The Ancient Earth Globe is a virtual globe that depicts the Earth of the distant past, with continents and oceans rearranged. Created by Ian Webster, it uses map data from the PALEOMAP project. [Strange Maps]
Ancient Earth Globe
Month: October 2020
Seeger Map Company to Close
Angie Cope reports that the Seeger Map Company, the Wisconsin-based publisher of hundreds of city, county and state maps, many for the American Automobile Association, since the 1970s, will be closing down at the end of the year. “At the height of the company’s success in the mid-1990s, they employed 27 people and produced 2 million maps a year.” [MAPS-L]
Anton Thomas’s Next Project: Wild World
Here’s what Anton Thomas, whose pictorial map of North America was released earlier this year, is working on now: Wild World, a pictorial map of the natural world.
While you won’t find cities or borders on this map, you will find geographic labels. This is important. From mountain ranges to deserts, rivers to rainforests, the labels here offer a detailed, accurate outline of Earth’s natural geography.
The hundreds of different animals can evoke a feeling of place like few things can. Paired with the labels, this allows the map to be a powerful resource for learning Earth’s basic geography. While, I hope, drawing attention to the beauty and fragility of the natural world.
As of this month, Thomas has finished North America and has moved on to South America; he expects to be finished by the middle of next year (which is a lot faster than his first map, which took more than five years). The map uses the Natural Earth projection. [Kottke]
Previously: The North American Continent: A Pictorial Map by Anton Thomas; An Update on Anton Thomas’s Map of North America; Preorders Open for Anton Thomas’s North America Map.
Mapbox’s Election Map Contest
Mapbox is holding an election mapping challenge. Entrants are asked to create, using the Mapbox basemap and compatible tools and platforms, “an original, publicly viewable interactive map, map-based data visualization, or application that uses location tools and focuses on an elections-related theme.” Entries are due November 8, and must be accompanied by a public blog post explaining the project.
Previously: Mapbox Elections.
Mapping Climate Change’s Impact on California’s Fire Seasons
ProPublica maps the change in California’s fire seasons. “As California continues battling its worst wildfire season on record, new research shows that fall fire weather days—days with high temperatures, low humidity and high wind speeds—will double in parts of the state by the end of the century and will increase 40% by 2065. […] In the north, a summer fire season has been driven by high temperatures and low humidity. In Southern California, fall fire season is driven by east winds. With climate change, though, both the summer and fall fire seasons have grown longer, and are melting into each other, overlapping in time and space.” [Joshua Stevens]
DuckDuckGo Adds Directions to Its Search Results
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, which added Apple Maps to its search results in early 2019, has taken the next step and added walking and driving directions to those maps. Like the maps, the directions use Apple’s MapKit JS framework. [Daring Fireball]
Simple COVID Maps Show the Growth in the Positivity Rate
Innouveau’s Corona Status Maps are simple yet effective: they show the rate of positive tests at the national, regional, county or city level, depending on the map. They’re animated and have responsive sliders to quickly show how the positivity rate has changed over time; clicking on a region gives a bit more detail as well. With maps of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, the Netherlands plus Germany, Central Europe and Europe, there’s a distinct emphasis in the maps’ focus. [Maps Mania]
Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500
Bookshop
Out tomorrow from Johns Hopkins University Press, Alida C. Metcalf’s Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500 explores how sixteenth-century European maps conceptualized a new, Atlantic-centred world. From the publisher: “Metcalf explains why Renaissance cosmographers first incorporated sailing charts into their maps and began to reject classical models for mapping the world. Combined with the new placement of the Atlantic, the visual imagery on Atlantic maps—which featured decorative compass roses, animals, landscapes, and native peoples—communicated the accessibility of distant places with valuable commodities. Even though individual maps became outdated quickly, Metcalf reveals, new mapmakers copied their imagery, which then repeated on map after map. Individual maps might fall out of date, be lost, discarded, or forgotten, but their geographic and visual design promoted a new way of seeing the world, with an interconnected Atlantic World at its center.” [WMS]
COVID Zones
Rather than applying restrictions across their entire jurisdictions, several authorities are designating zones to target measures to prevent the spread of novel coronavirus where the spread is at its greatest. Maps can quickly indicate not only where COVID is at its worst, but also where restrictions have been put into place. Two examples: New York City (above left) and the province of Quebec (above right). New York’s map is interactive and has an address search, whereas Quebec’s map is spectacularly ungranular: diagonal lines show that a region has more strict restrictions in some areas but not others, but does not map those areas (which are indicated in text).
