Well, it is that time of year again when the leaves in the northern hemisphere change colors. As usual, SmokyMountains.com has published their best guess as to when the leaves will be changing in various parts of the country. At the end of September and beginning of October here in Vermont, it'll start looking like this.
Very Expensive Maps is, well, I can't say it much plainer than host Evan Applegate: "Very Expensive Maps is a podcast by cartographer Evan Applegate in which he interviews better cartographers." A podcast about a visual medium like maps is maybe a tiny bit like dancing about architecture, but Applegate makes it work. The archives are a key part of the show...lots of links to the maps discussed during each episode. Here's a sampling of some of the visuals from recent shows:
This short video from Vox takes a look at the recent Supreme Court decision that struck down a gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama.
In 2013, a divided Supreme Court gutted one of the major pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the 10 years since then, the court has moved even farther to the right. So when the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court again in 2022, it didn't look good for the law. But then something completely unexpected happened: in a 5-4 decision, two of the conservative justices voted with the 3 liberal justices to preserve the Voting Rights Act. And the effects could be huge.
At stake in the case was the way that Alabama divides up its Congressional districts. Alabama has seven districts, one of which is what's called a "majority-minority district" in which Black Americans are the majority of the population. In 2022, a group of Black voters sued the state, saying that under the law, Alabama should actually have two majority-minority districts. And the Supreme Court agreed.
The decision could affect recently redrawn district maps in other states, which could in turn affect the balance of power in the House of Representatives. You can read more about these gerrymandering cases at the Brennan Center for Justice: Allen v. Milligan: Gerrymandering at the Supreme Court (Formerly Merrill v. Milligan) and Redistricting Litigation Roundup.
In this short video, Norwegian creative director Torger Jansen explains how he designed an unofficial transit map that combines all three of Oslo's public transportation networks (tram, metro, train) into a single diagram. His four main goals:
1. Showing all the lines on every network, thus making it easier to understand the service patterns.
2. Making it recognisable with the official line colours.
3. Compressing unnaturally long distances between stations.
4. Balancing aesthetics and accessibility. The diagram is clear and easy to read with minimal fuss.
As Jansen notes, this is not how a design process would work in the real world — there's no user testing or competing stakeholders to please — but from a purely aesthetic and functional standpoint, it's still an interesting challenge and puzzle to attempt to solve. (thx, david)
For his project Study of Perspective, artist and activist Ai Weiwei took photos of himself flipping off "significant institutions, landmarks and monuments from around the world", notably Tiananmen Square in 1995. Using this Google Street View-enabled web tool, you can use Ai's middle finger to flip off anything you'd like, anywhere in the world.
I've included a few examples above from the site's archive. In a brief review of what folks have done with the site recently, I observed several shots of the Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, churches, and various Trump buildings, but I also saw the Stonewall Inn and other gay landmarks.
The USGS Astrogeology Science Center recently released a series of detailed geological maps of Mars that detail features from the red planet's past like volcanos and flowing water. If you're thinking, "hey that looks a lot like a river in that second image", you're not far off.
One particularly interesting feature that hints at Mars' watery past is the sinuous ridge, which is a winding, narrow ridge that looks like an inverted river channel. These ridges are interpreted to be aqueous (formed by water), making them possible clues about the history of water on Mars.
The scale of the maps is useful for identifying geologic changes over time:
The new map of Aeolis Dorsa adds to the hypothesis that Mars was once wet and had abundant active river systems in the past before aqueous activity decreased over time. This change caused the primary depositional methods in the region to shift from rivers (fluvial) to sediment fans with intermittent deposition (alluvial) and eventually to a dry and wind-driven (aeolian) system. This local pattern mimics our current understanding of the global environmental history of Mars.
Lovely aesthetics as well. (via @geoffmanaugh)
After seeing an abstract US map where the borders between the states were preserved but the shapes of the individual states were not, Tom Comerford was inspired to design what he calls The Topologist's Map of the World.
I describe this a a topologist's map because topology is a branch of mathematics concerned with the way that space is connected. In topology it's common to think of stretchy, distortable surfaces that can be moved around without being punctured or torn.
With many connections to other countries and bodies of water, countries like Russia, India, Brazil, and China are prominent on the map while the US, which only borders two other countries, is a tiny box in the corner. (via hacker news)
The first maps of the world were created without satellite imagery but with the compass, mathematics and geometry, reports from explorers, and a healthy dose of imagination & creativity. Jeremy Shuback briskly runs us through a history of early world maps, from perhaps the first map of the world by Anaximander (circa 610-546 BCE) to the Catalan Atlas, created in 1375.
