The first time I saw a world map drawn from memory was at Christopher Fahey's apartment. I forget how long it took him to draw, but it was remarkably accurate and fairly large (a few feet across). Ever since then, I've kept an eye out for other hand-drawn maps (you know what they say: if you can't do, collect). Via waxy this morning comes the From Memory Flickr group. My favorites from the group are this map of the male human body and a fanciful drawing of the solar system, both by Ellis Nadler:
Mapping.com has links to several maps from memory drawn by grade- and middle-school children; this world map by a 7th grade class is not too shabby. I'm struck by how much some of these world maps from memory resemble world maps drawn in the 16th and 17th centuries, like this Dutch map from 1689. All the parts are (mostly) there...it's just that everything is a little wrong-sized and slightly skewed.
Lori Napoleon collects "personal maps" from various people. This tactical guide for nourishing yukio includes directions to the owner's house, outlines of the two different keys (outside door, inside door), and what to feed the cat and when.
Also slightly related is the Fool's World Map, a deliberately addled world map prompted by a question asked of the map-maker by a Texan: "How many hours does it take to go to Japan by car?"
Update: Despite having featured his work on kottke.org late last year, I completely forgot about Stephen Wiltshire's super-realistic drawings from memory. Here's video of Stephen drawing Tokyo from memory and Rome from memory. (thx, matt)
Update: Christopher Fahey uploaded a photo of his world map drawn from memory.
Not sure when these features were added, but Google Maps now displays public transportation stops (NYC subway, the T in Boston, the L in Chicago) and building outlines for metropolitan areas. Here's a shot of the West Village in NYC:
Tiny but useful improvements. (thx, meg)
A pair of trend maps for 2007, both based on subway maps. The top one depicts the top online companies/brands & how they're connected while the bottom one deals with ideas (with the River of Consciousness standing in for the Thames).
Both maps were found in this article about internet predictions in 2007. I don't know about you, but I find these types of maps fun to look at, but completely inscrutable informationally speaking. Surely there's a more enlightening way to present this information than in Tube map form.
Google Earth recently added some maps from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection to their software, so you can just click them on and off on the globe. Included are a US map from 1833, a 1680 map of Tokyo, Paris from 1716, and a world map from 1790. I spent some time exploring the map of New York from 1836. Here's a screenshot of the southern tip of Manhattan with the present-day buildings turned on:
A larger version is available on Flickr. Google Earth continues to be a fantastic software product. It's almost more of a game than an atlas or educational program...so much fun.
Related: I did a project using Google Earth called Manhattan Elsewhere and made a scrollable, zoomable version of Viele's Map of Manhattan.
One of the coolest little gadgets at PopTech is Onomy Labs' Twisty Table. This one is round and it's got a satellite map of the world projected on it. When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls it. Here's a photo of the table in action at Foo Camp.
Good maps of Bangkok seem hard to come by. Before we left, we looked in several bookstores and decided on The Rough Guide to Bangkok. We'd never used a Rough Guide before but our usual (excellent) guidebook series, DK Eyewitness Guides, did not have a Bangkok-specific book, only a general Thailand guide. What a mistake...I've wanted to throw the RG right into the river about 10 times in the past few days. Meg promises me that once we get home, I can ritually set fire to it and cleanse ourselves of its crappiness.
On one of our last days here, we happened upon the Eyewitness Guide for Thailand and while it's thick and heavy, the Bangkok section would have been perfect for our needs. Argh! Oh well...one of the difficulties in traveling is that you never know what you're really going to need until you get to where you're going, and that goes double for maps.
We ended up relying quite a bit on the free SkyTrain/Metro map they give you at the station, as well as a slew of free maps available at our hotel and various other places around town. None of them was very good, but depending on what we were doing, one of them had the appropriate information on it. After all this, I wonder if a good map for Bangkok even exists[1]. The city is so big and sprawling that it's conceivable that no one has undertaken the effort to map it all.
[1] To its (possible) credit, the RG recommended a Bangkok map called Nancy Chandler's Map of Bangkok. We found it in a small bookshop on our last full day here, and while we couldn't properly evaluate it in its wrapper, it looked promising.
Earlier this week, Google integrated their recently acquired Keyhole technology into Google Maps, allowing the user to toggle between the abstract map view and a satellite view. The addition was pretty big news, and I was pretty excited when I saw this feature, as were many others. Matt Haughey even did a Maps/Flickr mashup in creating a memory map of his childhood stomping grounds; others followed suit.
The ability to view satellite images online has been around for years in the form of Microsoft's Terraserver (and also on a mapping site that I can't locate right now...I swear Mapquest let you switch back and forth between the two views, but I can't find it), so this really isn't anything new. Terraserver lets you zoom in/out, move around the map, and view other versions of the map (they have a topological version), and I know that many of the people who are so excited about Google Maps are familar with it. So why is everyone so excited about it?
