Project Ukko visualizes seasonal wind predictions, i.e., the amount of wind that is forecasted for the upcoming season. It’s the sort of thing the wind generation industry would find useful. But such a prosaic purpose is belied by the breathtaking way in which the data is visualized. [via]
Earlier this month in the New York Times, Greg Milner looked at something that was a frequent subject during The Map Room’s first life: people getting themselves lost by blindly following their GPS units (or satnavs, as the British call them).
Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information—as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.
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Milner is the author of the forthcoming book Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (W. W. Norton, May 2016): pre-order at Amazon or iBooks.
For another look at how GPS may be affecting our brains’ ability to navigate, see “Global Impositioning Systems,” a long read by Alex Hutchinson in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus, which I told you about in 2011.
Last week, Slate’s Rebecca Onion looked at the surveying and mapmaking career of George Washington. Her main source is this page by the Library of Congress’s Edward Redmond. “Beginning with his early career as a surveyor and throughout his life as a soldier, planter, businessman, land speculator, farmer, military officer, and president, Washington relied on and benefitted from his knowledge of maps. Between 1747 and 1799 Washington surveyed over two hundred tracts of land and held title to more than sixty-five thousand acres in thirty-seven different locations,” Redmond writes. Here’s a list of Washington’s maps—drawn by him, drawn by others according to his sketches, or of property owned by him—held by the Library of Congress. [via]
The issue of whether the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer will survive DeLorme’s purchase by Garmin continues to be of concern to Maine residents. The Bangor Daily News last Thursday:
Some Mainers consider DeLorme’s Atlas and Gazetteer their own backwoods bibles. The collection of maps works perfectly for planning expeditions afield, and can prompt plenty of discussion around a wood stove after a long day of hunting or fishing.
When the BDN asked for readers to share their thoughts on the iconic map book, dozens responded, telling us how much the maps have mattered to them.
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Previously: ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Gazetteer’; Maine Reacts to DeLorme’s Acquisition by Garmin.
Here’s a short video overview of the history of cartography and maps, courtesy of GeographyHub, that’s really about what was mapped—and mappable. [via]
Zero degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude is literally nowhere: situated in the middle of the open ocean, off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, the only thing to mark its presence is a weather observation buoy [via]. But it’s also a significant set of coordinates, in that it’s the location you might get in the case of geocoding errors.
Hence the invention of Null Island, an imaginary place to flag geocoding failures. It shows up in version 1.3 of Natural Earth, for example, as an island one square metre in size, but coded so that it would never appear in an actual map. Gary Vicchi explains Null Island in more detail. As is the way of fictional places, Null Island has grown in the imagination: it has its own website, replete with sections on its history, geography, people and economy, and its own flag.
The Local profiles
Lausanne-based game and book company Helvetiq, which last year published Diccon Bewes’s Around Switzerland in 80 Maps. Those maps range, according to the publisher, “from the circular island map of 1480 to the birth of modern Swiss cartography; from the British rail plan for Switzerland to a Soviet map of Basel during the Cold War; from the 1970s Zurich map for men to the vision of a Greater Switzerland with 40 cantons.” Buy at Amazon. [via]
Benjamin Hennig calls on social scientists to “rediscover maps and other forms of geographical visualization”:
It is interesting to consider how far the discipline of human geography appears to have distanced itself from maps over recent times, resulting almost in a form of cartophobia. Several papers over the last years showed a decline in map use and mapping practices in high-profile geographic journals. Cartographic skills as a natural expertise of a geographer seems to have vanished in many places, as have the theoretical and practical elements of geographic data visualization. Do many geographers ‘prefer to write theory rather than employ critical visualizations’, as Perkins (2004: 385) notes?
“Simplified City Map,” a cartoon by John Atkinson. [via]
The 17th-century Dutch cartographer Frederick de Wit, “one of the most famous dealers of maps, prints and art during the Dutch Golden Age,” is the subject of a new book: George Carhart’s Frederick de Wit and the First Concise Reference Atlas, out this month from Brill Publishing. Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.) [via]
An exhibition of the maps of James Robertson (1753–1829), on display at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead, Scotland, wraps up this Saturday. The maps, on loan from the National Library of Scotland, include four maps of Jamaica, where Robertson worked as a land surveyor, and a controversial map of Aberdeenshire that, according to The Press and Journal, “was riddled with ‘inaccuracies’ and spelling mistakes, and sparked a legal dispute which raged until his death in 1829.” [via]
Shelf Awareness is reporting that Seattle’s Wide World Books and Maps, which has operated since 1976, will close at the end of the month. The owner cites the trend toward online shopping and something more particular to map stores: digital maps and online travel guides. [via]
Last week, DC Public Library announced “the release of a century of historic Washington, D.C. maps in Dig DC, the online portal to DCPL Special Collections. These maps cover the District of Columbia and the region from the 1760s to the Civil War. To see them, head on over to the Maps: City & Regional collection on Dig DC!” Of the 8,000 or so maps in the library’s Washingtoniana Map Collection, 250 have been digitized so far; they’re working on scanning the entire collection. [via]
DeLorme publishes other state atlases and gazetteers, but the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer is the one that started it all, the one Mainers rely on heavily, the one they’re worried might disappear now that DeLorme’s been bought by Garmin. Hence screeds like Troy Bennett’s (I should warn you, there are song lyrics):
Is there any other publication so complete, showing roads, trails, campgrounds, public reserve land, rivers, coves, islands and city streets? Am I the only one who didn’t know what an esker was before they picked up a Gazetteer? I doubt it.
If the new owners kill the map that helps define the state, what will happen to us? How will we know the Crocker Cirque even exists, let alone how to find it. (Map 29, D3, by the way.)
So, I’m looking at you, Garmin, out there in Kansas: Keep your hands off my Gazetteer.
Of course, nothing’s happened yet, and nothing may necessarily happen, but Maine losing the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer would be like London losing the A to Z or Winnipeg the Sherlock atlas: paper maps that are local, idiosyncratic, and essential. [via]
Previously: Maine Reacts to DeLorme’s Acquisition by Garmin.
The Cynefin Project is a crowdsourced effort to digitize some 1,200 tithe maps from mid-19th century Wales. Volunteers can transcribe text from the maps and place markers so that they can be georeferenced. Here’s their short introductory video:
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