https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDpoZdL1g0E
IKEA’s propensity for naming its products after locations in Sweden (among other things) has led to the unintended1 consequence of search results for those products drowning out search results for the lakes and towns they’re named after. Sweden has launched a more-than-tongue-in-cheek tourist campaign to counter that, inviting people to discover the originals. [Strange Maps]
This roundtable discussion about The New York Subway Map Debate, a book about the April 1978 Cooper Union debate over the design of the New York subway map (previously) and related subjects, featuring John Tauranac himself (who participated in the 1978 debate), alerted me to the fact that an audio recording of that debate is available online. (A discussion about a book about a debate: this all feels a bit recursive.) [Kenneth Field]
Canada’s federal Department of Natural Resources has released a new wall map of the world, its first since 2005, under an open government licence.
The World is a general reference political map focused on the names and international boundaries of sovereign and non-sovereign countries. The information is portrayed using the Winkel II projection at a scale of 1:29 000 000. The dataset includes international boundaries, populated places, and labelled major hydrographic and physical features.
Because it’s produced by a federal department, the map and the download page are at pains to emphasize that the boundaries, labels and other information is not necessarily representative of the Government of Canada’s position (viz., Persian Gulf and Sea of Japan; disputed boundaries are included, frozen conflicts not so much).
In what is now an annual tradition, John Nelson has released another do-it-yourself papercraft globe ornament; John says that this “this year’s ornament craft is the most straightforward yet! Just some cutting and pasting and high fives all around.”
Previously: John Nelson’s Cassini Globe Ornament; John Nelson’s Dymaxion Globe Ornaments; DIY Map Ornaments.
At Worlds Revealed, the Library of Congress’s map blog, Tim St. Onge looks at, and provides the background on, a series of six maps prepared by Frederick E. Pierce for a report on living conditions in New York’s tenement housing in 1895, including a stunningly bizarre map of ethnic groups living in the city.
Pierce’s map of nationalities, however, is a more memorable, if confounding, centerpiece. Aiming to convey diversity among immigrant communities in New York, the map depicts the proportion of major “nationalities” in each sanitary district of the city. The result is a dizzying array of zigzag stripes and scattered points. As Pierce writes in his explanatory notes accompanying the Harper’s Weekly publication, the original map was produced in color and adapted to black and white for publication, but the reproduction “is almost as effective and quite as illustrative as the original.” Despite Pierce’s confidence, perhaps the average reader could be forgiven if they find the map to be more difficult to parse. In fact, the map seems to resemble more closely the dazzle camouflage, a design aimed at confusing the observer, used on British and American warships in the first half of the twentieth century.
If you subscribe to Disney+, check out the 10th episode of Disney Insider, which dropped yesterday: its first segment looks at how National Geographic Maps produces its trail maps. The talking is done by National Geographic’s director of cartographic production, David Lambert. I can’t help but be reminded of those old newsreels that talked about map production; this is kind of that, only with really good production values.
Our NatGeo Maps office here in Colorado was featured on Disney+’s Disney Insider show episode 10 that dropped today! Watch 0:47-7:15 to see our boss talking about what we do! 🏞🥾 My 7-second, focused-cartographer 🤓🗺 cameo starts at 2:30! pic.twitter.com/p49B6Z1NfY
— Aly D. Ollivierre, MSc, GISP (@AlyD_VT) December 8, 2021
Every year at about this time—
(Actually no, check that, this year I’m late; and last year I didn’t post one at all except for this stationery guide.)
—I post a gift guide that lists some of the noteworthy books about maps that have been published this year.
(Actually . . . this year not very many books were published. Thanks, pandemic. I’ve had to expand my scope a bit 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.
Please keep in mind that this is not a list of recommendations: what’s here is mainly what I’ve spotted online, and there’s probably a lot more out there. Also, I haven’t so much as seen most of what’s here, much less reviewed it: these are simply things that, based on what information I have available, seem fit for giving as gifts. (Anyone who tries to parlay this into “recommended by The Map Room” is going to get a very sad look from me.)
This post contains affiliate links; I receive a cut of the purchase price if you make a purchase via these links.
A 1761 map of Fort Detroit that depicts the fort just after it was ceded by the French to British forces, commissioned by Gen. Amherst and hand-drawn by William Brasier, has been acquired by the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library.
The map had been in private hands since at least 1967. Because its $42,500 price tag put a substantial dent in the library’s acquisition budget, they’re crowdfunding the purchase—with $20,000 already pledged in matching funds. [Tony Campbell]
Previously: Early Map of Detroit Acquired.
NASA Earth Observatory: “Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) recently developed a new method to map the concentration of ocean microplastics around the world. The researchers used data from eight microsatellites that are part of the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission. Radio signals from GPS satellites reflect off the ocean surface, and CYGNSS satellites detect those reflections. Scientists then analyze the signals to measure the roughness of the ocean surface. These measurements provide scientists with a means to derive ocean wind speeds, which is useful for studying phenomena like hurricanes. It turns out that the signals also reveal the presence of plastic.”
A new study published in Nature Sustainability maps the Earth’s reserves of what is called “irrecoverable carbon”—that is to say, those stores of carbon in nature that, if released into the atmosphere, would not be able to be restored in the timeframe required to deal with climate change. These stores include wetlands and old-growth forests, which take longer to replenish.
Irrecoverable carbon represents 20% of the total manageable ecosystem carbon. Globally, 79.0 Gt (57%) of irrecoverable carbon is found in biomass while 60.0 Gt (43%) is in soils. […] The largest and highest-density irrecoverable carbon reserves are in the tropical forests and peatlands of the Amazon (31.5 Gt), the Congo Basin (8.2 Gt) and Insular Southeast Asia (13.1 Gt); the temperate rainforest of northwestern North America (5.0 Gt); the boreal peatlands and associated forests of eastern Canada and western Siberia (12.4 Gt); and mangroves and tidal wetlands globally (4.8 Gt).
The study argues that such reserves should be considered unexploitable; about 48 percent of it is already within protected or indigenous lands. About half the irrecoverable carbon sits on 3.3 percent of the world’s land area. [ScienceNews, GIS Lounge]
Interesting essay for the History of Cartography Project from Matthew Edney, on the practice of treating maps as separate from the books they were originally published in—and physically removing them from those books—and the damage that does, both to the physical objects and to our understanding of the past.
The key issue is that over many centuries, maps have routinely been removed from their original contexts without clear records being kept. These practices have been extensively countered and halted since the 1970s, however they have left a legacy that requires great effort to overcome. But that effort always pays off: resituating early maps in the original contexts of their production, circulation, and use inevitably allows for more new interpretations of their meaning and significance.
This 1930s map has made the rounds—it claims to show the global locations that various sites in California could plausibly represent on screen, and swaps the place-names accordingly (e.g. the Sierras can play the French Alps) [thread] pic.twitter.com/lVmYjWYyi6
— Patrick Ellis (@aeroscopics) November 27, 2021
In the above Twitter thread, and in a new article in Film History: An International Journal, Patrick Ellis looks at the several maps of California that portray it as being able to stand in for locations around the world. It’s more than just location scouting for film shoots (though it very much is that); it’s also about marketing for in-state tourism. (The article is paywalled.)
The Doctor Who YouTube channel just posted a clip from “Castrovalva,” a four-part serial first broadcast in January 1982. In this clip, the Doctor discovers the recursive geography of the eponymous town when he asks one of its residents to map it.
Previously: Doctor Who Does Trap Streets.
