North Carolina – The Map Room

When Mobile Maps Can’t Keep Up with Road Closures

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 22:59:47 +0000

During a natural disaster like Hurricane Florence, crisis maps can be an invaluable source of information about road and bridge closures and other infrastructure outages. Trouble is, that information doesn’t always trickle down to mobile phones, which is where most people get their maps. (Especially when authorities have trouble keeping up with road closures on their own maps.) CityLab’s Clare Tran explores this question, looking at, for example, how Waze incorporates road closure data from Esri and its volunteers.

North Carolina’s Gerrymandered Congressional District Map Ruled Unconstitutional

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:28:39 +0000

North Carolina’s congressional district map has been ruled unconstitutional by a panel of federal judges, the New York Times reports. Significantly, it’s because the map represented a partisan gerrymander, engineered to ensure a Republican stranglehold on North Carolina’s congressional delegation, rather than a racial gerrymander. Partisan gerrymanders have not previously been considered illegal; it’ll be interesting to see what the eventual and inevitable Supreme Court ruling on this (and other gerrymandering cases) will be.

Miniature Maps and Minchiate

Jonathan Crowe — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 15:11:53 +0000

The William P. Cumming Map Society’s North Carolina Map Blog has a post looking at miniature maps of North Carolina (“miniature” is defined as less than four inches in size) and a post about minchiate, a 16th-century Florentine card game; there were were educational minchiate decks with a map on each of the 97 cards. [WMS]

The North Carolina Civil War Atlas

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 19:40:04 +0000

The result of a decade’s worth of research, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas, written by Mark Anderson Moore with Jessica Bandel and Michael Hill, is now available. The book “is a comprehensive study of the impact of the war on the Tar Heel State, incorporating 99 newly prepared maps. The large format (17″ by 11″) volume highlights every significant military engagement and analyzes the war’s social, economic and political consequences through tables, charts and text.” Produced by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, it can be ordered through their online store, at the North Carolina Museum of History or selected state historic sites. Read historian John David Smith’s review in The News & Observer. [via]