Today marks The Map Room’s second anniversary. There have been more than 460 entries since my first; during that time I’ve learned just how much there is out there about which I know nothing, from psychogeography to triangulation to geocaching.

I’ve put together some narcissistic self-aggrandizing special features to mark this occasion. Well, not exactly special, but it seemed an opportune time to bring them up. First, an autobiographical essay that explains why I got interested in maps in the first place. Second, a reader survey — I’d like to know a little bit more about my readers. And third, a brazen attempt at money-grubbing: a little fundraising campaign with the aim of paying my hosting bills.

Enjoy, or, at the very least, endure. Regular programming to resume shortly.

When The Map Room made Fimoculous’s list of best blogs of 2003, he said this:

27) The Map Room — I love niche publishing, especially when it’s a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I’d probably pay for this.

I hope you’re not too offended if I try to explore this sentiment. Here begins my first attempt at a fundraiser for this site. My goal is not to make a living from this site — I’m neither Gruber nor Kottke in terms of talent or traffic. (Nor do I want to get into an argument over whether what I do here is worth x amount of dollars, which is what’s happened elsewhere.)

What I’m aiming for is something more modest: to pay for a year’s web hosting.

Here’s how it works. My hosting provider has a system by which people can donate to my web hosting bills via Paypal. The donation goes directly to the bills; it doesn’t pass through me at all. If you like The Map Room, have a Paypal account and want to send some encouragement my way, I’d be grateful if you could donate a few dollars — three, five, eight, ten, whatever. My annual hosting bills only come to around $240, not counting domain registration, so a few people contributing a few dollars can go a long way.

This works for me, because I’m a little scared of hooking Paypal up to my bank account. Also, since I’m in Canada, I can’t use an Amazon tip jar. And, because I’m already getting some ad and affiliate revenue, I can keep my target modest: essentially, I’m aiming to have one less bill to worry about. (Which at the moment would be very helpful indeed.)

But it’s more than an issue of money; it’s a question of positive reinforcement. The Map Room’s traffic took a big jump last September after DFL made the news and people presumably followed the link from there to here. Suddenly I felt an obligation not to fall too far behind: my god, people are reading this site — I’d better keep at it!

Don’t get me wrong: even if no one donates, I’ll keep doing this. But if I do get donations, my feet will be in the fire: you’ll have sent me a message that you do want me to keep at it.

It’s a dubious way to celebrate this blog’s second anniversary, but I thought it’d be neat to do a reader survey. If you don’t mind answering 20 questions, I’d be grateful if you’d give it a shot. All questions are optional, and no personally identifiable information is collected (not even your IP).

While a lot of the information gathered by this questionnaire would be useful from an advertising perspective (not that I have any sponsors per se yet: other than the Google ads, everything here is an affiliate link), I’m really just curious to know what kind of audience I have. Are you a bunch of antique map collectors, or a bunch of GIS geeks? Also, how do you use this site, and what do you think of it? Your answers will help me figure out where to go from here. Thanks much.

I’ll flog this survey for a week or so, then tabulate and share the results.

I can’t remember the first time I ever saw a map, but I’ve always been transfixed by them. As a child, I studied highway maps on long car trips until I got sick, which unfortunately was never long. When I went to summer camp, I mapped the entire property — tramping around each trail, giving them my own idiosyncratic names, and taking my best shot at the surrounding topography. At my grandparents’ cottage, I hammered paper road signs into trees and made imaginary highways through the poplar bush; the signs disintegrated immediately, and my grandfather was pulling nails out of the trees for the rest of the summer.

Official highway maps were my bread and butter: we were a family that vacationed by road, so we always had them. Canadian provinces have tourist offices at each border; I insisted that we stop to pick up the newest map, which at the time were always free. Or city maps from the CAA: I must have memorized the entire freeway network of Montreal by the time I was 13, which is impressive when you consider that I lived in Winnipeg.

Continue reading this entry »

Social Explorer has a large collection of maps derived from U.S. census data. The more you zoom in, the more detail you get: at the top level it’s by state; closer in the maps show counties. Via Jessamyn.

EOGEO’s world map showing media coverage of various countries reminds me a lot of Global Attention Profiles (see previous entry), except that they’re measuring standard deviations rather than percentages. This is a bit more difficult to grasp intuitively, because a country marked red is simply getting more coverage than usual, and “usual” is quite different from country to country. Submitted by Gail.

Sytadin provides real-time traffic data for Paris and its suburbs. Jonathan Hipkiss writes, “This site kept me sane when I lived in Paris and had to commute around the Peripherique daily.” (My condolences.) “It’s updated by the minute and gets its data from road sensors. The two most interesting pages are Etats de trafic (State of Traffic) and Calculs d’itineraire (Calculate your route); the latter gives good mouseovers for amount of time between points.”

Two minor changes. First, the search form on the left-hand side now searches just The Map Room, not the entire mcwetboy.net domain. (A full web search remains an option.) I didn’t realize until recently that you could narrow a Google search by directory (i.e. mcwetboy.net/maproom), not just by domain. Second, comments will now be held for approval on posts older than 14 days; it used to be just 10 days. (This means that I have to manually approve the comment before it appears, so it won’t appear immediately in such cases. It’s a comment spam prevention measure.)

