Where Disaster Strikes: Modern Space and the Visualization of Destruction, an exhibition of disaster maps, is taking place now until 19 April at Harvard’s Pusey Library.

Floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, bombings, droughts, and even alien invasions: disaster can take many forms. And, although disasters are always felt dramatically, a disaster’s form and location impacts who records its effects and what forms those records take. “Where Disaster Strikes” investigates the intertwined categories of modern space and disaster through the Harvard Map Collection’s maps of large destructive events from the London Fire to the present.

Open to the public. The exhibition also has a substantial online presence.

The New York Times is mapping the battle for Mosul on this page; the maps show the changing front lines around the city (see above).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post explains the history of Mosul in five maps.

Maps of War: Mapping Conflict Through the Centuries by Jeremy Black (Conway, 11 October). “There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were involved and, later, to use mapping to actually plan the progress of a conflict. Using contemporary maps, this sumptuous new volume covers the history of the mapping of land wars, and shows the way in which maps provide a guide to the history of war.”

War Map: Pictorial Conflict Maps, 1900-1950 by Philip Curtis and Jakob Sondergard Pedersen (The Map House, 6 October). This is a companion book to the Map House’s exhibition of pictorial conflict maps, which I told you about last week.

Scotland: Mapping the Islands by Christopher Fleet, Charles W.J. Withers and Margaret Wilkes (Birlinn, 20 October). A follow-up to Scotland: Mapping the Nation (Birlinn, 2012), this book explores the Scottish islands through maps from the National Library of Scotland’s collection.

Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300 by Marcia Kupfer (Yale University Press, 25 October). Reinterpretation of the Hereford Mappa Mundi from an art history perspective. “Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are typically dismissed as the product of careless execution. Kupfer argues that they should rightly be seen as part of the map’s encoded commentary on the nature of vision itself.”

I told you about the Ordnance Survey’s Great British Colouring Map (Laurence King, 10 October) last July; it’s available this week. “Based on the accurate maps of Ordnance Survey, the colouring pages explore the coasts, towns, forests and countryside of England, Scotland and Wales. Includes detailed maps of cities and other places of interest such as Britain’s most recognizable tourist and historical locations, plus a stunning gatefold of London.”

Britain’s Tudor Maps: County by County (Batsford, 13 October) reproduces  the maps from John Speed’s 1611 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. These apparently include the first individual county maps of Great Britain, so this is a work of some historical significance.

The rise of these next-generation mapmakers comes as many news organizations around the world are reducing their commitment to foreign coverage. And reporting from conflict zones remains as dangerous as ever. According to Reporters Without Borders, 50 journalists and 142 citizen journalists have been killed in Syria since 2011. The lack of on-the-ground coverage by journalists leaves an information gap that is being filled by these digitally savvy mapmakers.

[WMS]

The New York Times maps the impact of Russian airstrikes on the Syrian civil war. Using several maps to indicate the impact on each faction—government, rebels, ISIS and Kurds—strikes me as quite effective, as is the use of colour-highlighted text in the headings, rather than a legend, to indicate each faction.

The Syria Conflict Mapping Project (screenshot above), a project of the Carter Center, has been documenting events in the Syrian civil war since 2012 using open source information. “Using these publicly available resources, as well as regular consultations with stakeholders in the country, the Center has documented and mapped over 40,000 conflict events in Syria (including clashes, aerial bombardments, artillery shelling, etc.), the changing relations between thousands of armed groups, movements of internally displaced people, and humanitarian conditions.” [via]