Month: November 2019

2019 Holiday Gift Guide

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every year at about this time I post a gift guide that lists some of the noteworthy books about maps that have been published this year. If you have a map-obsessed person in your life and would like to give them something map-related—or you are a map-obsessed person and would like your broad hints to have something to link to—this guide may give you some ideas.

As before, this guide is organized loosely by theme. Its focus is on books of interest to the general reader: even though a lot of good academic work was published this year, it’s not the sort of thing to put under the tree. I’ve been maintaining a somewhat more complete list of books published over the year at the Map Books of 2019 page.

Also, this is not a list of recommendations: I haven’t even seen most of the books on this list, much less reviewed them (this has not been a good year for my reviewing). These are simply books that, based on the information available, seem fit for giving as gifts.

Anyway. Onward!

Mapping Canadians’ Attitude Towards Climate Change

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of interactive map of Canadian public opinion on climate change
Screenshot

Researchers have released an interactive map showing Canadians’ opinions about climate change—whether it’s happening, and what we should do about it—and, more significantly, the regional variations in that opinion, down to the riding level. Not surprisingly, the oil- and coal-producing regions are much more likely to be climate skeptics.

The map is based on surveys of more than 9,000 Canadians taken between 2011 and 2018, which raised my eyebrows a bit: public opinion can change a lot over seven or eight years, after all. But the researchers did so to get a more accurate sense of regional opinion: opinion polls are usually based on a small national sample; regional breakdowns of that sample have large margins of error, and getting accurate regional samples would be a lot more expensive. More at Global News.

Bert Johnson, 1946-2019

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Hubert O. (Bert) Johnson, longtime stalwart of the Washington Map Society and indefatigable administrator of its Facebook group, died earlier this month of a heart attack. He was 73.

Bert and I only knew each other online, and that mostly via what we posted. In fact, we made a regular habit of stealing each other’s links. He’d share many of The Map Room’s posts on the WMS Facebook group, and many of my posts had their origins in something Bert posted on the WMS Facebook group.

An obituary and funeral details are still to come.

First Geologic Map of Titan

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Geologic map of Titan
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

The first global geologic map of Titan, based on radar and infrared data from the Cassini probe, has been released.

The map legend colors represent the broad types of geologic units found on Titan: plains (broad, relatively flat regions), labyrinth (tectonically disrupted regions often containing fluvial channels), hummocky (hilly, with some mountains), dunes (mostly linear dunes, produced by winds in Titan’s atmosphere), craters (formed by impacts) and lakes (regions now or previously filled with liquid methane or ethane). Titan is the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface—methane and ethane.

The map is the result of research published today in Nature Astronomy.

Previously: Titan in Infrared; Mapping Titan with VIMS; A Topographic Map of Titan.

A GPS Spoofing Mystery in Shanghai

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Someone is spoofing GPS signals in Shanghai, and we’re not entirely sure why they’re doing it, or how. One ostensibly bizarre theory: sand thieves trying to obfuscate illegal dredging by zonking out the GPS received by other ships’ AIS transponders. But how they’re redesignating ship (and bicycle) GPS locations into riverside circles, rather than, say, shifting everyone’s position a few kilometres away, has not yet been figured out. [MetaFilter]

Previously: The Russians Are Spoofing! The Russians Are Spoofing!

Inside NOAA During Trump’s Sharpie Mapmaking Period

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Remember the nuttery surrounding President Trump, his erroneous warning that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, and his Sharpie-adjusted hurricane map? That was two whole months ago. It all put NOAA and the National Weather Service in an awkward spot. Mother Jones put in a Freedom of Information Act request for their internal emails and found out just how uncomfortable things were inside NOAA during that period.

Previously: Trump, Maps and Manipulation; ‘A Defilement of a Sacred Trust’.

Old Maps of Montreal

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map of the City of Montreal (1843)
Adolphus Bourne, Map of the City of Montreal, 1843. 36 × 23 cm. Collection Saint-Sulpice, BAnQ.

MTLBlog digs into the digital holdings of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) to present some vintage maps of Montréal.