Part of it is Google's involvement...they draw a crowd of attention anytime they do anything these days. But it also has a lot to do with someone I wrote about a couple of years ago: it's the user experience, stupid:
Robert Morris from IBM argued last year at Etech 2002 that -- and I'm paraphrasing from memory here -- most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV). The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented.
The satellite feature on Google is no exception. They took something that's been around for years, made it way easier to use (reposition & zoom maps without reloading, pinpoint addresses and routes onto the satellite imagery, toggle between sat and road maps, map size automatically scales to the browser window, etc.), and suddenly this old thing is much more useful and fun to play around with. Ajax is the underlying technology (which isn't new either) for many of the notable Google Maps features, but how Google used it to make a useful user experience is the real story here.
Although the web allows for communication on a global scale, I love the local resources it makes available just as much. New York Songlines is a fascinating site with annotated maps of New York City maintained by Jim Naureckas. Simply designed, each map is a linear representation of a single street (here's Bleecker Street, for example), with links available to switch to cross streets (here's where Bleecker crosses MacDougal). The maps are annotated with information about who lived where and when, contemporary commerce, location info for notable movies, and architectural history.
Some examples from the map for MacDougal Street:
93: Was the San Remo, famous bohemian hangout of Burroughs, Miles Davis, Tennessee Williams, James Agee, Jackson Pollock, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Village character Maxwell Bodenheim, photographer Weegee, etc. Gore Vidal once picked up Jack Kerouac here. Lost popularity because the bartenders beat up the customers once too often.
121: Authentically charming since 1927. Featured in Godfather II, Serpico, Next Stop Greenwich Village and the original Shaft. JFK gave a speech out front in 1959.
130-132: Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in this 1852 house.
Prompted by a discussion about maps of the London Underground I had with a friend, I spent a few minutes searching for a geographically accurate Tube map that I remembered running across a couple of years ago. I'm putting it here so I don't lose it again. The type is a little small so you might have to squint to read it (sorry, couldn't find a bigger version).
Compare with the usual schematic version.
Jessica Helfand's Reinventing the Wheel is my favorite kind of design book: one part lookie-L@@K-pritty-pictures, the other part explaining what it all means. The book is about information wheels -- alternatively called wheel charts, wheel calculators, or volvelles.
Readers my age might remember the circular BAC (blood alcohol content) calculators distributed every three months or so in junior high and high school...spin the wheel to your weight and a certain number of drinks and it calculated how drunk you were. Fat lot of good that did me; I could have done with something a little more useful such as a wheel calculator that determined your attractiveness to girls based on GPA and where your mom bought your clothes ("3.9 and K-Mart? Not looking good...").
The BAC and Unfashionable Teen Boy calculators aren't featured in the book, but many other wheels are, including several from the 30s and 40s. My favorites are the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer (for its complexity), the DeKalb Hybrids "What Your Corn Can Do to Help Win the War" wheel, the Wonder Bread Guide to U.S. Warships, the U.S. Navy Semaphore Signaling Guide (this one is really ingenious), and the colorful hand-made "Cercle Chromatique", and the surreal Puzzle Pets Letter Wheels.
Helfand has done a really nice job with this fun book. Definitely recommended.
A metamap of surveillance and privacy, a cartographic depiction of various global efforts and resources related to "surveillance, privacy, free speech and open infrastructure projects". A good resource presented with great information design.
Mapping Websites: Digital Media Design looks like an interesting book, although I really can't be sure because I only saw it for 2 minutes in the bookstore the other day. Perhaps not the most useful book for working Web folk, but it's filled with different schemes and techniques for mapping out information on the Web...and lots of maps. Mmmm...maps. (see also: Web Cartography)
BTW, I've added a bunch of books and movies and such to my Amazon wishlist, stuff that looks interesting to me but hasn't been mentioned here for various reasons. I tell you this not because I want you to purchase these things for me, but because you may find them interesting as well.
As open 802.11b access points increase in number (and the canonical list of them is created), this map will get crowded and not very useful. More useful would be a map where approximate 802.11b signal strengths are denoted by color**. With the wide view (as shown), you get just the strengths with the nodes showing up as you zoom down to the street-level view. You could also toggle a setting between open networks and fee-based networks (like Surf and Sip or Boingo). (Update: Christopher writes in with a pointer to the Wireless Network Visualization Project)
The April 2002 issue of Wired contains an infographic of wireless access points across the United States. An annotated list of the wireless access points included in their statistics is available in PDF format on their site.
** Note: the signals strengths denoted on this map have no basis in reality. The map is just for demonstration purposes. Map graphic borrowed from Yahoo! Maps.
Mid-Tokyo Maps makes excellent use of Flash to communicate lots of information effectively and is a very pretty site to boot. (via josh)
Visualize the Internet and Web with the maps and diagrams at the Atlas of Cyberspaces site. Tons of maps here on all sorts of things, from Web site maps to topology maps of the entire Internet.