The Catalan Atlas is worth a closer look — here's a high-res image courtesy of Wikipedia and a 22-minute explainer/appreciation from Flash Point History.
In the early 2000s, Rick Meyerowitz and Maira Kalman made a version of the NYC subway map where names of all the stations and landmarks were replaced with food. Here's a detailed view of lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn:
See also Simon Patterson's The Great Bear and the City of Women NYC subway map.
The Tolkien Estate has built a new website dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and it includes dozens of hard-drawn maps, illustrations, paintings, and calligraphic works done by the author in the course of writing his books. Tolkien was a talented artist and his maps and visual art were an integral part of his work. From Artnet:
Tolkien's art and writings went hand and hand, with illustrations serving as an an integral part of his creative process. Sometimes the words would inspire the artwork, and sometimes drawing a scene would move the narrative in new directions.
The author meticulously mapped out the world of Middle Earth to ensure the accurate movements of his large cast of characters.
I was lucky enough to see some of these maps and drawings in person at this 2019 exhibition at the Morgan Library — great stuff. (via @tedgioia)
From CGP Grey, here's an explanation of the numbering system used by the US Interstate Highway System. Here's the basic deal, from Wikipedia:
Primary Interstates are assigned one- or two-digit numbers, while shorter routes (such as spurs, loops, and short connecting roads) are assigned three-digit numbers where the last two digits match the parent route (thus, I-294 is a loop that connects at both ends to I-94, while I-787 is a short spur route attached to I-87). In the numbering scheme for the primary routes, east-west highways are assigned even numbers and north-south highways are assigned odd numbers. Odd route numbers increase from west to east, and even-numbered routes increase from south to north (to avoid confusion with the U.S. Highways, which increase from east to west and north to south).
In-car and on-phone GPS systems have made knowing this system largely irrelevant for most drivers. I spent a lot of time in the car as a kid — summer roadtrips around the country and frequent local travel out of our rural area — and loved maps & atlases even at that age, so this was pure nostalgia for me. The video covers some of the numbering exceptions at the end (like the 35E/35W split in the Twin Cities I used to drive on often), but I would easily have sat through 10 more minutes of them.
A Chinese man who was abducted from his family when he was four years old recently found his mother by drawing a map of his village from memory and posting it online. From The Guardian:
Thirty years ago, when Li Jingwei was four years old, a neighbour abducted him from his home village in China's Yunnan province and sold him to a child trafficking ring.
Now he has been reunited with his mother after drawing a map of his home village from his memories of three decades ago and sharing it on a popular video-sharing app in the hope that someone might be able to identify it.
"I'm a child who's looking for his home," Li said in the video. Unable to recall the name of his village or his address, Li's recollection and reconstruction of the village's key features - including a school, a bamboo forest and a pond - proved crucial.
"I knew the trees, stones, cows and even which roads turn and where the water flows," Li said in an interview with the Paper, a Chinese media outlet.
When I first read this story, I was interested in the incredible drawn-from-memory map but now I'm wondering about what kind of relationship Li has with the people who arranged to have him abducted (which the article calls his "adoptive parents"??!?) (via the morning news)
Activist and educator Mariame Kaba has created a walking tour of NYC (alternate version digitized by Claire Goldberg, Anna Wu, and Fatima Koli) that focuses on activities around slavery and resistance from 1626 to 1865.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas. More than 90 per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought enslaved Africans across the ocean. Though New York Passed an act to gradually abolish slavery in 1799 and manumitted the last enslaved people in 1827, it remained an intrinsic part of city life until after the civil war, as businesspeople continued to profit off of the products of the slave trade like sugar and molasses imported from the Caribbean.
I'm doing this walk the next time I'm back in NYC. I've been to some of the places on the tour before, but haven't considered them through the lens of slavery.
A group of activists called Slavers Of New York is working to educate people about the prominent New Yorkers who lent their names to the city's geography (Nostrand, Bergen, Rivington, Stuyvesant, Lefferts, Boerum) and were also slave owners or traffickers. From the NY Times:
Just a few months before, while scrolling through social media, Mx. Waithe had stumbled upon records from the nation's first census in 1790, which listed well-known New York families like the Leffertses, the Boerums and the Nostrands. To the right of those names was another category: "slaves."
