Two dark, torn illustrations found in the garage of a Palm Springs home and listed for sale as “two 19th century hand colored prints of the world” turned out to be something quite possibly a bit more significant. First identified as two panels (of six) from a 1708 Korean map, Kim Jin-yeo’s Gonyeomangukjeondo (곤여만국전도), which is a derivative of Matteo Ricci’s famous Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (aka the “Impossible Black Tulip”), the panels ended up selling earlier this month for $24,000; the buyer, map dealer Barry Ruderman, is restoring the map for sale and suspects that it may in fact be a 17th-century Chinese copy rather than a Korean map. Daily Mail, Fine Books Magazine. [WMS]
Many of Evans’s humorous stories go a way to responding to some of the scientific inadequacies and toponymic foibles so common in place naming studies. And after I’ve spent almost a decade inundated with often sterile and uninspirational place name theory and how it may fit within more general research in onomastics, the study of proper names, Evans’s tongue-in-cheek take is more than welcome.
I get the distinct impression that this is a less-serious work of scholarship than Monmonier’s. [WMS]
Here’s an appropriately spooky map for Halloween: Grim London, a map that celebrates the creepy side of London’s history. “Bringing the scary truths to life, Grim London is a personalised interactive map of the most spine-chilling events that have occurred across the capital.” [TimeOut London]
Over all, the gains are substantial: a seven-percentage-point drop in the uninsured rate for adults. But there remain troublesome regional patterns. Many people in the South and the Southwest still don’t have a reliable way to pay for health care, according to the new, detailed numbers from a pair of groups closely tracking enrollment efforts. Those patterns aren’t an accident. As our maps show, many of the places with high uninsured rates had poor coverage before the Affordable Care Act passed. They tend to be states with widespread poverty and limited social safety nets. Look at Mississippi and Texas, for example.
Next year’s annual meeting of NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society, will take place from 10-13 October 2017 in Montreal. Hey, my home province — I might actually be able to attend.
With less than two weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it’s time for a refresher on election map cartography, particularly in the context of U.S. presidential elections.
Cartograms
2012 U.S. presidential results. At right, a cartogram scaled by electoral vote. Maps by Mark Newman.
Let’s start with the basics: at All Over the Map, Greg Miller explains the problem with U.S. presidential election maps—big states with few electoral votes look more important than smaller states with more votes—and introduces the idea of the cartogram: a map distorted to account for some variable other than land area.
The map may not look advanced today, but in 1883 it broke new ground by enabling Americans to visualize the spatial dynamics of political power. Readers responded enthusiastically. One reviewer pointed to the Republican counties in Arkansas—something left invisible on a map of the Electoral College returns—and wondered what other oddities of geography and history might be uncovered when election returns were more systematically measured. In other words, the map revealed spatial patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain hidden, or only known anecdotally. Perhaps its no coincidence that at the same time the two parties began to launch more coordinated, disciplined, nationwide campaigns, creating a system of two-party rule that we have lived with ever since.
(This map also inverts the modern colours for the two main U.S. political parties: here the Democrats are red and the Republicans are blue. Those colours were standardized only fairly recently.) [Geolounge]
For other ways of mapping election results, see this gallery of thematic maps, which includes things like 3D choropleth maps, dot density maps, and all kinds of variations on cartograms and choropleth maps. There’s more than one way to map an election. [Andy Woodruff]
An archaeological dig on the Danish island of Bornholm has turned up a small stone, in two pieces, with scratches in a criss-cross pattern that has led researchers to conclude it’s a 5,000-year-old map of the island. Copenhagen Post, Kristeligt Dagblad (in Danish), The Local. [Tony Campbell/WMS]
The Smithonian’s Earthquakes, Eruptions and Emissions interactive map “is a time-lapse animation of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes since 1960. It also shows volcanic gas emissions (sulfur dioxide, SO2) since 1978 — the first year satellites were available to provide global monitoring of SO2.” [Axis Maps]
Texas Monthly has a piece about Christopher Alan Smith, who for the past decade has been creating original maps, mostly of Texas and Texas-related subjects. It’s been his full-time gig since 2008. Smith uses a mixture of pen-and-ink and acrylic paints:
I tend to follow the style of postage stamps and currency. I use a pen-and-ink stipple technique, which is a series of dots that create the illusion of halftones. Cross-hatching is another method, using lines instead of dots. I’ve also started using engraved wood to give the maps a layered, 3-D look. For example, on my Thirteen Colonies map, I illustrated the coastline on two layers of hardboard.
Earlier this month FiveThirtyEight built a county-by-county model showing where both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s “upside potential” — by which they meant where they would each benefit from the shifts in the electoral landscape. Compared to 2012, Clinton is underperforming with non-college-educated whites and Trump is underperforming with Asians, African-Americans, Latinos and college educated whites.
To get a handle on how these shifts could affect the electoral landscape, we modeled how many of Romney’s votes came from college-educated whites and minorities and how many of Obama’s votes came from non-college-educated whites in each state, county and congressional district. The difference between these two vote totals, shown in the map above, can tell us where Clinton and Trump have the most potential to build on 2012.
The authors went on to game out what that might look like in terms of the electoral vote if one in five voters in those shifting groups switched allegiances.
The Scotsman’s review of Scotland: Mapping the Islands focuses on the Scottish islands that didn’t exist, particularly in a 1560 map by Italian mapmaker Giorgio Sideri (aka Callapoda). On the other hand: “In contrast to Callapoda’s chart, many genuine Scottish islands were omitted from maps of Scotland altogether until only 150 years ago.” [Tony Campbell]
Speaking of islands that didn’t exist, and maps thereof, there’s a new book about them. The Un-Discovered Islands by Malachy Tallack (Birlinn, October). “Gathered in the book are two dozen islands once believed to be real but no longer on the map. These are the products of imagination, deception and simple human error. They are phantoms and fakes: an archipelago of ex-isles and forgotten lands.” Available in the U.K. for now (or via third-party sellers); the Shetland News story about the book suggests that a U.S. edition is forthcoming. Official website. [WMS]
The latest map to go viral is Robert Szucs’s dramatic and colourful map of the U.S. river basins. It’s even more spectacular in high resolution. Made with QGIS, the map separates river basin by colour and assigns stream thickness by Strahler number. I do have a couple of quibbles. The map doesn’t distinguish between the Hudson Bay and Atlantic watersheds: the Great Lakes and Red River basins are coloured the same way. And speaking of the Great Lakes, I have no idea why they look like ferns here. The map is available for sale on Etsy, along with similar maps of other countries, continents and regions. Daily Mail coverage.
