Last week I mentioned in passing that CarPlay support was coming to Waze, but it was apparently not ready yet. It’s available as of today: Engadget, The Verge.
Previously: Google Maps Adds CarPlay Support.
Month: September 2018
The North American Continent: A Pictorial Map by Anton Thomas
Since 2014 Anton Thomas has been working on a large and detailed hand-drawn pictorial map of North America. Done on a 120-×-150-cm piece of art paper with coloured pencils and pen, and full of little pictorial details, The North American Continent has taken more than 4,000 hours to draw—and re-draw. In an update earlier this month, Anton estimates there are still 200 hours of work remaining; he expects to be done by December, with prints going on sale early next year.
The map was the subject of two talks Anton gave at NACIS last year: see Drawing a Continent by Hand and Methods of a Hand-Drawn Map. And take note: Anton lives in Australia, but at the moment he’s in the U.S. to give talks and work out printing and distribution. He’ll be giving a presentation tomorrow evening at the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. (Another talk is scheduled for October 24 at the Rumsey Map Center in San Francisco Stanford.)
Update: Another talk, on October 6, in New York.
Land/Lines: Map Art Exhibition in Spartanburg
At the Spartanburg Art Museum until 11 November: Land/Lines, an exhibition of map-inspired art by six artists—Robert Bubp, Jennifer Bueno, Firat Erdim, Chad Erpelding, Keren Kroul and Amy Schissel—who “use and respond to maps as a subject matter to question how we create and interpret boundaries.” News coverage. [WMS]
De Iberia a España: An Exhibition of Maps of Spain
An exhibition at the Instituto Geográfico Nacional in Madrid: De Iberia a España a través de los mapas (“From Iberia to Spain via Maps”), which looks at the changing cartographic representations of Spain and the Iberian peninsula from classical times to the 19th century. Sixty maps on display, plus books, perspective views and a globe. The year-long exhibition runs until 20 April 2019. Free admission. [WMS]
Google Maps Adds CarPlay Support
iOS 12, which adds support for third-party map apps in Apple CarPlay, was released on Monday. Google wasted no time: a day after that, they released version 5 of Google Maps for iOS, which adds CarPlay support. AppleInsider has a hands-on look at Google Maps on CarPlay. (CarPlay support is coming to Waze, but it’s apparently not ready yet.)
Previously: Third-Party Map Apps Coming to CarPlay in iOS 12.
About the Spilhaus Projection
This image went a bit viral earlier this week. Some context. It’s from an August 2015 blog post at Le Cartographe, in which Alexandre Nicolas discussed (and rendered, above) a projection produced in 1942 by South African oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus. In Spilhaus’s oceanic projection, centred on Antarctica, the world’s oceans form a single, uninterrupted body of water. Which, you know, it is. The continents form the edges of the map; there is … some … spatial distortion. As Alexandre wrote in 2015, “This projection is rarely used and it’s a real shame!”
Previously: The Penguin Projection (speaking of Antarctica-centred projections).
Theatre of the World
In The Spectator, Travis Elborough reviews Thomas Reinertsen Berg’s Theatre of the World: The Maps that Made World History (Hodder & Stoughton, 6 September). This is a translation (by Alison McCullough); the original book appeared in Norwegian as Verdensteater: Kartenes historie last year. Elborough, who is himself an author of map books,1 calls the book “impressively global and touchingly parochial, as his native Norway and Scandinavia in general often and unashamedly take centre stage in the narrative. (A note in the foreword explains that the book has to a certain extent been de-Norwegianised for the English edition.)” But then he goes on to lament the omission of thoroughly British-centric content. Go figure.
Theatre of the World is out now in the U.K.; the U.S. edition, published by Little, Brown, and with its title thoroughly Americanized as Theater of the World, comes out on December 4th.
Related: Map Books of 2018.
The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada
The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada is finally on the verge of publication. First announced in June 2017, and unveiled in its final form in June 2018 (Canadian Geographic, CBC News, Ottawa Citizen, press release), the atlas is a massive project several years in the making and involving input from indigenous communities across Canada. The result of a collaboration between the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Métis Nation, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and Indspire, the atlas project includes a four-volume physical atlas, an online version, and additional teaching resources, including new giant floor maps from Canadian Geographic.1
The physical atlas’s four volumes include one for First Nations, one for the Inuit, one for the Métis, and one focusing on Truth and Reconciliation. It has a list price of C$99.99 (online sellers will have it for less) and comes out in one week, on September 25th: Amazon. A French-language version comes out next month, on October 23rd: Amazon.
The online version of the atlas has the text but very little in the way of maps: I can only assume that this is not the case for the book versions. The companion app, for iOS and Android, does little more than link to the web version and includes a location finder for land acknowledgment.
The news buzz about this atlas in this country is considerable: see recent coverage from the Canadian Press, CBC News and the Globe and Mail. This looks to be a cultural watershed event the likes of which I have not seen since the publication of The Canadian Encyclopedia in 1985. I expect a lot of copies to be sold.
