January 2016 – The Map Room

Seafloor Gravity Map

Published on 31 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The ocean floor is still very much terra incognita: only 5 to 15 percent of it has been mapped via bathymetry. But using military satellite measurements of the Earth’s shape and gravity field, a new map of the ocean floor has been created. “The result of their efforts is a global data set that tells where the ridges and valleys are by showing where the planet’s gravity field varies. […] Shades of orange and red represent areas where seafloor gravity is stronger (in milligals) than the global average, a phenomenon that mostly coincides with the location of underwater ridges, seamounts, and the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates. Shades of blue represent areas of lower gravity, corresponding largely with the deepest troughs in the ocean.”

Three Fantasy Authors Talk About Maps

Published on 31 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Seth Dickinson’s debut fantasy novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (which by the way is an amazing book that I recommend wholeheartedly) contains a map unlike your typical fantasy map: it includes annotations by the protagonist that conceal as much as they reveal, and reveal more about the protagonist than they do the geography. In a post on Omnivoracious last October, Dickinson explained how that map came into being.

In Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (which has been recommended to me), the scope of the maps broadens book by book as the protagonist’s horizons expands. Today she talked about working with the map (now in digital form) as she writes book five of the series.

Fran Wilde’s debut novel Updraft (which I’ve heard great things about and should read soon) came out last September. Yesterday, in a blog post called “A Map Year,” she ruminated on the many ways an author encounters maps, in fiction and in real life, and as a metaphor for growth and creativity.

The Hunt-Lenox Globe

Published on 31 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Hunt-Lenox Globe, a five-inch engraved copper globe dating from the early 1500s, is one of the earliest surviving globes, one of the earliest depictions of the New World and one of only two places where the phrase hic sunt dracones (“here be dragons”) can be found. It’s held by the New York Public Library, who are justly proud of it. They’ve received a grant to produce a 3D scan of the globe; once that’s finished, the 3D model will be available online. In the meantime, here are some other images of the Hunt-Lenox Globe from the NYPL. [via]

Mapping the Zika Virus (and the Problems with Doing So)

Published on 31 January 20164 February 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Maps about the Zika virus have been cropping up lately. I’ve been reluctant to post them, initially because I didn’t want to play a role in whipping up unnecessary panic, but also because—the more I looked at them—many of the maps are problematic in and of themselves.

Some, like this CDC map of countries with active Zika virus transmission, lack useful detail. Or if they have detail, it’s not at all helpful: The Economist’s map shows the local risk of transmission and the number of travellers from Brazil; this map aggregates news stories about the virus and overlays the predicted distribution—predicted, mind—of two mosquito species. Neither map says anything about the spread of the virus itself; both could do a great job of scaring the crap out of anyone who gives either map a casual look. Finally, like these Scientific American maps, they can be extremely U.S.-centric, suggesting that the virus is only a problem insofar as it affects us. [via]

Update, 4 February: Direct Relief’s Zika virus maps, some of which taken from the above, share the problem of indirectness but lose the U.S.-centricity. [via]

Another Look at Matthew Cusick

Published on 30 January 201630 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Cusick, Genevieve's Wave (after #3884 by Pierre Carreau), 2014 Inlaid maps on panel 40 x 62 inches. — Matthew Cusick, *Genevieve’s Wave (after #3884 by Pierre Carreau)*, 2014. Inlaid maps on panel.