Two exhibitions to report on in this entry, nearly half a world apart — but each dealing in some way with mapping the Pacific region in the early modern era. At Manila University in the Philippines until March 31, “Putting the Philippines on the Map: The Belgian Contribution from the 16th to the 21st Century,” which combines antique maps from the 1500s and 1600s with recent satellite imagery, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reports. And, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada until April 17, Mapping the Pacific Coast: Coronado to Lewis and Clark, The Quivira Collection, which showcases some morsels from the private collection of map collector Henry Wendt. AP story.

qatsi has a review of Nicholas Crane’s book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. We’ve seen examples of Mr. Crane’s work before: Profile of Tube Map’s Creator; TV Series About Maps; Triangulation Pillars. (Via and cross-posted to Here Be Dragons).

• Buy Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet at Amazon.com

My interest in railroads in the Pacific Northwest led me to this site about the British Columbia Electric Railway, an interurban that at its peak stretched across the Fraser Valley. It’s got a page of maps dating from, or showing, the 1890s to the 1930s.

Debbie MacPherson writes, “I’m wondering if you know where I can find a picture of the mapmakers Jan Jansson and Herman Moll for an exhibit I am working on called Places & Spaces. I appreciate any help you could provide.”

My cursory search of the web turns up both biographies and examples of the work of Jan Jansson (1588-1664) and Herman Moll (1654-1732), but not necessarily any portraits or engravings of the cartographers themselves. Does anything along those lines exist? What say you, old map experts?

From the British Library, an online exhibition: The Unveiling of Britain.

When the ancient Greeks looked beyond their Mediterranean world, Britain was virtually invisible, lost in the mists of legend. Their view, or lack of it, survived as late as the ninth century in maps that do little more than offer a few place names. The Orkneys, for example — the fabled Orcades — are shown unconvincingly situated in the Atlantic just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Britain’s shape and contours were gradually uncovered by the world outside, and to some extent by its own inhabitants, during the centuries between 800 and 1600. Through the British Library’s remarkable collection, we can follow the lifting of that veil.

(Thanks, Richard.)

Ireland’s History in Maps has a genealogical focus; the maps aren’t first rate, but they’re informative. Via Plep.

My coverage of GPS stuff is paltry at best, but gadget blog Engadget has a dedicated GPS section (RSS feed) that I’ll be keeping an eye on, to learn more about the subject.

GeoPDF looks like the company blog of Layton Graphics, which puts out (pricey) software that adds georeferencing to PDF files. The blog, which started this month, naturally covers their stuff, but also has a few more general map entries. Atom feed.

Mapping Hacks, forthcoming from O’Reilly, isn’t just a book of tips on everything from using mapping sites to using a GPS to building your own maps (see the table of contents), it’s also a blog. I must confess to being a bit bewildered by all the tech that’s blossoming out there at the moment — the blog content is sometimes quite opaque to me. I suppose that means I’ll have to buy the book when it comes out in a month or so.

• Buy Mapping Hacks at Amazon.com

Honey, I Geotagged the Kids: an essay by Douglas Rushkoff on the new collaborative mapping technologies — many of which have been featured here, though I haven’t assigned them their own category yet.

Rough Guides has released a series of interactive city maps for several mobile platforms, and they’re having a sale (US$20) in March. Via Gadling.

Earthcomber allows Palm OS PDA users to annotate maps and share that information with other users. Social software comes to mapping. Via Engadget and Palm Infocenter.

The Road Trip Effect generates animations for your home movies to indicate your trip. It does so in the classic manner (think Indiana Jones): a plane, ship or car moving across a map and leaving a trail. The site is a little sparse on documentation, but I’ve downloaded the program and it’s very straightforward. It comes with 16 satellite images to use as maps. Via Gadling.

A couple of new map-related tribes on Tribe.net: Map Creators Unite, which looks like it’s focused on dedicated amateurs rather than GIS professionals; and Surveying, for land surveyors. An older tribe that I missed: Geocaching. They’ve all got RSS feeds.

This has to be seen to be believed. James Lin writes to tell us about the Relief Globe Company: “Alan Folmsbee, a former Sun Microsystems engineer, has set up his own globe company with massive vertical exaggeration: 250× for the land globe, and 150× for the seafloor globe.” The globes, which cost $1,000 or more, are made by firing lasers at liquid plastic. (Copies are made in the usual urethane way.) The point of the exaggeration is to show greater detail. The site has lots of photos; there was coverage in the Santa Cruz Sentinel last year and in the San José Mercury last week (registration required).

Jonathan Hipkiss writes to tell us about his massive collection of maps scanned from old books, many of which date from the 1800s, all of which are scanned at 600 dpi, which is quite high-resolution.

I have a growing collection of old books which each contain a large number of maps. I thought it might be interesting to scan them in and make them available for others to see.

The books are usually travel guides or books about a particular country, region etc. Although I’ve recently found some good books on religious history and geography which have some good maps in them. Basically, anything with a map in it!

Worth a look. He’s even got an RSS feed for new additions to the site.