According to the census, the Lefferts family enslaved 87 Black people throughout New York City (Prospect Lefferts Gardens and an avenue in that Brooklyn neighborhood were named after them). The Boerums owned 14 slaves (the neighborhood Boerum Hill is named for them). And the Nostrands (of the eight-mile-long Nostrand Avenue), enslaved 23 people (this number would nearly double by the beginning of the 19th century).
The discovery sparked Slavers of New York, a sticker campaign and education initiative dedicated to calling out — and eventually mapping — the history of slavery in New York City.
The group detailed how they started where the project is headed in an interview in Guernica:
Mainly, our goal is to just educate people about the legacy of slavery and how it persists in the present day. We don't advocate for changing the names in any way. We hope that, if people feel so inclined to change names, they create their own groups and engage in political action. I definitely think there should be more context available in public places. When Maria and I went to Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan, a statue of Peter Stuyvesant was there in the middle of the park, glorified, and there's no information about his slave-owning history.
What's really interesting is that some of the naming of places for slavers happened more recently than you would imagine. Boerum Hill wasn't called "Boerum Hill" until 1964 or so, when that name was resurrected as part of the gentrification of Brooklyn. You can see, directly, the entanglement of the history of slavery and gentrification. Bringing this man's name back into the neighborhood is a symbol of violence. The persistence of these names and links carry this space through history.
You can keep up with the group's efforts on Twitter and Instagram and support their mission on GoFundMe. (Map above courtesy of The Decolonial Atlas.)
Well, I'm not sure this book could be any further up my alley; I mean:
The life and legend of New York City, from the size of its skyscrapers to the ways of its inhabitants, is vividly captured in this lively collection of more than 250 maps, cross sections, flowcharts, tables, board games, cartoons and infographics, and other unique diagrams spanning 150 years. Superstars such as Saul Steinberg, Maira Kalman, Christoph Niemann, Roz Chast, and Milton Glaser butt up against the unsung heroes of the popular press in a book that is made not only for lovers of New York but also for anyone who enjoys or works with information design.
Using data from Johns Hopkins, this time lapse video shows the spread of Covid-19 across the US from Feb 2020 to Sept 2021. This looks so much like small fires exploding into raging infernos and then dying down before flaring up all over again. Indeed, forest fire metaphors seem to be particularly useful in describing pandemics like this.
Think of COVID-19 as a fire burning in a forest. All of us are trees. The R0 is the wind speed. The higher it is, the faster the fire tears through the forest. But just like a forest fire, COVID-19 needs fuel to keep going. We're the fuel.
In other forest fire metaphorical scenarios, people are 'kindling', 'sparks being thrown off' (when infecting others) and 'fuel' (when becoming infected). In these cases, fire metaphors convey the dangers posed by people being in close proximity to one another, but without directly attributing blame: people are described as inanimate entities (trees, kindling, fuel) that are consumed by the fire they contribute to spread.
See also A Time Lapse World Map of Every Covid-19 Death (from July 2020).
Well, the leaves are starting to change up here in ol' Vermont,1 so it's time to take a peek at the 2021 Fall Foliage Map from smokymountains.com. Apple pie is just around the corner!
One fucker of a tree near my house has turned completely bright red already. Like, slow down mate.↩
50 Years of Text Games by Aaron Reed is a favorite newsletter of mine. (It's a hard newsletter to read in your email right away, but a rewarding one to pile up and save.) It specializes in in-depth explorations, typically at a single game per newsletter, but also takes a wider view to try to understand why this game at that moment was particularly significant or representative.
Here's an example of a great newsletter about a game I do not know well: Graham Nelson's Curses, from 1993. Curses, Reed, argues, emerges at an unlikely moment (surrounded by emerging CD-ROM games and exploding console popularity) to bring about an equally unlikely renaissance of interactive fiction.
Curses is scavenger hunt meets Dante's Inferno, "an allegorical rite of passage," adventure game by way of historical footnote. It certainly owes a great debt to Infocom, recreating the company's signature style even while literally resurrecting its technical bones...
But Nelson also took much inspiration from history and classics. When asked once about his favorite games and authors, he gave much more space to the latter, listing "Auden, Eliot, Donne, Browning, Elizabeth Bishop... For plays, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, David Hare." Curses is steeped in antiquities, from the abandoned odds and ends squirreled away in the Meldrew attics—an old wireless radio, for instance, which seems to do nothing when turned on until you realize it just takes a few turns to warm up—to its detailed time travel excursions to lovingly researched long-ago eras. It's a game very much about odd corners and margins: interstitial places...
