Month: April 2016

Ireland Mosaic

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Irish_mosaic

The European Space Agency has released this false-colour composite image of Ireland based on 16 radar scans by the Sentinel-1A satellite in May 2015. The colours show change over the 12 days of coverage: “The blues across the entire image represent strong changes in bodies of water or agricultural activities such as ploughing. […] Vegetated fields and forests appear in green. The reds and oranges represent unchanging features such as bare soil or possibly rocks that border the forests, as is clear on the left side of the image, along the tips of the island.” [ESA]

The U.S. as Seven Mega-Regions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

us-mega-regions

In a piece for the New York Times, Parag Khanna—author of the forthcoming book Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization—argues that super-regions and urban clusters, rather than the 50 states, should be the focus of future planning.

First, there are now seven distinct super-regions, defined by common economics and demographics, like the Pacific Coast and the Great Lakes. Within these, in addition to America’s main metro hubs, we find new urban archipelagos, including the Arizona Sun Corridor, from Phoenix to Tucson; the Front Range, from Salt Lake City to Denver to Albuquerque; the Cascadia belt, from Vancouver to Seattle; and the Piedmont Atlantic cluster, from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C.

Federal policy should refocus on helping these nascent archipelagos prosper, and helping others emerge, in places like Minneapolis and Memphis, collectively forming a lattice of productive metro-regions efficiently connected through better highways, railways and fiber-optic cables: a United City-States of America.

Note that this isn’t quite the same as, say, reimagining the U.S. as fifty equal states or Pearcy’s famous 38-state thought experiment: this is an argument against using state boundaries for planning purposes. (The EU has similar regions for similar purposes, I believe.) Makes for a very interesting map, though. [Tim Wallace]

Bespoke Hand-Made Maps for Country Estates

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Financial Times looks at bespoke hand-made maps for country estates:  map artists like James Byatt, Anthony Pelly and Simon Vernon are commissioned to create one-of-a-kind illustrated maps for fairly wealthy clients (prices start in range of thousands of pounds). [WMS]

Consider this another data point, along with hand-made, hand-painted globes and map collecting in general, showing that maps have become a serious luxury/wealth marker.

Beinecke Acquires Map of Harlem Nightclubs

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
E. Simms Campbell, A Night-Club Map of Harlem, 1932. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has announced that it has acquired “the original artwork for a 1932 map of Harlem nightclubs drawn by E. Simms Campbell, the first African American illustrator to be syndicated and whose work was featured regularly in national magazines. The map, purchased at auction on March 31, provides a ‘who’s who’ guide of the nightclubs that drove Harlem nightlife during and after Prohibition, including the Savoy Ballroom, the Cotton Club, and Gladys’s Clam Bar. It was published in the inaugural edition of Manhattan Magazine and appeared in Esquire nine months later.” [WMS]

Vancouver Archives Digitizing Old Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
vancouver-1935
Guide Map: Vancouver-New Westminster, Burnaby and North Shore Municipalities, 1935. City of Vancouver Archives.

The City of Vancouver Archives: “Thanks to funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program, we’ve recently completed a project to digitize over 2100 maps and plans and made them available online for you to use and re-use. We’ve tried to digitize these maps with enough resolution to support future types of re-use and processing, including optical character recognition and feature extraction.” A selection is available on Flickr. [WMS]

Data Visualization’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and Choropleth Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham compares two choropleth maps of U.S. population growth: while they look rather different, they use the same data. “The difference between my map and Pew’s—again, they both use the exact same data set—underscores a bit of a dirty little secret in data journalism: Visualizing data is as much an art as a science. And seemingly tiny design decisions—where to set a color threshold, how many thresholds to set, etc.—can radically alter how numbers are displayed and perceived by readers.” [Andy Woodruff]

(Worth mentioning that this is exactly the sort of thing dealt with in Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps.)

Monterey Bay Area Seafloor Maps Released

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

New seafloor maps of the Monterey Bay area have been released as part of the California Seafloor Mapping Program. The maps “reveal the diverse and complex range of seafloor habitats along 130 kilometers (80 miles) of the central California coast from the Monterey Peninsula north to Pigeon Point.” [Leventhal Map Center]

Previously: Mapping the California Sea Floor.

De Wit’s Planisphærium Cœleste

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Frederick de Wit, Planisphærium cœleste, 1670.
Frederick de Wit, Planisphærium cœleste, 1670.

As part of its regular “Map Monday” feature, Atlas Obscura looks closely at Frederick de Wit’s Planisphærium cœleste (1670), above. Like other celestial maps of the period, it’s as though the monsters on sea charts have been placed in the skies—especially true for constellations like Cetus, as the article shows.

This reminds me that there’s quite a lot about antique celestial maps in The Map Room’s archives: The Face of the Moon; Star Atlases; Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web; The U.S. Naval Observatory’s Celestial Atlases; Divine Sky: The Artistry of Astronomical Maps; Another Look at the Linda Hall Library’s Celestial Atlases; Christian Constellations.

kanaspb2ndedb.inddA book about celestial maps, Nick Kanas’s Star Maps: History, Artistry and Cartography, is now in its second edition (Springer, 2012). I own a copy of the first edition.

Previously about Frederick de Wit: A New Book About Frederick de Wit.

Topographic Map of Mars

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
machacek-mars
Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/ASU/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)/Daniel Macháček.

Daniel Macháček released his topographic map of Mars, based on the latest probe data, in November 2014. It uses the Mercator projection between 65° north and 65° south latitude and stereographic projections for the poles. It can be downloaded in insanely high resolution: 17,400×14,700 (78 MB JPEG, 106 MB PDF). His blog post (in Czech: use the translate button) has all the technical details. I particularly like the colour scheme he used for elevation data: the low-lying areas are coloured like deep oceans, which seems appropriate. [Maps on the Web]

Pluto Globe Gores

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
pluto-gores
Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Sarah J. Morrison. CC licence.

If you wanted to make your own globe of Pluto based on New Horizons imagery, now’s your chance: Sarah Morrison has created globe gores based on NASA’s photomosaic global map of Pluto.

(Globe gores for other planets and moons are available for download from the USGS’s Astrogeology Science Center.)

Previously: Globes of the Solar System.

Old Logging Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

North Country Public Radio’s Adirondack Attic: “Jerry Pepper, librarian at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, shows Andy Flynn a collection of maps that detail logging operations by the Finch Pruyn paper company in the town of Newcomb. The maps were used from the 1920s to about 1950, the year of the last river drive carrying logs from the Adirondack Mountains down the Hudson River.” [Tony Campbell]

My county’s archives has a collection of old logging maps; I blogged about them in 2007.

Putting Slums on the Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

kibera

In Smithsonian, Erin Blakemore explores the on-the-ground, amateur efforts to get disadvantaged communities—slums, shanty towns, whatever they may be called—on the map, like the Map Kibera and Mapillary projects, and the implications of such projects.

Sterling Quinn, who is earning his Ph.D. in geography at Penn State, notes that there are downsides to user-generated maps. Just because an underserved community makes its way onto the map doesn’t mean it becomes less vulnerable, says Sterling. “Putting yourself on the map may make you more vulnerable to people who want to exploit the area,” he tells Smithsonian.com.

[Dave Smith]

Previously: The Geospatial Revolution Project, Episode Four; Crowdsourcing Street Photos of Dar es Salaam.