Using an interactive interface to compare present-day and historical maps and aerial imagery is done all the time—on this website I use a slider plugin—but Chris Whong’s Urban Scratchoff uses a familiar metaphor to compare present-day aerial images of New York City with imagery from 1924. Give it a try. More on how Chris did it. [via]
Month: January 2016
New York Music Map
The New York Music Map is a typographical map made up of some 450 musical artists with some connection to the city. (Some choices are bound to be controversial.) A project of the U.K.-based Kingdom Collective, it’s available in both online and print forms. [via]
Mapping New York City’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions
By cross-referencing public data on energy consumption with georeferenced tax lot data, Jill Hubley has created an interactive map of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions by property, colour-coded to show the biggest emitters. More on how she did it, and what the data reveal. [via]
Andy Woodruff’s Islands of Boston
Andy Woodruff imagines Boston neighbourhoods as islands, where any unpopulated areas—commercial districts, industrial areas, highways, parks—are represented as water. “Some neighborhoods of the Boston area are actual islands, or were at one point. Others, however, can feel that way even when connected to each other by land. Water isn’t the only thing that can create a gulf between neighborhoods; sometimes it’s created by features of the urban landscape and the experience of passing through them.” [via]
Thanks to a surprising number of links about city maps waiting in the queue to be posted, today’s blog posts will have cities as their theme.
Surface Temperatures Warmest Since 1880
According to analyses by NASA and NOAA scientists, 2015 was the warmest year on record, with average surface temperatures the highest they’ve been since 1880. The above video shows the long-term warming trend since 1880 as a five-year rolling average. The baseline average is from 1951 to 1980; orange colours are warmer than that average, blue colours cooler. (Credit: GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio.)
Mapping U.S. Drug Overdoses
The New York Times maps the rise in deaths from drug overdoses. “Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest, according to new county-level estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […] The death rate from drug overdoses is climbing at a much faster pace than other causes of death, jumping to an average of 15 per 100,000 in 2014 from nine per 100,000 in 2003.” [via]
Made in Algeria: An Exhibition of Colonial Cartography
Opening today at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France, and running until May 2nd, Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire is an exhibition of nearly 200 “maps, drawings, paintings, photographs, films and historical documents as well as works by contemporary artists who surveyed the territory of Algeria.” The exhibition examines not only the cartography of the French colonial period, but the political and cultural narratives—to say nothing of the territory itself—created by colonial mapmaking. Lots of material on the exhibition’s website, but it’s French-only. [via]
Beware of Fake Snowfall Maps
Meterologist Dan Satterfield warns about fake snowfall maps appearing on social media. “[R]esponsible meteorologists do not post raw model data more than 3 days away from an event. It’s just not likely to be correct, and could actually give someone a false sense that the storm will not impact them. […] If you see a map showing snowfall totals, it almost certainly did not come from NOAA, or an AMS Certified meteorologist. There are even hoax maps floating around from storms in the past” (emphasis his).
Rare Atlas Identified via Reddit
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NPR and the Washington Post report a fascinating story of how a rare atlas was identified in an unlikely fashion: being posted to Reddit. Last month, reference librarian Anders Kvernberg stumbled across an uncatalogued atlas in the vaults of the National Library of Norway. He could make out that it was an Ottoman atlas from 1803, but not much more than that, since he couldn’t read Ottoman Turkish. He did scan and post one of its maps to Reddit, where Redditors went to work translating the text. Then, a couple of weeks later, another Redditor posted an Ottoman map of Africa, which was identified as part of the Cedid Atlas (Cedid Atlas Tercümesi), published in Istanbul in 1803. The Library of Congress has a copy, which it acquired in 1998, digitized, and put online. Kvernberg went and looked—and, he says, “started recognising the scans. Then I realized this was the very same atlas I had held in my hands a few weeks earlier.” The Cedid Atlas was rare: only 50 were printed, and only 14 were known to be held in public institutions. It turns out that the National Library of Norway has the 15th. [via]
Mapping the American Revolution
The National Geographic website has an interview with Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, authors of Revolution: Mapping the Road to American Independence, 1755-1783 (W. W. Norton, October 2015). In the interview, Brown says that “some of the best collections of Revolutionary War maps have been among the least used. Historians tended to use the same maps over and over again to illustrate their narratives. What we did is to take the opposite view. We wanted the maps to tell the story, so we picked maps that we thought would tell the story of the battles best.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
The New York Times’ Learning Network and Maps
I was not aware of The Learning Network, a New York Times blog that provides online teaching resources for teachers, students and parents based on the newspaper’s content. Some of the posts deal with learning to use the Times’ maps and infographics; the most recent is on how to analyze maps to understand current events. [via]
Persuasive Cartography
Persuasive cartography: it’s a term I haven’t encountered before, though I’ve seen kind of maps it refers to: propagandistic art that uses cartography to make a point—think of all those caricature maps leading up to World War I. Many of them can be found in Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography: there are more than 300 maps available online, plus some pages about the genre. (Above: a 1951 map from the French Communist Party that takes a pro-Soviet line against the U.S. military.) [via]
Globemaker Peter Bellerby Interviewed
Peter Bellerby is interviewed in Fashion Times. Bellerby is the founder of Bellerby & Co., which makes hand-made, hand-painted—and very expensive—globes. (When I blogged about them last August, the cheapest globe I could find in their catalogue was £999.) Bellerby’s PR and marketing is fairly sophisticated and positions a globe as a serious luxury good; being interviewed in Fashion Times is consistent with that. They’re not exactly in the same market as Replogle, if you follow me. [via]
Earthquakes in Canada Since 1980
CBC News has an interactive map of all earthquakes in Canada since 1980 that were higher than magnitude 4.0. The page also has a map of fault lines in British Columbia.