Month: March 2022

General Milley’s Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been carrying a map of Ukraine with him everywhere he goes, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports in a piece that looks at U.S. intelligence gathering and work with its allies during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Milley’s map is a compendium of U.S intelligence about Russia’s pitiless assault on Ukraine. The paper version isn’t actually big or particularly fancy, just a foot-square chart showing the locations, numbers and likely assault paths of the vast Russian force battering Ukraine. But the map documents what Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his top aides believe might be the most comprehensive operational intelligence in the history of warfare. […]

Milley ordered aides to begin assembling the map in late October, when startling intelligence reports signaled that Russia was gathering an invasion army on Ukraine’s border. The Russian forces were no exercise; intercepted messages showed that Russia was actually planning an attack.

Of course we can’t get a look at Gen. Milley’s map. Classified.

The End of the Ski Trail Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ski trail maps may not last much past Jim Niehues’s retirement. Ski resorts are increasingly resorting to apps rather than paper ski trail maps to help their guests navigate, the New York Times reports.

Ski areas are increasingly cutting back on the number of pocket-size paper trail maps they print and distribute. The reasons range from cost savings and environmental concerns to promoting resort-specific apps that offer a slew of interactive features in addition to digital maps. Last winter many ski areas didn’t put out the usual stacks of maps as a Covid measure, but the trend goes well beyond pandemic protocol.

Once again we see a variation on the long debate between paper and digital maps, with many familiar arguments: saving paper, convenience, the sheer robustness of paper vs. failure-prone technology (not nothing when you’re relying on a phone to work on top of a cold mountain), and so on. Also, in this specific case, that guests might prefer a paper map as a souvenir (not for nothing did Niehues make a career out of them).

The Direction of Escape

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I got lost in the map of an imaginary country.
The Baedeker told me to look for the palace of government
and I found my great-grandmother
renouncing the head of a state that was never hers.

This is how “The Direction of Escape,” a poem by Sonya Taaffe published at online zine Not One of Us, begins. It is a poem very much about the current moment. Taaffe says, “The title is a line of Le Guin’s. The stories it contains are real.”

Ortelius Online at the National Library of the Netherlands

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
World map from Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Koninklijke Bibliotheek

The National Library of the Netherlands has an online version of Ortelius’s 16th-century atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. In Dutch only. (From what I understand it’s not the only digitization of this work available online: see the atlas’s Wikipedia page for links to additional sites.) [Maps Mania]

The Problem with Worldle

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Meanwhile, among the many many Wordle variants and games-inspired-by-Wordle out there is one that map aficionados ought to appreciate: Worldle. Every day you have six chances to guess the name of a country based on an outline map. If you guess wrong, you’re given the distance and direction to the correct answer.

The problem with this is that if you know your geography it’s astonishingly easy, at least in default mode. It’s rare for me to need more than one try—unless, for a totally hypothetical example that has nothing at all to do with one stumper last week, it’s a nondescript atoll in the middle of the ocean, and then it’s as much because you didn’t think it was on the list, like a Scrabble set that unexpectedly includes þ, ð and ß. But you can increase the difficulty level by rotating the country image, or by hiding it: then you have to rely on the distances and directions alone. I should try it that way.

Mapping Wordle Scores

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

WordTips map of average Wordle scores by countryWordTips maps Wordle scores. Using Twitter data—what, you thought someone couldn’t do something with all those Wordle results you keep tweeting out?—the word finding site looks at which countries, U.S. states, and cities are the best (and the worst) at the viral game. The country with the best average scores? Sweden. The U.S. state? North Dakota. The U.S. city? Saint Paul, Minnesota. You know, I’m sensing a trend there. [Toronto Star]

Mapping the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Roundup #2

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Content warning: Some of these links contain disturbing images: I’ve marked them with a †.

More on the question of whether theatre maps accurately reflect the ground situation. Nathan Ruser’s maps have been used to argue that Russian forces are controlling roads rather than territory, but Ruser complains that his maps are being misinterpreted: they were never meant to show territorial control, just troop movements. See also this Twitter thread from Jennifer Cafarella, in which she explains the methodology and reasoning behind her team’s maps.

3D models of bombing damage.† Satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetric data are used to create 3D models of bombing damage in Ukraine. [Maps Mania]

A map of attacks on civilian targets† with photo and video documentation. [Nataliya Gumenyuk]

Where hot spots are literally hot spots. In a Twitter thread, Sotris Valkaniotis shows how military operations in Ukraine show up in Landsat spectral imagery: weapons fire turns up as hot spots showing “very high temperature in short-wave infrared band.”