Nelson's game would take over the IF newsgroups as players who thought they'd seen the last of the great text adventures discovered a worthy modern successor. "Congratulations," wrote one poster: "Its almost like having Infocom back." It helped that the game had so many nooks and crannies and puzzles, endless puzzles, that at least some of them were bound to be stumpers for any given player. Hint requests and discussion of the game proliferated, and dominated the newsgroups through the rest of 1993 and 1994: so much so there was a half-hearted proposal to split it all off into a dedicated new group, rec.games.curses, just so there'd be enough oxygen to talk about anything else.
The other big thing Nelson did with Curses is build a compiler for the Infocom virtual machine so that players and designers could create their own text adventures. Kind of like Dante importing the classic epic into the vernacular. Everybody could now do it themselves.
That juncture — a compelling world, an obsessed and supportive community, and (there's no better way to put this) the means of creative production — have proved over and over again to be the secret formula for building something beautiful and new in art.
Using data from the United States Geological Survey, River Runner visualizes the path taken by a raindrop from its landing spot to its eventual endpoint. Just click on any spot in the US and it maps out the path the drop would take, complete with a satellite fly-through of the route. I spent many happy minutes playing with this, although the endpoint of "Canada" for a raindrop that lands in my Vermont yard was somewhat unsatisfying.
See also The Marvelous Mississippi River Meander Maps and a map of all of the rivers in the US. (via waxy)
Translating sites, search engines, social networks, browsers, ISPs, and other internet entities into geographic features, Martin Vargic has created a map of the internet circa 2021.
It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct "countries", which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of distinct clusters, regions and continents that stretch throughout the map, such as "news sites", "search engines", "social networks", "e-commerce", "adult entertainment", "file sharing", "software companies" and so much more. In the center of it all can be found ISPs and web browsers, which form the core and backbone of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the domain of the mysterious "dark web".
Courtesy of Geodienst, this is a map of the world's lighthouses. Where the data is available (and you can see it's quite sparse for some areas of the world), the map shows the location, color, range, and flashing frequency/pattern of each lighthouse. The color and flashing pattern of a lighthouse is called the characteristic. Each lighthouse has a different characteristic so that mariners can tell them apart and to indicate different water areas. (via strange maps)
Ollie Bye has created an animated time lapse of the growth of London from a small Roman town in 47 ACE to the largest city in the world (during the Victorian era) to the massive, sprawling city it is today.
See also Here Grows New York City, a Time Lapse of NYC's Street Grid from 1609 to the Present, an example of what the creator called "an abstract representation of urbanism". And a list of the largest cities throughout history — perhaps surprisingly, there have only been two lead changes since the 1820s. (via open culture)
In the US and other English-speaking countries, the names of Donald Duck's three nephews are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. As this map shows, they have different names in other countries — like Tick/Trick/Track in Germany, Billi/Villi/Dilli in Russia, and Ripp/Rapp/Rupp in Iceland.
You should check out the rest of the maps on the Mapologies blog as well, including maps of what the Milky Way is called in different countries and what people say when toasting.
Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have developed a system called BirdCast that uses machine learning & two decades of historical bird movement data to develop daily bird migration forecasts for the United States.
Bird migration forecasts show predicted nocturnal migration 3 hours after local sunset and are updated every 6 hours. These forecasts come from models trained on the last 23 years of bird movements in the atmosphere as detected by the US NEXRAD weather surveillance radar network. In these models we use the Global Forecasting System (GFS) to predict suitable conditions for migration occurring three hours after local sunset.
The map above is the migration forecast for tonight — overall, warmer temperatures and increased bird movement are predicted for the next week or two. They also maintain up-to-the hour records of migration activity detected by the US weather surveillance radar network; this was the activity early this morning at 3:10am ET:
If the current & predicted bird radar maps were a part of the weather report on the local news, I might start watching again.
The Ostrich Egg Globe, made in/around 1504, is the earliest-known European globe to depict the Americas. And there's evidence that it was made by Leonardo da Vinci. Open Culture has the story:
Missinne, a real estate developer, collector, and globe expert originally from Belgium, discovered the globe in 2012 at the London Map Fair. It was purchased "from a dealer who said it had been part of an important European collection for decades," and its buyer and owner remain anonymous. After the globe appeared, Missinne "consulted more than 100 scholars and experts in his year-long analysis," putting "about five years of research into one year," says Sander, calling the research "an incredible detective story."
