S. (up from $200) and $285 in Canada (up from $275).

Some of the changes since that 15th edition are listed on the publisher’s page, and a lot of them deal with updating place names:

  • New country names for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)1 and North Macedonia (previously the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)
  • More than 8000 place name changes with names comprehensively updated in Kazakhstan and Ukraine
  • Addition of Māori names in New Zealand and restored indigenous names in Australia, the most notable being the renaming of Fraser Island in Queensland to its Butchulla name K’gari
  • Administrative boundary updates in Ethiopia, Mali and Kazakhstan
  • Added road, railway and airport infrastructure across the globe including the 4km-long Dardanelles Bridge (Turkey), the Fehmarn Belt road/rail tunnel alignment (Germany/Denmark) and the Sandoy Tunnel (Faroe Islands)

Each round of Times atlases has its own cover design language: from this Comprehensive and next year’s announced Desktop we can see that this round of atlases combines dark relief backgrounds with bright title and spine colours. Neon green is an unexpected choice for the Comprehensive, especially given how restrained the 15th was. I wonder what the bookmark looks like.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The Lost Subways of North America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The Lost Subways of North AmericaThe Lost Subways of North America, in which Jake Berman looks at the successes and failures of 23 North American transit systems, is out now from the University of Chicago Press. The book’s text is accompanied by a hundred or so of Berman’s own maps, and is based on his series of maps of discontinued and proposed subway systems: see the online index for what made it into the book. On his blog, Berman is posting “deleted scenes”: city chapters that were cut from the book for length, like Denver and Portland.

See the Guardian’s interview with Berman (thanks, Michael); the Strong Towns interview focuses specifically on Los Angeles.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

A Stranger Quest: A Documentary About David Rumsey

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map collector David Rumsey—he of the eponymous website and Stanford map center—is the subject of a new documentary directed by Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopolous. A Stranger Quest premieres at the Torino Film Festival later this month and is scheduled for a 2024 release. The trailer, above, doesn’t reveal much. [Kottke]

Earthquake Swarms and an Imminent Eruption in Iceland

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Two maps showing geological deformation in Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland, from the Icelandic Meteorological Office.
Icelandic Meteorological Office

A swarm of thousands of earthquakes have been recorded on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula over the past three weeks. It’s a strong indication that a volcanic eruption is imminent. The town of Grindavík has been evacuated as a result. The Icelandic Meteorological Office has a page with updates and maps of earthquakes and ground deformation from the magmatic intrusion (examples above). A post on Earthquake Insights has more maps, plus geological and historical context.

Map of British English Dialects

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map of British English Dialects by Starkey ComicsStarkey Comics’s Map of British English Dialects took Ryan ages to research. “The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.” The rest of his post is a careful litany of caveats about what constitutes a dialect, whether it’s geographically specific and whether its boundaries can be sharply defined. “So yes, this map may be unsatisfying, arbitrary, and unfinished, and no amount of work on it will really change that. It exists mainly as a testament to the huge dialectal diversity of the English language within the UK, and as a way for me to express my fascination and love for that diversity.” [LanguageHat]

Astronomy Atlas 1899: A New Kickstarter Project

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Banner image for the Astronomy Atlas 1899 Kickstarter project

Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter project, Astronomy Atlas 1899, does for 19th-century astronomy atlases what his previous Geography 1880 project did for school atlases of the era: create an anthology of the best maps, drawings and diagrams from the books available to him.

In my library, in addition to the collection of geographical atlases from the 18th to the 21st century, there is a whole series of old books on astronomy, and of all of them, the ones that attract me the most are those published between 1880 and 1930. This was a time when science was developing at an astonishing rate and astronomy was changing radically. […]

In total there are twelve astronomical atlases in this library, mostly Spanish, French and English, published between 1880 and the early 1930s. From these I have selected the most interesting engravings and drawings, arranged them chronologically and given details of the original source. I have also supplemented many of them with other engravings from the Biblioteca Nacional de España and similar sources.