The BAnQ has more than 20,000 maps in its digital collection, ranging from the 16th century to the present day; said holdings include maps from before the Conquest, maps of cities, towns and villages (many of them fire insurance maps), and historic topo maps.

Humboldt’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
David Rumsey Map Collection

Writing for Smithsonian.com, Greg Millar looks at the maps of pioneering naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

What’s often omitted, however, in discussions of Humboldt’s scientific legacy is the role that his pioneering maps and scientific illustrations played in shaping his thinking. By creating visualizations of data that had previously been bound up in tables, Humboldt revealed connections that had eluded others, says historian Susan Schulten of the University of Denver. “He’s really a visual thinker,” she says.

According to Schulten, Humboldt was one of the first scientists to use maps to generate and test scientific hypotheses. One example was his use of what he called “isotherm” lines to indicate regions of the globe with the same average temperature. These lines are ubiquitous on weather maps today, and they seem so obvious we take them for granted. But when Humboldt published a map using them in 1817, it caused scientists to rethink the widely held assumption that the average temperature of a region depends primarily on its latitude. The isotherm lines on Humboldt’s map had ups and downs that deviated from lines of latitude. This prompted him and others to look for explanations, and eventually led to an understanding of how ocean currents, mountain ranges, and other features of geography contribute to local climates.

For more on Humboldt generally, Andrea Wulf’s biography, The Invention of Nature, is a marvellous read.

The Writer’s Map Wins a World Fantasy Award

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Writer’s Map (cover)
Amazon
Bookshop

The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, which I reviewed on Tor.com last year, has won a World Fantasy Award for its editor, Huw Lewis-Jones.

The 2019 World Fantasy Awards were announced yesterday at the World Fantasy Convention, held this year in Los Angeles; Lewis-Jones won in the Special Award—Professional category.

Winners in each category are decided by a panel of judges.

Previously: The Writer’s Map; More from (and on) The Writer’s Map; Essays on Literary Maps: Treasure Island, Moominland and the Marauder’s Map; David Mitchell on Starting with a Map.

GPS Units: Still a Thing

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wirecutter’s Medea Giordano argues that even in the age of smartphones with built-in map apps, there’s still a place in your car for a dedicated GPS device: “there are cases when a phone just doesn’t cut it—say, in rural areas where coverage is questionable, or if you simply don’t want to drain your phone’s battery and data plan. Or when you’ve just found it frustrating to use a phone for long trips, like I have.”

Mapping the Canadian Election Results: Technical Details

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bothered by the widespread use of Web Mercator by Canadian news outlets to show last week’s election results, Kenneth Field has posted an article that aims to address the problem. Static maps of Canada tend to use a conic projection like the Albers or the Lambert, and that’s the case for print election maps as well. Online interactive maps, on the other hand, use off-the-shelf tools that use Web Mercator, which results in the sparsely populated territories looking even more enormous. But that doesn’t have to be the case, says Ken, who shows us, with a few examples, how use ArcGIS Pro to create interactive maps using a conical projection.

Meanwhile, Mark Gargul writes in response to Ken’s critique of his cartogram of the election results. Mark describes himself as an amateur and readily admits that other cartograms are “clearly more aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, I was going for something different with my cartogram—specifically, to try to preserve riding-adjacency as much as possible.”

The other thing Mark was going for in his cartogram was to indicate the urban-rural split: metropolitan areas are given a black border: it’s easy to see which ridings are in Montreal or Toronto; seats that are partially urban and partially rural straddle those borders.

So it’s doing several things at once that may not be immediately apparent.

Previously: A Cartogram of Canada’s Election Results; More Canadian Election Maps.

Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps (Thames & Hudson, October) is a look back at Booth’s idiosyncratic and judgey block-by-block survey of poverty and the social classes of late 19th-century London (his maps described the “lowest class” as “vicious, semi-criminal,” for example). The final maps, hand-coloured, are famous in map terms: there was an exhibition back in 2011. The book adds preparatory maps, “selected reproductions of pages from the original notebooks, containing anecdotes related by Londoners of every trade, class, creed and nationality together with observations by Booth’s interviewers that reveal much about their social class and moral views.” Plus essays and infographics to put the whole thing in a modern context. Mapping London has a review.

Related: Map Books of 2019.