Imaginary Maps – Page 2

Null Island

Published on 19 February 20162 August 2024 by Jonathan Crowe

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.

Metroid Metro: Video Games Mapped Like Subways

Published on 9 February 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Take a map from a popular Nintendo video game. Draw it in the style of a familiar transit map. That’s what Matt Stevenson has done here, with a half-dozen or so maps from Final Fantasy, Metroid, Zelda and other games done in the style of metro system maps from Washington, New York and other cities. Available for sale as posters. [via]

Plotted: A Literary Atlas

Published on 3 February 20163 February 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Another look at Plotted: A Literary Atlas (Zest, October 2015) a collection of maps of literary worlds by Andrew DeGraff (whose work is quite distinctive and unique), this time from Atlas Obscura (and focusing on his map for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time). Previously. Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks

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.

A Map of Every City

Published on 24 January 201628 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

“A Map of Every City” by Chaz Hutton:

View this post on Instagram

A wordy one for your Saturday afternoon. Enjoy. (Feel free to name neighbourhoods so I know where to go when I visit your city)

A post shared by Chaz Hutton (@instachaaz) on Jan 23, 2016 at 8:39am PST

Andy Woodruff’s Islands of Boston

Published on 21 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Andy Woodruff imagines Boston neighbourhoods as islands, where any unpopulated areas—commercial districts, industrial areas, highways, parks—are represented as water. “Some neighborhoods of the Boston area are actual islands, or were at one point. Others, however, can feel that way even when connected to each other by land. Water isn’t the only thing that can create a gulf between neighborhoods; sometimes it’s created by features of the urban landscape and the experience of passing through them.” [via]

The Biomes of a Tilted Earth

Published on 8 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Uploaded by Reddit user Lowtuff to MapPorn, this map imagines the Earth’s biomes if the continents were rotated 90 degrees, with the North Pole somewhere in North Africa. It mines more or less the same territory as Randall Mundroe does in this What If? answer. [via]

Emily Garfield’s Map Art

Published on 15 February 201518 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Emily Garfield’s art is a pen-and-watercolour exercise in the cartography of imaginary places. Her drawings “are inspired by the visual language of maps, as well as the fractal similarity that cities share with biological processes such as the patterns of cells and neurons.” Above: “Branching Networks (Cityspace #178).”

Sorol

Published on 6 November 201418 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Sorol world map

Another one for those of you who like geofiction as much as I do. The Sorolpedia is an online encyclopedia of the distant and fictional world of Sorol, containing articles about the planet and its inhabitants. The maps are something else: far better than you’d expect from such a project (there’s even a KML file to import it into Google Earth). Its creator has put it on indefinite hiatus since 2010, so we may not see any more updates, but it’s still fascinating stuff.

OpenGeofiction

Published on 15 June 201412 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot: OpenGeofiction

I love geofiction—creating imaginary worlds through maps—and OpenGeofiction is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time: a collaborative map of an imaginary world that is built with OpenStreetMap’s editing tools. The world is divided into territories, some of which any member can edit, others that are assigned to individual members (after a waiting period). More info here.

I’ve been playing with it and am already nervous about the amount of time I can see myself losing to this. (Though one wrinkle is having no real-world referents to determine scale: without GPS traces or aerial imagery, figuring out how big a house, or a cloverleaf loop, should be is going to be tricky.)

Previously: Ian Silva’s Koana Islands.

Mapping Gotham

Published on 1 June 201412 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Map of Gotham City I was not aware that Batman’s Gotham City has had a consistent map for the last fifteen years or so. Its geography was defined in 1998 by illustrator Eliot R. Brown for the “No Man’s Land” storyline but has been used ever since, including by the Christopher Nolan trilogy of movies. Brown describes how the map came to be on his website; the story has also been picked up by Smithsonian.com. Thanks to Caitlin and Dwight for the tip.

More Map Books

Published on 17 January 201412 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Here are some map books that I recently found out about:

Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury Press/House of Anansi Press/Profile Books, 9/13). A book-length study of the enigmatic Selden Map of China, donated to the Bodleian Library in 1659 and only rediscovered in 2009. (Amazon)
The Golden Age of Maritime Maps: When Europe Discovered the World by Catherine Hoffman, Hélène Richard and Emmanuelle Vagnon (Firefly Books, 9/13). One of those big, illustrated books of old maps; this one looks at portolan charts. It’s an English translation of L’Âge d’or des cartes marines. (Amazon)
Maps of Paradise by Alessandro Scafi (University of Chicago Press, 11/13). Explores “the diverse ways in which scholars and mapmakers from the eighth to the twenty-first century rose to the challenge of identifying the location of paradise on a map, despite the certain knowledge that it was beyond human reach.” (Amazon)
The International Atlas of Mars Exploration: The First Five Decades, 1953 to 2003 by Philip J. Stooke (Cambridge University Press, 9/12). The first of two volumes (the second will be subtitled Spirit to Curiosity) that maps the extent of exploration by orbiters and landers. (Amazon, author’s page)

Ian Silva’s Koana Islands

Published on 21 August 20134 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Koana Islands (Ian Silva)

Wired Map Lab has the story of Ian Silva, who’s been posting astonishing road and transit maps of the imaginary Koana Islands to Reddit; the Islands now have their own section on the site, replete with a travel guide. It’s as serious an undertaking as William Sarjeant’s Rockall, Jerry Gretzinger’s Ukrainia, or Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia.

I admit it: I love geofiction—creating imaginary worlds through maps—and I always get excited when I encounter a great new mapmaker. This is no exception.

Fictional Worlds Map-Making Competition

Published on 21 April 20134 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

A map-making competition asking participants to submit maps of their fictional worlds? That’s precisely the sort of thing I should bring to your attention, now that it’s been brought to mine. First announced in February; deadline May 21.

Jeffrey Beebe’s Refractoria

Published on 28 November 201222 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

$Western Refractoria (detail), Jeffrey Beebe$
Jeffrey Beebe operates in the same space as Jerry Gretzinger or Austin Tappan Wright. “Over the last fifteen years, I have created the world of Refractoria, a comprehensive imagino-ordinary world that is equal parts autobiography and pure fantasy.” The design language is pure fantasy map, but he goes deeper than that: in addition to maps, he’s created heraldry and constellations, among many other things: the primary source materials of an imagined place whose history has not been written. Boing Boing, MetaFilter.