Indigenous Place Names and Cultural Property
I’ve mentioned Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada, a wall map of Canadian place names in indigenous languages, before. I’ve since received a review copy and have been able to examine it in some detail. One thing that struck me is the following statement, which appears on the map.
The place names in this map are the intellectual and cultural property of the First Nation, Métis, and Inuit communities on whose territories they are located. The names may not be mapped, copied, or reproduced in any way without the permission of the Nations, communities, and organizations who are their caretakers.
The PDF download page has similar language that is part of the map’s terms of use, which you have to agree to before downloading the map.
This isn’t an injunction not to use the names indicated on the map: that would be weird. Nor is it an assertion of copyright over geographical data: if you know anything about trap streets, you know that facts cannot be copyrighted. It’s an injunction not to replicate these names: not to compile them, not to add them to a database of toponyms, not to have them pass out of the control of the communities who shared those names with the mapmaker. This is, in other words, about protecting indigenous intellectual property from exploitation, and preventing this map from being a tool to strip-mine the cultural heritage of the communities who shared their information.
The 42×33-inch paper map is sold out as in rolled format but still available folded (and, as I said, as a PDF); if you need a rolled map to put on your wall, a second printing is tentatively scheduled for next month.
Previously: Indigenous Place Names in Canada.
Native Land
Native Land is an interactive map that shows traditional territories, indigenous languages and treaties in the Americas, Greenland, Hawaii, the Mariana Islands, Australia and New Zealand, though the treaty coverage is limited to Canada and the United States. In part because the map is ahistorical, there is some overlap in terms of languages and territories. The brainchild of Victor Temprano, who started the project in 2015, Native Land is also available as a mobile app: iOS, Android. [Atlas Obscura]
Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS
Dan Bell’s career drawing maps of real-world places in the style of maps of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth continues apace; a recent piece, a map of San Francisco, got written up in the San Francisco Chronicle, and his website is full of other recent works.
But computer mapping may be about to overtake hand-drawn illustration. John M. Nelson has created an ArcGIS style that does the very thing Dan Bell does by hand: emulate the maps of Middle-earth executed by Christopher Tolkien and Pauline Baynes. The style is called, naturally, My Precious: John explains it here and here, and demonstrates the style with this map of the Americas.
There are, of course, some flaws in this method: a mechanical representation of a hand-drawn style risks falling into the uncanny valley’s cartographic equivalent, especially when mountain and forest signs are clone-stamped over large areas. And to be honest I’m not a fan of the Aniron font: those letterforms were used in the Lord of the Rings movies, but never the books’ maps, and now they’re found on damn near every Tolkien-style map, and we hates it, precious, we hates it forever. But Nelson is basically emulating modern fantasy map practice: modern fantasy maps are invariably done in Illustrator, labels are computer generated rather than hand-drawn, and hill signs are clone stamped. Applying it to real-world maps, and GIS software, is new, but a difference in degree.
Previously: Dan Bell’s ‘Tolkien-Style’ Maps of the Lake District.
David Mitchell on Starting with a Map
“Fictitious maps give form to a thing—the imagination—that has no form. They are mysteries and answers to those mysteries.” The New Yorker publishes a piece by Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell in which he describes his creative process, which since childhood has meant to Start with a Map—something he calls “a displacement activity,” but in the same breath he says “mapmaking and stage-sketching can be necessary aspects of writing.” Mitchell’s essay is an excerpt from a forthcoming book edited by Huw Lewis-Jones: The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (University of Chicago Press, October), which sounds right up my alley.
Sarah Spencer’s Giant Star Map Tapestry
This huge star map tapestry is the work of Australian maker Sarah Spencer, who created it by hacking a 1980s-era knitting machine. Yes, this thing was knitted: it apparently took more than 100 hours and 15 kg (33 lbs) of (locally sourced Australian) wool to produce this 4.6×2.8-metre (15×9-foot) monster, which is accurate (with the caveat that an equatorial projection distorts familiar circumpolar constellations) and reasonably detailed: the constellations are labelled and the stars’ apparent magnitude is indicated. Space.com has the story. [Boing Boing]
Purple Lizard Maps
Every now and again I discover another local mapmaking company whose products are familiar to, even well-loved by, well, the locals, but not much known elsewhere: the A-Z maps and London; the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer; Kroll and Seattle; Wunnenberg and St. Louis; Sherlock and Winnipeg (that one I knew about, being from there). Add another company to that list: Purple Lizard Maps, which produces a line of outdoor recreation maps that focuses mostly (but not exclusively) on central Pennsylvania. The Center County Gazette talks to Michael Hermann, who founded Purple Lizard in 1997. [WMS]
Previously: John Loacker and the Kroll Map Company; A Paper Maps Roundup.
Typhoon Mangkhut
Meanwhile, Typhoon Mangkhut has hit the Philippines and is moving toward China. The New York Times has a map tracking the storm’s path; NASA has posted a number of visible-light and infrared images of the storm as well.