Digital (€18), softcover (€45) and limited-edition hardcover (€90) versions will be produced.

Mapping North Korea in OpenStreetMap

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mapping North Korea in OpenStreetMap is, by necessity, an exercise in armchair mapping—i.e., drawing maps from aerial imagery and other data sources—because on-the-ground mapping is, to say the least, impractical. French OSM user Koreller has created a North Korea mapping guide for OSM contributors.1 See Koreller’s diary entry about the guide, plus their entry about mapping the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

El Niño and Snowfall in North America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NOAA map showing snowfall during all El Niño winters (January-March) compared to the 1991-2020 average.
NOAA

NOAA’s ENSO blog maps the impact of El Niño on snowfall in North America.

Obviously, snowfall is limited in its southernmost reaches because it needs to be cold enough to snow, so the effects are strongest in the higher and colder elevations of the West. To the north, however, there is a reduction in snowfall (brown shading), especially around the Great Lakes, interior New England, the northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, extending through far western Canada, and over most of Alaska. In fact, El Niño appears to be the great snowfall suppressor over most of North America.

The above map shows the change in snowfall during all El Niño years; additional maps tease out other details (such as the difference in moderate-to-strong El Niños). [CNN]

Estate Sale Map Turns Out to Be Rare 14th-Century Portolan

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A full-sized image of a 14th-century portolan chart on vellum.
Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart, ca. 1360. Vellum, 1141 × 686 mm. Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps.

The Los Angeles Times has the story of a map that turned out to be far older and more valuable than anyone expected. Ann and Gordon Getty paid £56,600 for a portolan chart in 1993, restored it and put it on display in their home. After Ann died in 2020, Alex Clausen of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps paid $239,000 for it at the estate sale. The map was dated to 1500-1525, but Clausen suspected it was older and therefore even more valuable. Hundreds of hours of research and lab tests determined a new date: circa 1360, making it the oldest portolan chart in the U.S. and the fourth oldest portolan chart known overall. As for how much more valuable, Ruderman thinks it’s worth a lot more than $239,000: they’re listing it for $7.5 million. They’ve named it the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart, after the single human figure appearing on the map, and you can see the listing and read the 49-page catalogue (PDF).

Mapping Global Sea Levels at Even Finer Resolution

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Launched in December 2022, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite measures ocean surface topography—i.e., sea surface height. It recently completed its first full 21-day science orbit, which is represented in the above animated globe.

The animation shows sea surface height anomalies around the world: Red and orange indicate ocean heights that were higher than the global mean sea surface height, while blue represents heights lower than the mean. Sea level differences can highlight ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream coming off the U.S. East Coast or the Kuroshio current off the east coast of Japan. Sea surface height can also indicate regions of relatively warmer water—like the eastern part of the equatorial Pacific Ocean during an El Niño—because water expands as it warms.

Sea surface height has been measured by earlier satellites (previously); SWOT does so at a much greater level of detail.

Middle-earth in 3D

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of Middle-earth 3D map showing an oblique view of Gondor and the Bay of Belfalas.
Screenshot

Micah Vander Lugt’s Esri-powered 3D map of Middle-earth is a departure from the usual fantasy-style map in that it uses an elevation layer. It’s a fascinating perspective, and lots of fun to play with. Though not without quibbles: for example, the labels and 3D rendering don’t always agree with each other, and I’m having a hard time imagining either Minas Tirith or Caras Galadhon as 25-30 km across. [Maps Mania]

A Map of New York City Neighbourhoods

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Back in December 2022, the New York Times asked readers to map their neighbourhoods. They got 37,000 responses; combined with feedback from council members, community boards and another survey, the result is a detailed interactive map of New York City neighbourhoods as seen by New Yorkers that the Times is keeping behind its paywall. The accompanying article talking about how the map came to be and what it reveals, is a bit more accessible (see also archive link). [LanguageHat]