Tag: hand-drawn

The Quarantine Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The Quarantine AtlasOut today from Black Dog & Leventhal: The Quarantine Atlas, a book-length distillation of CityLab’s COVID-19 mapping project, in which they solicited readers’ hand-drawn maps of life under lockdown, the year 2020 in general, and how life has been changed by the pandemic. They received more than 400 submissions; 65 of those maps, plus essays by divers hands, are included in the book.

To mark The Quarantine Atlas’s release, editor Laura Bliss has a piece in Smithsonian adapted from the book’s introduction and generously illustrated with maps. Bloomberg, which absorbed CityLab a while back, features twelve quarantine maps from the various calls for submissions. Update: Plus an adaptation of David Dudley’s foreword.

Book cover: The Quarantine AtlasThe Quarantine Atlas
by Laura Bliss
Black Dog & Leventhal, 19 Apr 2022
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books | Bookshop

CityLab Continues Its COVID Mapping Project

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bloomberg CityLab is continuing its COVID-19 mapping project: they’ve issued another call for reader-submitted maps. “[T]he new year is a chance to take stock of where we stand now. Once again, Bloomberg CityLab invites you to make a map that reflects on how your world has shifted or been reframed during the pandemic.” Due date is 17 January.

The Quarantine Atlas (book cover)Previously: CityLab Wants Your Hand-Drawn Quarantine Maps; Maps from Isolation; CityLab Wants Your Homemade Map of 2020.

Preorder The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Life under COVID-19 at Amazon (Canada, UK).

Hand-drawn Map Leads Man Abducted in Childhood to Birth Mother

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Vice: “In an attempt to locate his birth family, a man who was abducted at the age of four resorted to drawing a map of his childhood hometown from memory and posting it online. The map went viral in China, resulting in the 37-year-old reconnecting this week with his long-lost mother, whom he is set to see for the first time in 33 years on Jan. 1.” [MAPS-L]

A Project to Restore a 19th-Century Treatise on Hand-drawn Mapping

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Art of Hand Drawn Maps 1890 (Kickstarter cover image)

“I have a new mapping project on Kickstarter,” writes our friend Alejandro Polanco. “This time it is about recovering some exciting hand-drawn maps by a forgotten craftsman from the 19th century.” This is Alejandro’s second project to digitally recover a 19th-century illustrated book; this time his target is an 1890 edition of a treatise on topographical drawing by Juan Papell y Llenas. The book is full of detailed examples of mapping techniques done only with ink on paper. Alejandro’s restored edition, The Art of Hand-drawn Maps 1890, will be released this fall in digital (€18 pledge) and paper (€32) editions.

Alejandro’s previous crowdfunding projects include Pandemic Atlas, The Minimal Geography Atlas, Minimal Geography and Maptorian.

A Flurry of New Book Announcements

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

News about upcoming map books has been thin on the ground of late, which is hardly surprising given the havoc the pandemic has wreaked on the publishing industry as a whole. But in just the past two days we’ve seen three significant new book announcements.

Kenneth Field’s long-awaited Thematic Mapping: 101 Ways to Visualise Empirical Data, which takes as its starting point a map of a single event—the 2016 U.S. presidential election—will be out from Esri Press as an ebook on the 31st of August, Ken announced yesterday. Pre-order: Amazon (Canada, UK).

You might remember James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s amazing 2016 book Where the Animals Go. Their next book of data visualizations, Atlas of the Invisible, will be out in September from Particular Books in the U.K. and in November from W. W. Norton in North America. Pre-order: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Life under COVID-19 is the byproduct of CityLab’s 2020 project soliciting hand-drawn maps of life under quarantine (previously here and here). In the book version, Laura Bliss matches 65 of those submissions with original essays. Due out in April 2022 from Black Dog & Leventhal. Pre-order: Amazon (Canada).

I’ve updated the Map Books of 2021 page with these books; that page still looks awfully sparse compared with previous years. If there’s a map-related book coming out this year that I haven’t listed, please let me know.

Maps at Year’s End

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Kenneth Field has posted his favourite maps from the past year—something he’s been doing since 2013. Quite a diverse set, from the Johns Hopkins coronavirus dashboard to a Lego model of Manhattan: you won’t have seen all of them.

CityLab has posted a selection of reader maps that explore how their lives were affected by 2020. Coronavirus, change and disruption are recurring themes. “We hope these maps offer readers a sense of solace and solidarity, a chance for reflection or provocation, and perhaps even a breath of creative inspiration.” (Previously: CityLab Wants Your Homemade Map of 2020.)

CityLab Wants Your Homemade Map of 2020

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Earlier this year CityLab invited readers to submit maps of their life under lockdown. Now they’re soliciting reader maps again, with a slightly expanded focus: 2020 in general. (Which, in general, was a year: how do you represent that cartographically? That’s the idea.)

We’re inviting you, our readers, to create a homemade map of your life, community, workplace or broader surroundings as you experienced them in 2020. Show us how the extraordinary changes of this year have shown up in your life. Or, try to envision how this year will impact 2021. Perhaps you want to map the city you hope to see—changes in architecture, transportation or public space—or how you imagine, hope or fear humanity might be changed due to this collectively lived experience.

Deadline is Monday, 7 December.