Missinne's investigation seems to substantiate his claims that the globe was made by Leonardo or his workshop. The evidence, some of which you can find on the Cambridge Scholars Publishing site, includes a 1503 preparatory map in da Vinci's papers; the presence of arsenic, which only Leonardo was known to use at the time in copper to keep it from losing its lustre; "The use of chiaroscuro, pentienti, triangular shapes, the mathematics of the scale reflecting Leonardo's written dimension of planet earth"; and a 1504 letter from Leonardo himself stating, "my world globe I want returned back from my friend Giovanni Benci."
As with all things newly attributed to Leonardo in recent decades, there's disagreement about this claim. You can read about the evidence collected by Stefaan Missinne, the discoverer of the globe and primary champion of its Leonardo connection, and decide for yourself. My brief, amateur take: if the first point in your analysis of a connection between this globe and Leonardo da Vinci is based on Salvator Mundi, which itself has disputed authorship and all but disappeared after its 2017 purchase, you've chosen a tough path towards persuasion.
With regard to the Chicago's street numbering system, Madison Street is the boundary between the North and South Sides of Chicago. Because of discriminatory housing policies and practices, especially during the Great Migration, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in America. Generally speaking, a predominantly white North Side has had better access to resources and higher home values while a largely Black South Side has had lower home values and less access to resources.
Artist Tonika Johnson's Folded Map Project explores the differences and similarities across this boundary by comparing an addresses on the North Side with the corresponding addresses on the South Side. She does this through paired photos of the houses and the residents living at each twinned address, and video interviews with those "map twin" residents, as well as a movie, an installation, workshops, and even a stage play. The image at the top of the post is of one of the address pairs (6329 S. Paulina and 6330 N. Paulina).
Colossal recently posted an interview with Johnson about the project:
The ultimate point that I was trying to get across was that Chicago's history of segregation is still with all of us today. I wanted to prove this point for people who might not make that connection [between] the disparity that exists and the history behind it. I wanted the project to be an entree into expanding people's minds of Chicago's history of segregation through thinking about their own lived experience. I really appreciated being able to do that through art, through photos and portraits and video because I wasn't blaming people who live on these different sides. I was offering them insight into the larger question of, "did you really choose this? Does our segregation reflect how we want to interact? And if it doesn't, then you have to question why is it this way?"
There is this narrative that people think [Chicagoans] don't interact. But we do, a lot, especially through art. That's how we know the city is segregated. (laughing) We know that we're disrupting this segregation when we come together. And that's why I think art is such a beautiful common denominator.
I love these coastline contour maps made by the Inuit people of Greenland. So simple and functional.
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.
See also the Marshall Islands Navigation Charts. (thx, kate)
In 1980, Sol LeWitt created a piece of art called The Area of Manhattan Between the Places I Have Lived Is Removed where he cut out the area between all the places he'd lived in NYC on a satellite image. Matt Miller whipped up an app on Glitch that allows you to make your own map according to those rules. Here's my Between the Places map:
Here is LeWitt's original map:
Looks like Miller's app doesn't optimize for solid, filled polygons — I suspect if I'd been a little more careful about entering my addresses in the correct order, mine would look more like LeWitt's. But still a fun exercise!
This is a map showing the real-time location of Scotland's fleet of snow plows (which they call "road gritters"). As Jackie Sojico discovered, Scotland names their plows and some of them are hilarious.
Some of the plows are named things like Sprinkles or Salty but there are also Gangsta Granny Gritter, Mr Plow, Spready Mercury, License to Chill, Ready Spready Go, and Gritney Spears. A possibly out-of-date list of plow names shared on Twitter includes Darth Spreader, Gritty Gritty Bang Bang, and Snowbegone Kenobi.
Plows elsewhere in the UK are also given interesting names: Basil Salty, David Plowie, Freezy Rider, and Roger Spreaderer. (thx, meg)
For BBC Future, Sam Arbesman writes about "maps that plot alternative worlds to our own".
These are the "what if" stories that ask us to imagine our world on a different path: what if a battle, election or assassination had gone the other way, or a pivotal person had never been born? Some of these stories involve time travel to make the change, but many alternate histories are simply imagined differences. What if the Nazis had not been beaten, as in the novel The Man in the High Castle, or what if the Soviets had landed a man on the Moon first, like in For All Mankind?
The map above was created by Andrew Shears and shows what the United States could have looked like if various state partition plans had come to fruition.
One of my favorite alternative history maps not covered by Arbesman is Melissa Gould's Neu-York, a map of Manhattan after a hypothetical conquest of the United States by the Nazis in World War II (which I blogged about way back in 2003, when kottke.org had comments!)
See also Alternate Map of the Americas Features "Long Chile".
