Next month sees the release of The Map Against the World, a Korean movie about cartographer Kim Jeong-ho, who in 1861 produced an enormous, detailed map of Korea called the Daedongyeojido. The movie stars Cha Seung-won as Kim and is directed by Kang Woo-suk. Here’s a trailer:
https://youtu.be/RikFHUvlFGM
According to IMDb, it opens on 7 September in South Korea and on the 9th in the United States. (I’d check that page for other international release dates, if any.) [WMS]
Streetwise Maps, which has been publishing laminated maps of city centres around the world, is apparently closing up shop. In a statement posted to their website over the weekend (according to the Wayback Machine), Michael and Andrika Brown say as much:
Frankly, we’re pooped.
So now, after all the miles, all the notes, all the sketches and the reams of research material, it’s finally time to set aside the tools and retire (cue the band, release the confetti!!). It’s time for a new adventure.
Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this and to all of you who came along on the journey, this fiesta of a life. We are forever grateful.
No other details or word on how the business will be wound up. Streetwise Maps products are still available in stores (Amazon link), at least for the time being. [MAPS-L]
The City of Boston fields several hundred bed bug complaints a year. The Boston Globe has put together an interactive map showing every complaint made from January 2012 onward—1,822 in all. (The dots show date only, and the map doesn’t zoom in enough to out anybody specific.) [Leventhal Map Center]
Another profile of ocean cartographer Marie Tharp, this time from Smithsonian.com’s Erin Blakemore. As Blakemore recounts, Tharp crunched and mapped the sonar sounding data collected by her collaborator, Bruce Heezen; her calculations revealed a huge valley in the middle of a ridge in the North Atlantic seafloor.
“When I showed what I found to Bruce,” she recalled, “he groaned and said ‘It cannot be. It looks too much like continental drift.’ … Bruce initially dismissed my interpretation of the profiles as ‘girl talk’.” It took almost a year for Heezen to believe her, despite a growing amount of evidence and her meticulous checking and re-checking of her work. He only changed his mind when evidence of earthquakes beneath the rift valley she had found was discovered—and when it became clear that the rift extended up and down the entire Atlantic. Today, it is considered Earth’s largest physical feature.
When Heezen—who published the work and took credit for it—announced his findings in 1956, it was no less than a seismic event in geology. But Tharp, like many other women scientists of her day, was shunted to the background.
I really ought to get to Hali Felt’s 2012 biography of Tharp, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, at some point. Amazon (Kindle), iBooks.
Previously: Marie Tharp Profile; Soundings: A Biography of Marie Tharp; Marie Tharp and Plate Tectonics; Marie Tharp.
Everything Flows is an interactive online map that shows how much water comes into, is consumed in and flows out of Germany.
“Water flows” does not only refer to the hydrological processes related to natural watercourses. The project also answers the following questions: How much water flows through Germany in terms of natural, artificial and virtual flows? What are the different ways in which water is used and for what? Who uses it and why? And how much water flows out of Germany—physically and virtually?
[IÖW]
The Tube map, like other diagrammatic transit network maps, does not show distances between stations very well: two adjacent stations on the map could be right on top of each other or miles apart. Last November Transport for London released a map showing walking times between each station (PDF); news stories at the time connected it to imminent strikes by Tube workers. Now they’ve released another walking map, this one showing the number of steps between each station (PDF), which is presumably mainly of interest to people with activity trackers (pedometers, fitness bands and smart watches) that count their steps. News coverage from the Daily Standard. [Map Makers]
Ever since Garmin announced it was purchasing DeLorme last February, there has been considerable anxiety in Maine over the possibility that the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer would be discontinued. Everyone in Maine can now relax: Garmin has announced that it’s keeping DeLorme’s entire Atlas and Gazetteer line of paper atlases.
“As a part of the acquisition earlier this year and subsequent integration efforts, Garmin recently completed its analysis of DeLorme’s Atlas & Gazetteer business. We have concluded that these venerated, highly respected products will not only remain as a part of Garmin’s offering, but will continue to be enhanced in the coming months and years,” said Ted Gartner, director of corporate communications for Garmin.