A Ukrainian map of alleged Russian casualties† and where they were deployed from. [Michael Weiss]

A map of checkpoint traffic. More than two million Ukrainians have fled the Russian invasion. Overwhelmingly, they’re fleeing westward. This map shows how busy each border checkpoint is: Polish border crossings are extremely congested. [Kyiv Independent]

Meanwhile, Kenneth Field has been working on ways to map Ukraine’s refugees. Here’s his most recent iteration:

Ukraine’s population density. More than 41 million people live in Ukraine. This map from Airwars shows the population density per square kilometre. Which shows how many people in an area are affected by a particular military strike.

Apple says Crimea is Ukrainian. Mashable: “Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute.” Apple had marked Crimea as Russian in 2019, which pissed Ukraine off at the time. [TechCrunch]

Finally, this striking bit of art:

Mapping the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map of Ukraine showing Russian incursions from Nathan Ruser, Putin’s War: The Daily Ukraine Brief, 2 Mar 2022.
Nathan Ruser, Putin’s War: The Daily Ukraine Brief, 2 Mar 2022.

Areas vs. lines. I’ve seen several reminders that the areas shown in some maps as being under control by Russian forces are not necessarily under Russian control. Since Russian columns have to stick to major roads and cannot, under current conditions, move cross-country, the argument is to visualize Russian incursions as lines rather than areas, as Nathan Ruser does in maps for his Daily Ukraine Brief (above).

The New York Times maps the Russian invasion. This regularly updated New York Times page includes their maps of the on-the-ground situation in Ukraine. Areas rather than lines though.

Map of operational train stations in Ukraine as of 2 Mar 2022
Укрзалізниця

Where the trains are still running. Ukraine’s rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia has posted a map (above) showing which stations are still operating—at least at that particular moment. [Christopher Miller/ТРУХА]

Captured maps and other documents carried by Russian troops are being posted to Twitter.

Previously: Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Air-Raid Shelters in Kyiv; A Crowdsourced Map of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

New Article from Me: ‘Maps in Science Fiction’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

My article “Maps in Science Fiction,” which attempts a taxonomy of the maps that appear in science fiction novels, stories and media, has just been published in the February 2022 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.

Maps are a central part of our experience of the fantasy genre: “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one,” wrote Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland; fantasy maps “are only much noticed when they’re absent,” notes The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It’s easy to forget that maps are also found in science fiction. They don’t turn up as frequently, nor are they expected to, and we don’t talk about them or think about them nearly as often. But they do exist. I’ve been writing about fantasy maps for years, and even I didn’t give science fiction maps the same consideration at least until 2014, when during a presentation about fantasy maps at Readercon, I had to extemporize in response to a question about science fiction maps. My off-the-cuff response led me to look into where and how maps are used in science fiction and from there to write this article on the subject.

This article took a while to come to fruition. I put out a call for examples of science fiction maps and pitched the idea to the NYRSF’s editor back in July 2014—and then life got thoroughly and fundamentally in the way. It was still thoroughly and fundamentally in the way when I finally, finally finished it and sent it off to NYRSF in the summer of 2020. Life was thoroughly and fundamentally in the way at their end, too—thanks, pandemic!—so it’s taken until now to see print at last. I’m glad it has: science fiction maps don’t get a fraction of the attention fantasy maps do, and I think I might have come up with some useful frameworks in this piece.

From the examples explored here, we can discern several functions science fiction maps can perform on behalf of both text and reader. Maps may have a thematic purpose as in the case of maps of Pern or Majipoor in that their style signals a science fantasy environment, the use of fantasy reading protocols, and a text of likely interest to fantasy readers. They may have a storytelling purpose as with the maps from Dune, the Steerswoman series, and the Mars trilogy: the maps separate the known from the unknown, the transformed from the untouched, the colonized from the indigenous. Or they may have a conceptual purpose by giving the reader a big-picture understanding of structures, solar systems, networks, or empires.

I will post the complete text of the article later. In the meantime, if the teasers above have left you unwilling to wait even a little bit, you can buy the NYRSF issue here; it costs just $2.99 in the usual electronic formats.

Update: You can read the article here.

Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

AppleInsider looks at how online maps (Apple Maps, Google Maps), especially their traffic layer, inadvertently revealed Russian troop movements at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The sheer volume of mapping data now available at our fingertips means it was possible for civilians half a world away to see when Russian forces began moving. Specifically, that data pinpointed a traffic jam starting on the Russian side of the border, actively moving into Ukraine in the first few minutes of the Russian and Ukraine conflict.

Just as with any cartography, this information required interpreting. Google Maps did not specifically say that it was troop movements, nor was its satellite imagery up to the minute. During the process of researching this story, we’ve confirmed that Apple Maps presented similar inbound troop movement information—but it wasn’t setting out to do that either.

What these services did, though, was register all of the smartphone users whose driving was slowed or halted by unusual traffic conditions. Wherever the majority of the data came from, it was possible to determine what was happening when coupled with known details of Russian troop locations.