The Osher Map Library has a new website, its first major redesign in a decade. (Details in the media release from HistoryIT, their tech supplier.)
Month: April 2017
A Typographic Literary Map of London
You might have seen this typographic literary map of London: it was featured in a recent article in the Telegraph and went a bit viral from there. The work of London-based artist Dex, who runs a creative studio with interior designer Anna Burles, the map places the names of fictional characters in the areas of London they’re associated with. It’s one of several typographic maps and illustrations available for sale on the artist’s website. [Cartophilia/Goodreads]
Amsterdam’s Interactive Maps
Many cities’ websites have a map section that contains a few interesting maps, but the City of Amsterdam’s interactive maps are something else in their number (more than 80 right now) and breadth and detail. They use discrete map pages powered by Google Maps (though not necessarily Google Maps tiles), rather than layers in a web-based GIS viewer, and that makes them pretty damn responsive in comparison, too. Or if you must have layers, there’s the Map of Maps. [CityLab]
Whither the BCS?
If you’re going to rant, do it at length. Kenneth Field takes 16,000 words to lay out his concerns about the British Cartographic Society.
BCS is failing. Let’s ask the hard questions that need asking and make the Society actually mean and offer something going forward for UK cartography … or reconsider the very purpose of the society and seek an alternative. I’d like to see profound change in what is offered; a society that makes me want to belong and which is the place I go to for my daily cartographic shot. I want to go beyond the scant reward of a re-branded society who think newly monogrammed pencils, pens and rulers will keep me interested. At the moment I see an error-strewn and content-less web site, a late Journal which is getting thinner, a conference that is costly and not particularly interesting and a rhetoric that says everything is rosy and dynamic. It really isn’t.
My fundamental pitch is that I’m convinced BCS is on its last legs. We (as in the community of cartographers and map-makers) should look towards forming a new society. The best approach in my mind is one that merges BCS with the other cartography society—the Society of Cartographers. BCS and SoC need to get round the table, cast aside personality and work towards a solution for the betterment of cartography as a whole. Form a brand new society that brings everyone together and starts afresh with a blank piece of paper rather than everyone’s well-worn prejudices. Deal pragmatically with the contested issues. Cartography has changed so much that the question has to be asked why shouldn’t the professional organisations that are clinging to some desire for relevance just disband, reform and go again?
It’s a mix of institutional critique and airing of personal grievances. I’m not a BCS member, nor can I assess the veracity of Field’s claims (the BCS itself has a rather formal rebuttal here). But what he describes—too many committees (especially for society with only around 700 members), too much dysfunctional ossification (the Iron Law of Institutions may also be applicable here)—is rather common, even endemic, in organizations. But I’ve also seen organizations reinvent themselves and be the stronger for it.
(Field’s work has been featured here previously: Kenneth Field’s Map of Mars; Green Mars; End of the Line: A Tube Map of Tube Maps.)
A Tube Map of Roman London
A thing from 2015 that I hadn’t seen until recently: Londonist’s Tube Map of Roman London. “Stations indicate sites of major Roman landmarks, such as gates in the wall, municipal buildings and temples. Nobody knows what the Romans called their creations, so we’ve used the modern names, like Ludgate and Bishopsgate, which are medieval in origin. Stations in bold indicate locations where Roman remains are still accessible to the public.” [Londonist]
Greater Arizona: A Map Exhibition at Arizona State
Greater Arizona: Mapping Place, History and Transformation, an exhibition of maps from the Simon Burrow Map Collection at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies that “highlights the different ways the region of Arizona has been conceptualized in a global context,” runs until 19 May at ASU’s Hayden Library. ASU Now: “Dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the maps document everything from peoples to borders to geographical features, and were created by a number of nations, including France, Great Britain and Holland—all that variation reveals portions of history that in some cases have been ignored.” [Tony Campbell/WMS]
Connecticut Map Society
It’s worth giving new organizations as much of a boost as possible, so let me draw your attention to the brand-new Connecticut Map Society, whose inaugural meeting takes place this Sunday (9 April) at 3:00 PM in Durham. Details on the website. [WMS]
The Transit Line Colour Palette
This was way too much fun. cc @transitmap pic.twitter.com/QAcmOLD61c
— Ari Ofsevit (@ofsevit) March 21, 2017
MIT grad student Ari Ofsevit created an infographic showing the colours used to mark transit lines by a number of different North American transit agencies and posted it to Twitter last month, where he got all kinds of feedback. (One response pointed out that the colour choices aren’t great for red-green colour blindness.) Ofsevit, who also makes hiking trail maps in the style of transit maps, is running a Kickstarter to create a poster of the transit palette. [Next City]
Harrison Reassessed
Jim Bennett, author of the new book, Navigation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), reassesses the history of John Harrison and his marine chronometer solution to the longitude problem, a story that has been popularized by Dava Sobel’s 1995 bestseller, Longitude (reviewed here).
It is difficult to claim without important qualification that Harrison solved the longitude problem in a practical sense. In the broad sweep of the history of navigation, Harrison was not a major contributor.
The Harrison story seems to attract challenge and controversy. The longitude exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in 2014 was an attempt to offer a more balanced account than has been in vogue recently. The Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, for example, has been maligned without justification. A recent article in The Horological Journal takes a contrary view and offers ‘An Antidote to John Harrison’, and we seem set for another round of disputation. From a historian’s point of view, one of the casualties of the enthusiasm of recent years has been an appreciation of the context of the whole affair, while a degree of partisanship has obscured the legitimate positions of many of the characters involved. There is a much richer and more interesting story to be written than the one-dimensional tale of virtue and villainy.
Deadline Extended for Corlis Benefideo Award Nominations
The nomination deadline for the Corlis Benefideo Award has been extended to April 15. The Award, given by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), “recognizes imaginative cartography,” which is defined in part as “the potential … to transform our ways of seeing and understanding our world, and to trigger imaginative reaction from its audience.” It’s named for a character in “The Mappist,” a short story by Barry Lopez, and if you’ve read the story you’ll understand how appropriate the name is. (The story can be found in two of Lopez’s collections: Light Action in the Caribbean and Vintage Lopez.)
Nominations for this award are accepted from anyone, not just NACIS members.
New York Times Maps Receive Infographic Award
The New York Times Graphics Department was recognized at the 25th Malofiej International Infographics Awards, where the jury awarded the special Miguel Urabayen Award for the best map to two Times
Google Map Maker Is Now Closed
Google Map Maker, Google’s tool to allow users to edit its maps, has been shut down, Ars Technica reports. “A support page went up over the weekend declaring that Map Maker is closed but that ‘many of its features are being integrated into Google Maps.’” You may recall that Map Maker was temporarily suspended in 2015 after a series of embarrassing edits came to light; its editing tools have been increasingly limited to a smaller circle of editors.
There are still plenty of other blogs about maps, cartography and geospatial out there (despite my comments about the future viability of blogging). I have long made a point of using this platform to draw attention to other map blogs;
1882 Isochrone Map of France
I think I'm in love: a stunning isochrone map of travel times from Paris by rail in 1882 (making this a very early example of the genre). pic.twitter.com/gaSEzGCQWI
— Transit Maps (@transitmap) March 31, 2017
Cameron Booth (of Transit Maps fame) posted an 1882 isochrone map of France showing travel times from Paris by rail to Twitter and boy did it ever go viral. He’s planning on selling a print of it on his online store.
Zero Degrees
Jon Wright reviews Charles W. J. Withers’s Zero Degrees:
Related: Map Books of 2017.