The Delusive Cartographer
“The Delusive Cartographer,” a fantasy short story by Rich Larson published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2015, plays with the familiar trope of a lost treasure map. In this story that map is hidden in a prison, which the story’s two rapscallions must break into in order to retrieve the map. Larson throws in more than one plot twist to confound things; the final paragraph’s reveal is well set-up but still surprising.
Related: Fiction About Maps: A Bibliography.
California Wildfires: Mapping the Bigger Picture
Two maps:
John Nelson’s 100 Years of Wildfire is a static map showing a century of California wildfires, simplified into zones of 100 square miles. The map measures the cumulative burn area for each zone over that entire time: this can exceed 100 or even 200 percent if large fires are frequent enough, or the whole damn area burns down more than once.
The California Fire Observatory combines longer-term data about forest cover with up-to-date information about wildfire hotspots and wind speed. “We map the drivers of wildfire hazard across the state—including forest structure, weather, topography & infrastructure—from space. […] By providing these data for free we hope to support the development of data-driven land management strategies that increase wildfire resilience—for forests and communities—enabling people and nature to thrive.” [Maps Mania]
Scarfolk Map Announced
A map of Scarfolk has been announced. For those blissfully unaware, Scarfolk is Richard Littler’s fictional, satirical English town locked in a 1970s-era dystopia. Littler has been producing deeply creepy examples of graphic design—public information posters, mainly—purporting to emanate from Scarfolk authorities on his blog and in two books so far. This “road and leisure map for uninvited tourists,” which apparently comes with a postcard and visa, costs £12. As they say in Scarfolk: For more information please reread. [via]
New Map Books: Early October 2020
New map books released in early October include:
The 27th edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World (Oxford University Press); this atlas is updated annually. This edition includes more satellite imagery, a new feature on plastics pollution, and an updated cities section. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
The 14th edition of the Times Concise Atlas of the World (Times Books). One step below the Comprehensive in the Times Atlas range, and a bit more than half the price. Available now in the U.K., next month in Canada, and next March in the United States. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps by Jeremy Black (British Library) “selects 100 of the most revealing, extraordinary and significant maps to give a ground-breaking perspective on the Second World War. It follows the British Library’s enormously successful A History of America in 100 Maps, published in 2018.” Out tomorrow in the U.K.; the U.S. edition is out from the University of Chicago Press later this month. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Philip Parker’s History of World Trade in Maps (Collins), in which “more than 70 maps give a visual representation of the history of World Commerce, accompanied by text which tells the extraordinary story of the merchants, adventurers, middle-men and monarchs who bought, sold, explored and fought in search of profit and power.” Also out now in the U.K. but later in North America. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Finally, the paperback edition of Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library, which I reviewed here in 2018, is out tomorrow from the British Library. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps Online
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.
Apple and Google Maps Updates
Apple Maps
- AppleInsider looks at how cycling directions work in iOS 14.
- Macworld provides a primer on how to correct errors and add features in Apple Maps.
- Apple’s new maps have now officially launched in Ireland and the United Kingdom (previously).
Google Maps
- Google’s official blog details updates to Live View, Google Maps’s AR feature that superimposes walking directions on the view through your phone’s camera (previously).
- A primer on how Google Maps acquires and processes satellite and aerial imagery, also from Google’s official blog.
- Google Maps has a Nazi problem, says Mike Shaughnessy: the service’s inadequate review moderation and its poor handling of memorials (whichit expects to act as businesses) provide an inadvertent platform “for Nazi veneration and Holocaust jokes.”