A lecture by independent historian John Cloud about indigenous contributions to early American mapmaking and surveys of the newly acquired territory of Alaska is now online. The lecture, titled “The Treaty of Cession, as Seen through the Lenses of Art, Cartography, and Photography,” is 80 minutes long and full of interesting stuff about the early history of Alaska. Cloud gave the talk on 15 November at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, as part of the institute’s Native American Heritage Month. Local public radio station KTOO had a short article on the talk last month. [Tony Campbell]
Videos
A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist
Earlier this year Great Big Story did a short video piece about legendary ski resort map artist James Niehues, whom I’ve blogged about here on several previous occasions. Though this 2½-minute video is obviously less in-depth than, say, the Aspen Daily News’s profile of him from last year, I don’t mind another look at him and his work. [Atlas Obscura]
Previously: James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.
Fake Maps! (Very Dishonest)
Here’s a video of Steven Feldman’s informative and entertaining talk at FOSS4G in Boston last August: “Fake Maps, Very Dishonest” looks at the ways in which maps, through ignorance, incompetence or deliberate intent, can mislead, misinform, misfire and miss the point. Very much in the vein of Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps, or Andrew Wiseman’s “When Maps Lie,” but very much aimed at working mapmakers. Slides of Steven’s presentation are available here (there are some that didn’t make it into the actual talk). Slides and videos of other FOSS4G presentations are also available online. [Benjamin Hennig]
A Look at GOES-16’s Imagery
This NOAA article looks at three kinds of imagery provided by the GOES-16 geostationary weather satellite: GeoColor, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (!), and full disk infrared imagery from the Advanced Baseline Imager. GOES-16 launched last November and is currently in the checkout phase before it replaces GOES-13 at 75° west latitude.
Bellerby on CBS Sunday Morning
Bellerby & Co., makers of expensive bespoke handmade globes, continues to get all kinds of good press: earlier this week they were featured on CBS Sunday Morning.
Predicting Future Malaria Outbreaks from Satellite Data
Data from NASA’s earth-observing satellites is being used to predict future malaria outbreaks in the Amazon rainforests of Peru. To be sure, as the above video shows, this is really about taking geospatial and remote sensing data from several different sources and correlating them to build a predictive model: it’s John Snow’s cholera map at large scale and for the satellite age.
Amtrak Before and After
Following up on this post about maps of cuts to Amtrak, here’s a visualization from Will Geary showing a week of Amtrak trips before and after the proposed budget cuts. [CityLab]
Scanning the Miranda Map
Speaking of scanning old maps. The State Library of New South Wales, Australia is scanning its copy of Jozeph da Costa e Miranda’s 1706 world map with a state-of-the-art high resolution scanner.
This digitisation process combines high resolution scanning, up to 1200 dpi, with precise lighting technique and incredibly accurate colour rendition. This process is ideal for scanning really large, long items like this map, panoramas and items with high levels of fine detail. The files captured at these resolutions allow up to 50× enlargement, making them excellent sources for detailed investigation into aspects of the physical substrate of the item and for innovative multimedia exhibition and display.
The map was scanned in 15cm sections and will be stitched together to create an exceptionally accurate and detailed high resolution file.
This short video (above) gives a close-up view of the process. [WMS]
‘Potato Drop’
The CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes has a sketch on the matter of Prince Edward Island being left off maps of Canada.
Marie Tharp Video
Marie Tharp, who died in 2006, has never been more in the public eye. This short film for the Royal Institution, animated by Rosanna Wan and narrated by Helen Czerski, is the fourth profile I’ve seen of her within the past year. [National Geographic]
Danny Dorling’s TEDx Talk
Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling spoke at the TEDx Exeter conference in April 2016. If you’re familiar with Dorling’s work, it will come as no surprise that he makes extensive use of cartograms to describe the world’s population. Video: TED, YouTube.
Previously: Hennig and Dorling on ‘Seven New Maps of the World’; People and Places.
Vermeer’s Mania for Maps
Last November art historian James Welu gave a talk at the Leventhal Map Center about Jan Vermeer’s use of maps in his paintings. The talk is now available on YouTube. I found it fascinating that Vermeer represented actual maps in his paintings — many of which are now very scarce or available only fragmentarily. [Leventhal Map Center]
A Giant Map for Presidential Inauguration Planning
The U.S. military uses a huge floor map of Washington, D.C. to plan for presidential inaugurations, as the Tech Insider video above shows. According to this, it’s used by the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, a joint-service organization that provides military ceremonial support. (See this U.S. Army article from 2012 about the 2013 inauguration, and this 2008 Pruned blog post about the 2009 inauguration.) [Tim Wallace]
Globemaking Films
This short film on globemaking from 1955 has been making the social media rounds:
Compare it to this short film from 1949:
It’s nearly identical in its turns of phrase and factoids, though there are slightly different emphases. Though the firm is unnamed, it’s clearly the same one: it’s even the same guy doing the varnishing.
These films fascinate me because they describe a kind of globemaking—layers of plaster, paper globe gores, and varnish—that I don’t think happens any more. There are some similarities to Bellerby’s globemaking methods, but Bellerby’s underlying globe isn’t a plaster shell. And most of us don’t have the money for a Bellerby globe: if we have a globe, it’s almost certainly a Replogle. As this short video from the Chicago History Museum reveals, Replogle’s globes are a combination of paper, cardboard and glue:
A Little Bit More About Bellerby & Co.
Bellerby & Co., maker of hand-made, bespoke and very expensive globes,
Previously: Atlas Obscura Profiles Peter Bellerby; Globemaker Peter Bellerby Interviewed.