Month: September 2020

More on the Western U.S. Wildfires

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NASA Earth Observatory

NASA Earth Observatory has had several stories on the western U.S. wildfires, gathered here. This story summarizes the situation; satellite images of the smoke generated by the fires can be seen here, here and here.

Marena Brinkhurst of Mapbox has a comprehensive list of open data sources relating to the wildfires, smoke, and air quality.

Mark Altaweel at GIS Lounge looks at how GIS is being used to map wildfires, smoke and air pollution.

Previously: California Wildfires, 2020 Edition.

Mapping Maine

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Moses Greenleaf, “Map of the Inhabited Part of the State of Maine,” 1820. Map, 52.5×61.5 cm. Osher Map Library.

Mapping Maine: The Land and Its Peoples, 1677-1842, an exhibition of maps celebrating Maine’s bicentennial while acknowledging the Wabanaki presence and history in the space that became Maine, opens today at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. The online component is here; there is a physical exhibition in the OML’s gallery, but visitors are limited to a maximum of four per one-hour timeslot: details here. Curated by Matthew Edney, the exhibition runs until 31 March 2021.

Mapping COVID-19 Outbreaks in the U.S. Food System

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Food & Environment Reporting Network (screenshot)

The Food & Environment Reporting Network has a map of COVID outbreaks in the U.S. food system. “Since April, FERN has been closely tracking the spread of Covid-19 at meatpacking plants, food processing facilities, and farms. This dashboard is home to our latest reporting on Covid-19 cases and food system workers, and is updated each weekday.” [via]

Dan Bell, the Ordnance Survey, and Fantasy Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Dan Bell, whose “Tolkien-inspired” maps of real-world places have been a thing for a while now, makes an appearance on the Ordnance Survey’s blog to demonstrate how he uses OS maps in his creative process.

Previously: Dan Bell’s ‘Tolkien-Style’ Maps of the Lake District; Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS; What Does a Fantasy Map Look Like?

The COVID-19 Infodemic and Online Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

So many COVID-19 maps: some misleading, some mislabelled or with other design flaws, some lacking key information, some misunderstood or misused. On GIS Lounge, Mark Altaweel explores how the COVID-19 “infodemic”—the overabundance of information, some reliable, some not—has manifested itself in online coronavirus maps.

Mapping a World of Cities

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map of Tenochtitlan and the Gulf of Mexico, 1524
Map of Tenochtitlán and the Gulf of Mexico, attrib. Albrecht Dürer, 1524. 29.8×46.5 cm. John Carter Brown Library.

The Leventhal Center’s latest online map exhibition, Mapping a World of Cities, draws examples of city maps from ten map libraries and collections across the United States; those examples range from a 1524 map of Tenochtitlán (above) to a 1927 map of Chicago gangs.

Looking at maps helps us to understand the changing geography of urban life. Maps didn’t just serve as snapshots of how cities looked at one moment in time; in the form of plans, maps were also used to build, speculate, and fight over urban form. Historical maps reflect cities’ ethnic and economic transformations, systems of domination and oppression, sites of monumentality and squalor. They capture good times and bad, expansion, decay, and destruction. City dwellers take great pride in their cities, as part of a shared sense of place that embedded in a historical trajectory. Maps tell the stories of a city’s past, present—and perhaps its future.

The Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division contributed five maps to the exhibition; see their post.

Red and Blue vs. Gray and Green

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
New York Times

The New York Times uses the colours in aerial images as a proxy for political leanings: rather than red-and-blue electoral maps, the political landscape, Tim Wallace and Krishna Karra argue, is more green and gray.

The pattern we observe here is consistent with the urban-rural divide we’re accustomed to seeing on traditional maps of election results. What spans the divide—the suburbs represented by transition colors—can be crucial to winning elections. […] At each extreme of the political spectrum, the most Democratic areas tend to be heavily developed, while the most Republican areas are a more varied mix: not only suburbs, but farms and forests, as well as lands dominated by rock, sand or clay.

This is a generalization, to be sure, but so are most political maps, and the notion that urban areas tend to vote Democratic while rural areas tend to vote Republican isn’t what I’d call a revelation. Still.