“Because the DeLorme name is so well-known and closely associated with the unique feature set and style of the Atlas & Gazetteers, which combines digital cartography with human editing, the product line will continue under the same iconic brand and familiar appearance. Furthermore, we will be revising and updating the atlas series in the coming years, by investing in additional resources and cartography staff based in the Yarmouth facility, formerly the DeLorme headquarters,” Gartner added.
[MAPS-L]
Previously: It’s ‘Too Early’ to Announce the Fate of the Maine Atlas; Mainers Speak Out on the DeLorme Atlas; ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Gazetteer’; Maine Reacts to DeLorme’s Acquisition by Garmin; Garmin Is Buying DeLorme.
Update, 1 Sept.: Bangor Daily News coverage. [WMS]
On the Making Maps: DIY Cartography blog, John Krygier announces the third edition of his and Denis Wood’s Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, out this month from Guilford Press. The new edition of this extremely visual guide includes more than 40 new pages of content, Krygier says, plus new maps and examples and other changes he details in the blog post. Buy at Amazon.
(I reviewed the first edition back in 2006. I knew a lot less about cartography back then, and I suspect it shows.)
Map Men is a YouTube series by comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones. It’s funny as hell, and quite informative too: it’s two silly people being very smart about often-silly cartographical situations. Six episodes so far; I hope they make more. [Geographical]
Reddit user joostjakob posted the above map to MapPorn with the following caption: “Why population density maps are hard to read: exactly the same amount of people live in the black and in the blue areas.” [Maps on the Web]
Uncharted Atlas is a Twitter bot that generates a new fantasy map every hour. The brainchild of glaciologist Martin O’Leary, it uses algorithmically created terrain that is weathered by water erosion, a process he details on this page (All Over the Map’s post explains it in more human-readable terms). As Martin writes:
I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.
At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.
The code is available for playing with, and apparently other people are doing just that. Another algorithm—one that linguists should find fascinating—generates the place names.
These maps, generated by Python and JavaScript, are at least credible in comparison to the human-made product. (Quite possibly better, since fantasy maps aren’t always geologically and hydrologically accurate.) So it’s possible to look at Uncharted Atlas as an indictment of fantasy geographies and maps.
Another profile of New World Cartography, the South Carolina firm that combines computer-generated cartography with hand colouring and custom framing, this time from local newspaper The Island Packet. [WMS]
Previously: New World Cartography.
A fascinating story from the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Robinson Map Library, in which map and geospatial librarian Jaime Martindale used aerial photos held in the library to help a patron track down the site of a 1966 bomber crash in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. Neat stuff. [History of Cartography Project]
The fantasy maps that get the most popular and critical attention are those of Middle-earth and Westeros. That’s almost entirely due to their respective series’ popularity (and in the case of Middle-earth, the foundational nature of that map and its influence on later works). Maps of Robert Jordan’s hugely popular Wheel of Time series don’t get quite the same attention—a situation that Adam Whitehead, writing on his Atlas of Ice and Fire blog, tries to rectify. Reading his post, I suspect that the afterthought-ish nature of said maps might have something to do with it.
Apparently Robert Jordan did not originally plan to include maps in the books, and did so only at the urging of his publisher Tom Doherty because people expected maps in a fantasy novel. This may be why the earliest maps for the books were pretty bare-bones, only featuring the names of the major countries, the two big mountain ranges and not much else. It may also explain the curiously straight mountain range edges to the map border which later came in for much ribbing from reviewers.
Here again is a link to a 2009 Tor.com post by Jason Denzel on the maps of Jordan’s so-called Randland.
(Sidebar: In the talk on fantasy maps I gave at Readercon in July 2014 I noted the difference in map quality between the paperback editions of The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt; the second map is of considerably lower quality, but has the virtue of being more legible at mass-market paperback size.)
Interchange Choreography is a collection of maps of complicated highway interchanges by Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux. “Applying colors to roads and using connecting roads to blend those colors adds structure and breathes new life in to areas that are often avoided for their complexity. The results resemble everything from dancers to otherworldly creatures.”
New Jersey’s interchanges look particularly complicated:
Prints are also available. More at Slate and Fast Company. [Leventhal Map Center]
