July 2016 – The Map Room

A Forthcoming Map Art Book About New York City

Published on 22 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Yesterday on her Facebook page, Katharine Harmon announced her next map art book: You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City is coming in November from Princeton Architectural Press. “It features 150 cartographic views of New York (which has to be the most-mapped city in the world)—including historical maps, cartoons, contemporary art, pictorial maps, hand-drawn maps, and more,” Harmon writes. Based on her previous books, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (2004) and The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009), both of which I own, this will almost certainly be a book worth looking for. Pre-order at Amazon.

Google Maps Expands User Edits

Published on 22 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps is adding features to its iOS and Android apps to enable its users to add and edit information about points of interest. Edits will be verified by other users before going live. More at TechCrunch. [James Fee]

New Book: Making Art from Maps

Published on 22 July 201622 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Jill K. Berry’s latest book, Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists, is out this month from Rockport Publishers. From the publisher: “With her cartographic connections, she takes you on a gallery tour, introducing you to the work of some of the most exciting artists creating with maps today. Designer interviews are accompanied by 25 accessible how-to projects of her own design that teach many of the techniques used by the gallery artists.”

(I reviewed Berry’s first book, Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking, back in 2011.)

Amazon (Kindle) / iBooks

Cartographiae, a Belgian Map Exhibition

Published on 22 July 201622 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Cartographiae, a map exhibition organized as part of a summer science and culture festival at the Belgian royal palace, opens today and runs until 4 September. Press release (in French). Admission is free; for those of us who can’t make it to Brussels, there’s an online version. [WMS]

Antonín Rükl, 1932-2016

Published on 22 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Astronomer and lunar cartographer Antonín Rükl, author of the authoritative Atlas of the Moon among other works, died on 12 July in his home in Prague at the age of 83, Sky and Telescope reports.

Two More Posts on Fantasy Maps

Published on 20 July 201620 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Two more posts about imaginary maps on the Library of Congress’s map blog: a look at maps made after the books were published (such as posters, movie adaptations and online maps), focusing on Middle-earth and Westeros; and a look at maps in children’s stories that talks about whether what appears on maps is in fact true.

(In my previous entry about this series I misattributed the authorship of these posts. That entry has since been corrected. Sorry about that.)

Previously: Fantasy Maps: Middle-earth vs. Westeros; The Library of Congress Looks at Fantasy Maps.

Sea Monster Shower Curtain

Published on 19 July 20169 February 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Retired graphic designer Don Moyer is producing a sea monster shower curtain, inspired by the iconic beasties found on early modern European maps and based on a sea monster print he created last year. It’s a Kickstarter project, but since it’s already been funded, it’s definitely happening. So if your world map shower curtain is beginning to fray, here’s an alternative. [Mental Floss]

New NLS Exhibition: You Are Here

Published on 19 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

A new map exhibition opens this Friday at the National Library of Scotland. You Are Here “challenges our acceptance of maps. It poses questions about how they are made and how we understand them. Drawn from our collection of more than two million maps and atlases, each map in the exhibition shows the answer to some or all of those questions. The maps on display zoom out from the Library itself to the whole world in the shape of the Blaeu Atlas Maior—‘the most beautiful atlas ever made.’ They also include one of the finest plans of Edinburgh and the first map of Scotland, as well as more utilitarian railway, fishing and schoolroom maps.” The exhibition runs until 3 April 2017. I imagine there will be more links once it opens. [NLS]

The United Swears of America

Published on 18 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

united-swears

Linguist Jack Grieve studies regional variations in languages using quantitative methods. A year ago he posted a number of maps of the United States showing regional variation in swear word usage, based on a corpus of nearly nine billion geocoded tweets. Stan Carey of the Strong Language blog has more on the maps:

Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states—together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—are the areas of particular motherfucker favour. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts. Fuckboy—a rising star—is also mainly a coastal thing, so far.

I love everything about this. See also Stan’s follow-up post from last March. (Thanks to Natalie for finding this.)

2016 Map Gallery Results

Published on 18 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Esri has announced the results of their 2016 Map Gallery competition. The top three maps in a number of different categories are posted on this page. Nearly 700 maps were submitted for the contest by attendees at last month’s Esri User Conference. [Esri]

The Osher Map Library’s Digital Project

Published on 18 July 201618 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Slate’s Jacob Brogan looks at the Osher Map Library and its decade-long project to digitize its collection of maps, atlases and globes, and ruminates on the advantages and disadvantages of digitization.

Digitization also presents scholars with a new way of looking at maps, since, according to Fowler, “you can get a lot more detail than you could even looking through a magnifying glass.” As Matthew Edney, Osher professor in the history of cartography, pointed out, you can also dwell on an image longer than you could while studying a physical item under controlled conditions. “Rare book rooms kick you out,” he told me, but you can take your time with digital copies.

In some cases, that’s allowed Edney to discover new features of maps that he thought he already knew well. He points in particular to an 18th-century map of New England that was once owned by Hugh Percy, a British army officer who was a key player during the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Staring at it on screen, you realize there are these faint pencil lines, possibly indicating tentative knowledge,” Edney said. As he explains in a recent paper on the topic, such observations helped him better understand how Percy likely used the map—offering a picture of what the map meant at the time and not just what it shows.

Previously: A Look at the Osher Map Library.

After the Map

Published on 18 July 201618 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

William Rankin’s After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century is out this month from the University of Chicago Press (Amazon, iBooks). The book’s website explains in depth what it’s about, and makes all the book’s illustrations and data available for free download. [GIS Lounge]

This book can be read at two scales. Narrowly, it is a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century that situates technologies like GPS within a longer trajectory of spatial knowledge. But more expansively, by connecting geographic knowledge to territorial politics and new ways of navigating the world, it is also a political and cultural history of geographic space itself.

I’ve posted a few of Rankin’s earlier projects for the Radical Cartography website on The Map Room; see for example City Income Donuts and The World’s Population by Latitude and Longitude.

The Great British Colouring Map

Published on 18 July 201618 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Another map colouring book has just been announced, this one from the Ordnance Survey: “The book will take you on an immersive colouring-in journey around Great Britain, from the coasts and forests to our towns and countryside. Expect to see iconic cities, recognisable tourist spots and historical locations across England, Scotland and Wales via the 55 illustrations. The Great British Colouring Map also includes a stunning gatefold of London. We can’t wait to share it with you—it will be on shelves in October.” Pre-order at Amazon.

Previously: A-Z Maps Colouring Book; Albion’s Glorious Ile: A 400-Year-Old Map Colouring Book; City Maps: An Adult Colouring Book.

A-Z at 80

Published on 18 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company, which produces the iconic A-Z Maps line, is marking its 80th anniversary this year by posting a series of photos of company memorabilia—they plan 80 photos over 80 days. So far I’m particularly fascinated by the mapmaking tools and processes, like this scribing tool, this type layer and these negatives—all from the time when maps were photo typeset (only three decades ago!). [WMS]

The Ordnance Survey Maps Britain’s Favourite Routes

Published on 15 July 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Ordnance Survey has created a series of data visualizations showing the most popular walking and cycling routes, based on OS Maps usage. “The 500,000 plus routes were illustrated in a series of beautiful data visualisations by [cartographic designer] Charley [Glynn], who found it amazing that the people who created routes for their outdoors adventures had logged almost every bit of British coastline. It neatly frames the rest of the data and gives the illusion you are looking at a map of Great Britain. The darker, thicker areas illustrate the higher concentration of routes and reveal popularity.” Flickr gallery. [Mountain Bike Rider]