Previously: CityLab Wants Your Hand-Drawn Quarantine Maps; Maps from Isolation.

A Crowdfunded, Hand-drawn Atlas of Scotland

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Artist and writer Andrew Barr is crowdfunding for what he is calling “the first major Scottish atlas for over 100 years”: a hand-drawn, hardcover Atlas of Scotland:

Produced as a visually striking hardback book, combining text with illustrated maps, the Atlas will shed new light on Scotland’s size and resources, its cultural and political history, as well as its long standing as one of the ancient kingdoms of Europe and the richness of its international connections.

As satellite images replace traditional paper atlases, modern technology leaves us with an incomplete picture of the nation. By returning to map-making in pen and ink, and by retelling the story of Scotland’s history and culture, this Atlas aims to delve deeper into the fabric of the land and reveal one of the world’s oldest nations in a whole new light.

Very much a nationalist project—and a personal project as well, which is not how atlases are usually done nowadays, hand-drawn or not. The atlas is projected to ship in October 2021. [History Scotland]

Mapping the Monuments of St. Louis

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
How would you map the monuments of St. Louis?
Monument Lab

In the summer of 2019, a research project spearheaded by Monument Lab asked St. Louis residents and visitors to draw personal maps of the city’s monuments and important sites. “Some maps celebrate famous sites like the St. Louis Zoo and the statue of St. Louis himself atop Art Hill in Forest Park. Others point to things that have been removed from the landscape, like the mounds built by native Mississippians,” St. Louis Public Radio reports. “Another shows a street map of downtown St. Louis with notations for ‘incidents of racism, from microaggression to racial violence.’” A total of 750 people contributed maps, which you can see at this Flickr gallery as well as on the project website, which has accompanying data and analysis. [Osher]

An Illustrative Map of Japan

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An Illustrative Map of Japan
David Cook

David Cook has released his Illustrative Map of Japan, a hand-drawn pictorial map showing the principal Japanese islands in classic oblique, pictorial-map style. On Reddit Cook says that it took ten years, on and off, from concept to completion: “Conceptually I started in 2010, but actually drawing this version didn’t start until 2012 when I finally settled on a size and perspective. Tbh I did not work on it continuously all those years. The drawn portion wrapped up in 2017 and I didn’t start coloring it in until 2019.” It’ll be available for sale as a 24-by-36-inch print at some point. [r/MapPorn]

CityLab Wants Your Hand-Drawn Quarantine Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

CityLab is asking readers to send them hand-made maps of their life under quarantine.

We’re inviting readers to draw a map of your life, community, or broader world as you experience it under coronavirus. Your map can be as straightforward or subjective as you wish. You might show key destinations, beloved neighbors, a new daily routine, the people or restaurants you miss, the future city you hope to see, or anything else that’s become important to you right now. It might even be a map of your indoor life. For an added challenge, try drawing from memory.

Deadline is 20 April, with a selection of submissions to be featured in a future article.

Prior art would include Fuller’s quarantine maps and Kera Till’s “Commuting in Corona Times” (previously).

Keith Myrmel’s Hand-Drawn Trail Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Keith Myrmel

Keith Myrmel, a retired landscape architect from Minnesota, has produced two maps of the Boundary Waters region that are proving popular with hikers and canoers. The maps—one of the Superior Hiking Trail, the other of the North Country Trail and Arrowhead region—are large (26 by 40 inches) and intricately hand-drawn. The Twin Cities Pioneer Press covered Myrmel and his work last June:

“It’s fascinating how many people are map lovers,” Myrmel said. He has an extensive collection of Boundary Waters Wilderness maps dating back to the 1950s. “I said, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this old-school style. It’s all by hand.”

Using pencils, markers and watercolor paint, he put down information from books, maps, the internet and personal experience on a 2-by-13-foot map. The process took hundreds of hours, he said.

See also this 2018 story from the Star Tribune. The maps cost $34 or $35 and are available for sale from Myrmel’s website or from a number of local businesses.

New Books for May 2018

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Art

Helen Cann’s How to Make Hand Drawn Maps: A Creative Guide With Tips, Tricks, and Projects (Chronicle, 1 May paperback, 22 May ebook). “With wonderful examples and easy-to-follow instructions, this beautifully illustrated how-to book makes it simple and fun to create one-of-a-kind hand-drawn maps. Helpful templates, grids, and guidelines complement a detailed breakdown of essential cartographic elements and profiles of talented international map artists.” Amazon, iBooks

Academic Monographs

I trained as a historian of the French Third Republic, so Kory Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris, 1889-1934 (Liverpool University Press, 4 May), which “looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934),” would have very much been up my alley twenty years ago. “The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space.” Amazon

Chris Barrett’s Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 22 May) is about “the many anxieties provoked by early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain. […]  This volume explores three major poems of the period—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials.” Amazon, iBooks

Related: Map Books of 2018.

Atlas Obscura Readers’ Dream Islands: The Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I mentioned Atlas Obscura’s call for readers to submit maps of their perfect dream island, but I neglected to post a link to the results. Atlas Obscura: “We received submissions from readers young and old, all full of fun and creative details. Entries included islands full of cats (there were several of those, in fact), political strongholds, simple sandbar paradises, intricate hidden bases, guinea pig sanctuaries, and poetic dreamscapes.”