Month: July 2019

The Art of Illustrated Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map illustrations. Illustrated maps. Pictorial maps. Map art. There are many different names for a form of mapmaking that is, to appropriate a phrase, “not intended for navigation,” but rather for purposes such as advertising and promotion, political propoganda, decoration, or simply pure art. You may not be able to find your way home with such maps, but that’s not to say they don’t have a purpose.

I’ve reviewed books about maps in this general field before. Stephen J. Hornsby’s Picturing America (reviewed here) explores the rich pictorial map tradition in the United States during the early and mid-20th century. The Art of Map Illustration (reviewed here), on the other hand, is a focused, step-by-step guide to the how of modern-day map illustration.

The Art of Illustrated Maps: A Complete Guide to Creative Mapmaking’s History, Process and Inspiration (HOW Books, October 2015) falls somewhere in between. Written by John Roman, it’s a book that talks about the creative process in considerable detail, and gives many contemporary examples of map illustrations, but tries to place that process in the context of the history of map illustrations.

Continue reading “The Art of Illustrated Maps” →

Naming and Renaming Streets and Places in Vancouver

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

How are the names of roads, streets and other places on the map determined? In Vancouver, British Columbia, the process was until very recently pretty ad hoc and informal, until the formation, in 2012, of the city’s Civic Asset Naming Committee. The Tyee looks at the workings of that committee and the issues around naming and renaming places in Vancouver—where thanks to a legacy of colonialism, some names are rather more fraught than others.

New Canada-Shaped Coin Released

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Royal Canadian Mint

This, believe it or not, is a coin—a coin in the shape of a map of Canada, with various animals forming the shape of each province and territory. The design was created by Ottawa illustrator Ali Giroux, who posted it online as a letterpress map. Then, as CBC News and CTV News report, the Royal Canadian Mint came calling.

Commemorative coins aren’t cheap. This one is made of three ounces of pure silver and sells for $340 (Canadian). It is being produced in a mintage of 2,000 and will ship in December.

(And yes, despite its weirdo shape, it is a real coin: the Queen is on the other side, a traditional, coin-shaped portrait embedded in the centre. It has a face value of $50, but that’s only if you want to use it to pay a bill or something, and who’d do that with this?)

Sheldon Tapestry Map of Oxfordshire on Display

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Oxford (detail)

In case the Talking Maps exhibition (previously) was insufficient cause for you to visit the Bodleian Library in Oxford this year, here’s another. The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Oxfordshire, one of four tapestry maps of English counties commissioned in the late 16th century by Ralph Sheldon, is on display at the Bodleian’s Weston Library. The tapestry is partially complete—intact it would have measured 3.5 × 5.5 metres—and on display for the first time in a century, having gone through a “painstaking” restoration. BBC News, Londonist.

The Oxfordshire tapestry map replaces a display of the Worcestershire tapestry map that had been running for the past four years: both were donated to the Bodleian by Richard Gough in 1809. The Bodleian acquired a sizeable section of the Gloucestershire map in 2007 (it went on display the following year); other parts are in private hands. The fourth tapestry map, of Worcestershire, is the only one that is completely intact and not missing any pieces: it’s owned by the Warwickshire Museum, where it’s on display at the Market Hall Museum.

National Geographic’s Atlas of Moons

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Atlas of Moons (screenshot)

The Atlas of Moons is National Geographic’s interactive guide to every single moon in the solar system (except for a few moons of dwarf planets and asteroids that we know next to nothing about). The big ones get interactive globes and additional description (as do Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos, because we have imagery for them). Note that this is an extremely resource-intensive page that will use gigabytes of RAM if you let it.

Mapping Ground Displacement from the California Earthquakes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NASA/JPL-Caltech

This interferogram shows the ground displacement caused by last week’s earthquakes in southern California. Produced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from JAXA’s ALOS-2 satellite taken both before (16 April 2018) and after (8 July 2019) the earthquakes. Each colour cycle represents 12 centimetres (4.8 inches) of ground displacement.

Recent Google Maps Errors

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map data is not perfect and users are too trusting. They believe maps to be accurate, and the map data that GPS receivers, online maps and smartphones rely on is riddled with a thousand insignificant errors that show up in unexpected cases. Whenever we read a story about some driver getting themselves into trouble because they followed the directions their GPS receiver or phone gave them, that’s what caused it.

