I got lost in the map of an imaginary country.
The Baedeker told me to look for the palace of government
and I found my great-grandmother
renouncing the head of a state that was never hers.
This is how “The Direction of Escape,” a poem by Sonya Taaffe published at online zine Not One of Us, begins. It is a poem very much about the current moment. Taaffe says, “The title is a line of Le Guin’s. The stories it contains are real.”
Content warning: Some of these links contain disturbing images: I’ve marked them with a †.
More on the question of whether theatre maps accurately reflect the ground situation. Nathan Ruser’s maps have been used to argue that Russian forces are controlling roads rather than territory, but Ruser complains that his maps are being misinterpreted: they were never meant to show territorial control, just troop movements. See also this Twitter thread from Jennifer Cafarella, in which she explains the methodology and reasoning behind her team’s maps.
3D models of bombing damage.† Satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetric data are used to create 3D models of bombing damage in Ukraine. [Maps Mania]
A map of attacks on civilian targets† with photo and video documentation. [Nataliya Gumenyuk]
Where hot spots are literally hot spots. In a Twitter thread, Sotris Valkaniotis shows how military operations in Ukraine show up in Landsat spectral imagery: weapons fire turns up as hot spots showing “very high temperature in short-wave infrared band.”
A Ukrainian map of alleged Russian casualties† and where they were deployed from. [Michael Weiss]
A map of checkpoint traffic. More than two million Ukrainians have fled the Russian invasion. Overwhelmingly, they’re fleeing westward. This map shows how busy each border checkpoint is: Polish border crossings are extremely congested. [Kyiv Independent]
Meanwhile, Kenneth Field has been working on ways to map Ukraine’s refugees. Here’s his most recent iteration:
Update to my illustrative #Ukraine refugee map.
Adds more displaced grey dots to major populated areas.
Adds same stippled symbology to Russian incursion to indicate fuzziness of invasion (neither lines nor areas).#cartography #StandWithUkraine 💙💛 pic.twitter.com/QOyA8RaRi0
— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) March 8, 2022
Ukraine’s population density. More than 41 million people live in Ukraine. This map from Airwars shows the population density per square kilometre. Which shows how many people in an area are affected by a particular military strike.
Apple says Crimea is Ukrainian. Mashable: “Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute.” Apple had marked Crimea as Russian in 2019, which pissed Ukraine off at the time. [TechCrunch]
Finally, this striking bit of art:
By Ukrainian tattoo artist Eugene Anatsky pic.twitter.com/qVybeGYAuE
— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) March 5, 2022
Areas vs. lines. I’ve seen several reminders that the areas shown in some maps as being under control by Russian forces are not necessarily under Russian control. Since Russian columns have to stick to major roads and cannot, under current conditions, move cross-country, the argument is to visualize Russian incursions as lines rather than areas, as Nathan Ruser does in maps for his Daily Ukraine Brief (above).
The New York Times maps the Russian invasion. This regularly updated New York Times page includes their maps of the on-the-ground situation in Ukraine. Areas rather than lines though.
Where the trains are still running. Ukraine’s rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia has posted a map (above) showing which stations are still operating—at least at that particular moment. [Christopher Miller/ТРУХА]
Captured maps and other documents carried by Russian troops are being posted to Twitter.
Previously: Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Traffic Data Inadvertently Revealed the Start of the Russian Invasion; Air-Raid Shelters in Kyiv; A Crowdsourced Map of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
AppleInsider looks at how online maps (Apple Maps, Google Maps), especially their traffic layer, inadvertently revealed Russian troop movements at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The sheer volume of mapping data now available at our fingertips means it was possible for civilians half a world away to see when Russian forces began moving. Specifically, that data pinpointed a traffic jam starting on the Russian side of the border, actively moving into Ukraine in the first few minutes of the Russian and Ukraine conflict.
Just as with any cartography, this information required interpreting. Google Maps did not specifically say that it was troop movements, nor was its satellite imagery up to the minute. During the process of researching this story, we’ve confirmed that Apple Maps presented similar inbound troop movement information—but it wasn’t setting out to do that either.
What these services did, though, was register all of the smartphone users whose driving was slowed or halted by unusual traffic conditions. Wherever the majority of the data came from, it was possible to determine what was happening when coupled with known details of Russian troop locations.
In a Twitter thread, Lisa Charlotte Muth provides a comprehensive list of maps and infographics about the Russian invasion of Ukraine produced by news organizations.
The city of Kyiv has posted a map of public air-raid shelters in the Ukrainian capital, including basements and cellars, metro stations, underground parking, even underpasses. [Politico EU]
The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map “is a crowdsourced effort to map, document and verify information in order to provide reliable information for policymakers and journalists of the on-the-ground and online situation in and around Ukraine. […] The pins on this map represents open source material such as videos, photos and imagery that have been cross-referenced with satellite imagery to determine precise locations of military activity.” It’s produced by the Centre for Information Resilience. [Boing Boing]
As is often the case with disputed boundaries, what online maps show depends on who they’re showing it to. So when it comes to Crimea, which annexation by Russia two years ago many countries refuse to recognize (not least of which Ukraine!), Google Maps shows Crimea as Russian territory to Russian users, as Ukrainian territory to Ukrainian users, and disputed territory to everyone else. As the Washington Post reports, that didn’t stop Google from getting in trouble with Russia last month, when Google changed Crimean names in all versions of Google Maps to conform with a 2015 Ukrainian law that removed Soviet names from Ukrainian territory. Russian Crimean politicians called it “Russophobic” and “topographical cretinism,” according to the Post; by last Friday, though, the name changes had apparently been reverted. [WMS]
This interactive map of the number of intercity rail trips between Ukrainian cities would be a little easier for me to parse if I could read Ukrainian, but I agree with Aleks Buczkowski’s assessment that it’s well designed. [Geoawesomeness]