Creative Boom, an art an design blog, has a brief profile of the artist Matthew Cusick that focuses on his recent ocean scenes. I first blogged about Cusick in 2006; he’s even better now. If you’re not familiar with his art, which is constructed from collages of old maps, you really owe it to yourself to take a look. A close look. [via]

Lost Cornish Map Rediscovered

Published on 30 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

A seventeenth-century map of Falmouth, Cornwall lost for more than a century has turned up in the private collection of a local historian who died last June. Created by George Withiell in 1690, the map, titled A True Map of all Sir Peter Killigrew’s Lands in the Parish of Mylor and part of Budock Lands, was last on public display in the 1880s and had gone missing since then. The historian, Alan Pearson, found it for sale in Bristol 10 years ago. The map is now on display at the Cornwall Record Office in Bristol. BBC News, West Briton. [via/via]

A Snowstorm Revealed Through Traffic Delays

Published on 30 January 201630 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

NPR graphics editor Alyson Hurt discovered that this month’s blizzard was showing up in Google Maps as traffic delays, and whipped up a little script that took regular screencaps of Google Maps’s traffic layer. She then created an animated GIF from the screencaps. The end result (above) dramatically shows the storm sweeping across the mid-Atlantic states.

Andy Woodruff then took Hurt’s script and created an animation of an ordinary day of Boston traffic. For a “quick, crude” script it certainly seems to have potential. [via]

‘We Are One’ in Colonial Williamsburg

Published on 29 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

We Are One: Mapping America’s Road from Revolution to Independence, an exhibition by the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center (it ran from May to November last year) is going on tour. First stop: Colonial Williamsburg. From March 2016 to January 2017 it will appear at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. From the press release: “More than 30 unique objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collections will be included in the exhibition, which were not shown when it initially opened at the Boston Public Library in May 2015. […] Many of the objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collection to be seen in We Are One are on view for the first time or are rarely exhibited.” [via]

Previously: Mapping the American Revolution.

Literary Selections on Cartography

Published on 29 January 201618 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Literary Selections on Cartography was a series of letterpress broadsheets published by the History of Cartography project. A total of 23 appeared between 1992 and 2015; they included poetry and snippets from longer works, and were sometimes accompanied by commentaries. The move of Silver Buckle Press from the University of Wisconsin—Madison to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum will put an end to any future Literary Selections, in letterpress form at least, but the complete set so far is available online. [via]

Previously: Maps and Poetry.

Mapping Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution

Published on 28 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

A decade’s worth of data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument aboard the Aura satellite reveals the change in global nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) pollution from 2005 to 2014: down significantly in some areas, due to stricter emissions controls, but up sharply in others. More at NASA Earth Observatory.

More on ‘A Map of Every City’

Published on 28 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Without question, the most popular post on The Map Room so far this week—by two orders of magnitude—was this post pointing to Chaz Hutton’s “A Map of Every City.” Hutton’s map went kind of viral, and not just here. He’s since announced that a print of the map will be available at some point; he’s also written a post on Medium explaining some of the background behind the map.

History of the Miami Map Fair

Published on 28 January 201628 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Miami International Map Fair is just around the corner: it runs from February 5th to 7th. Relatedly, Joseph H. Fitzgerald has just published a short (64 pp.) history of the fair: The Miami Map Fair: The First 20 Years. From the excerpt I saw on Amazon it looks like one of those dry institutional histories, but there are people for whom this will be interesting. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

Update: Miami Herald coverage of the Fair [via].

Ian’s 3D Relief Maps

Published on 27 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Planetary globes aren’t the only map-related 3D-printed items being sold on Shapeways; Ian Grasshoff writes to say that he’s flogging 3D relief maps there as well. “I have made it a focus to only use Open Data (LiDAR where available) and Open Source GIS/modeling software,” he writes. “I think the results speak for themselves.”

Books About the Tabula Peutingeriana

Published on 27 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve blogged about the Tabula Peutingeriana before. It was a medieval copy of a fourth- or fifth-century map of the Roman road network. Combined, its 11 sheets form a scroll 6.82 metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, with territories elongated beyond modern recognition; it was basically the classical period’s equivalent of a TripTik or Beck network map. The sole remaining copy is held by the National Library of Austria: it’s too fragile to put on display, though an exception was made for a single day in 2007.

peutinger-books Anyway. During my online meanderings today I stumbled across two academic books about the Tabula that I was previously unaware of: The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire by Emily Albu (2014) and Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (2010). Both from Cambridge University Press, neither cheap.