Take, for example, last month’s incident where Google Maps’ response to a traffic accident was to route traffic heading toward Denver International Airport along a private dirt road that was muddy and nearly impassible due to recent rains: about a hundred cars got stuck. That Google Maps thought the muddy part of East 64th Avenue was a viable route would not likely have been spotted were it not for the accident; said accident routed dozens of drivers along an unfamiliar route that they had no real option other than to trust Google on. [Jalopnik]

Meanwhile, see Dan Luu’s Twitter thread on Google Maps (and other map providers’) errors, their persistence, and the trouble it can sometimes take to get them dealt with.

Talking Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Gough Map. Wikimedia Commons.

Talking Maps, opening today at the Bodleian Libraries, is a major new map exhibition featuring maps from the Bodleian’s collections.

Highlights on show include the Gough Map, the earliest surviving map showing Great Britain in a recognizable form, the Selden Map, a late Ming map of the South China Sea, and fictional maps by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Map treasures from the Libraries’ collection will be shown alongside specially commissioned 3D installations and artworks, and exciting works on loan from artists and other institutions.

The exhibition is co-curated by Jerry Brotton, who among other things wrote A History of the World in Twelve Maps (my review) and Bodleian map librarian Nick Millea. They’ve co-authored a companion book to the exhibition, also out today, and also called Talking Maps (Bodleian).

The Bodleian is also publishing a number of other map books to coincide with the exhibition, including Mark Ashworth’s Why North is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From (Bodleian) and Brotton and Millea’s Fifty Maps and the Stories They Tell (Bodleian).

(See the Map Books of 2019 page for more Bodleian titles.)

Talking Maps opens today and runs until 8 March 2020. Free admission. More information from the Bodleian and Queen Mary University of London (where Brotton teaches).

Maps from the Bodleian Library were previously featured in Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (Bodleian, 2016), reviewed here.

The History of the Netherlands in 100 Old Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Briefly noted: the publication last month of Marieke van Delft and Reinder Storm’s De Geschiedeneis van Nederland in 100 Oude Kaarten (Lannoo), whose title, for the 98.6 percent of you who are not visiting this website from the Netherlands, translates as The History of the Netherlands in 100 Old Maps, which makes it the same sort of book as Susan Schulten’s History of America in 100 Maps (reviewed here), only about the Netherlands. And in Dutch. It’s not listed at every Amazon store (and at the moment is not in stock where it is listed), but it’s available (at a discount) from the publisher.

Marleen Smit contributed to the book; here’s her post about it (in English). There’s a brief promotional video (in Dutch).

Mapping Memory: An Exhibition of 16th-Century Indigenous Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Unknown artist, Map of Teozacoalco (detail), ca. 1580, tempera on paper, 176×138 cm, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin Libraries.

Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico, a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, presents “a selection of maps, known as Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas, created by Indigenous artists around 1580. These unique documents show some of the visual strategies used by native communities for the endurance and perseverance of their cultures throughout the so-called colonial period and well beyond.” Opened 29 June; runs until 25 August.

New Exhibition of Wartime Mapping Activities at Hughenden

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Opening today at Hughenden Manor: a permanent exhibition on the secret wartime mapping activities that took place at the Buckinghamshire mansion during the Second World War.

In rooms never before opened to the public, the installation features original photographs, records and memories of personnel involved at the time.

In newly accessible spaces used by the mapmakers themselves, the interactive exhibits shed light on how Hillside played such a significant role in shaping the outcome of the war. […]

Codenamed ‘Hillside’, Hughenden played such a critical role supporting the pilots of nearby Bomber Command that it was on Hitler’s list of top targets.

Around 100 personnel were based here, drawing up the maps used for bombing missions during the war, including the ‘Dambusters’ raid and for targeting Hitler’s mountain retreat Eagle’s Nest. Skilled cartographers produced leading-edge maps from aerial photographs delivered by the RAF’s reconnaissance missions.

The BBC News story provides more detail: some 3,500 hand-drawn target maps were produced at Hughenden Manor during the War.