“Geocoding” is adding latitude/longitude data to something to indicate its physical location — for example, geocoding a digital photograph so you can pinpoint where it was taken, or geocoding your blog so that people can know where you’re blogging from. Now, as far as blogs are concerned, the most frequent use of geocoding is to be able to show which other bloggers are located nearby. A few blog maps showed where some bloggers were relative to one another, but the biggest geocoding project was probably GeoURL: it generated lists of nearby bloggers based on latitude/longitude data embedded in a web page’s metadata. (It was one of Joshua Schachter’s many projects; another one turned into del.icio.us).

Some time last year, though, for whatever reason, GeoURL went dark. Now, under the tutelage of Ask Bjørn Hansen, it’s been relaunched as a version 2.0 beta. There’s a blog for updates. There’s also a Firefox extension. Via Urban Geography.

But GeoURL isn’t the only game in town. There’s also BlogMap, which works with RSS feeds and displays a map of your location using MapPoint. It’s a project of Microsoft employee Chandu Thota, who works on MapPoint, and it’s pretty neat — especially when you click on the number of nearby blogs and get presented with a map of all of them. Via Scobelizer.

Online at the National Library of Scotland: “The first Atlas of Scotland, containing 49 engraved maps and 154 pages of descriptive text, translated from Latin into English for the first time.” Via Plep. See previous entries: Pont’s Maps of Scotland; Maps of Scotland, 1560-1928.

This map of the Swiss political landscape scarcely resembles a map of Switzerland (see previous entry); instead, it plots various Swiss cities and regions on political axes — left to right, liberal to conservative — and with colours showing voting patterns. Zürich and Basel, two hours away from one another by train, end up adjacent to one another. More details at Swissinfo.

Swissinfo has a story about a Swiss cartographer who’s put out a post-occupation, up-to-date map of Baghdad. The map is an update of a 2002 edition, but now includes such landmarks as bombed-out infrastructure and other changes since the invasion.

“Our strength consists of mentioning particularities and offering insider tips that have not been published anywhere else.”

Rohweder, who has never been to Baghdad, based the latest version on his 2002 edition and on satellite photos and images. But he needed a co-worker on site to do the fieldwork.

Martin Herzog, his business partner who is married to an Iraqi, spent about three months in the city collecting information on street names and buildings to update the map, which covers central Baghdad.

The cartographer’s company site is here; the site uses frames, but the Baghdad page, sans frames, is here.

Next Wednesday at the Washington University in St. Louis, a talk by history professor Christine R. Johnson titled “The Art & Science of Renaissance Mapping: Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.”

At the end of the 16th century, Europe was remaking itself and its relationship with the world. In the beautifully illustrated maps included in the first modern atlas — the Theatrum — ancient science is fused with the powerful dynamics of exploration, empire and state-building, reflecting the creative use of knowledge in the Renaissance.

Free admission.

Jimmy Bloom writes, “I have several encyclopedias and dictionaries of imaginary, lost and misplaced islands, continents etc., but am wondering if someone has produced a wall map of such things suitable for framing and mounting.”

David Kim asks, “I was wondering how valuable old Paris subway maps are, in general (if such a question can even be answered)? I am talking about the 1937 map of the Metro you had on your site a while back?” (He means this one.) He also asks, “Is there a web site on antique Paris Metro maps?” I didn’t know of any; a cursory Google search in both English and French came up with nothing. Is there an RATP specialist in the house?

Further to my earlier post, it turns out that there’s already plenty of work under way on hacking Google Maps. Engadget has a how-to on adding your own annotations to Google Maps — it requires Firefox and a plugin, though. This page shows you how to run Google Maps off your own server with your own custom XML data. This is a more general page on Google Maps hacking and bookmarklets. And there are a couple of wiki pages about Google Maps hacking — one for hackers and one for users.

Don Sattler writes, “I’m in London on vacation and would love to purchase a large map of the tube system to hang on my office wall. I can’t seem to find one. Do you know of any shops that might sell one?” So the question is twofold — does one or more of such a map exist, and where can it be found?

Tube map fanatics should not miss the ultimate MetaFilter post on the London Underground. Some stuff you may have seen before, even here, but it’s all in one spot, see?

An exhibition of the art of Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser & Wirth, London:

The main gallery space features Everything, 2004, an impressive four-panel painting which interpolates fragments of American road maps. The enigmatic veined surface invites the viewer for closer inspection where one can identify the names of locations; painstakingly woven in parts. Devoid of any beginning, end, or coordinates, places dissolve within some larger unknown entity of no geographical order. Maps are one of Kuitca’s leitmotifs and have played an extensive role in his work. The graphic configurations function as his reading of tensions between one’s assignment of place and belonging, of home, but on the idea of the “place” being Universal. Here, the viewer traces an imaginary journey, which goes, and returns, to nowhere. A sense of search and self-scrutiny on the weathered surface suggests loss and dislocation.

More on Kuitca here and here.

Infoworld’s Jon Udell has a couple of columns (February 18, March 4) pointing out that Google Maps’s open data formats — XML is a wonderful thing — can allow all sorts of web services to be built around it. For example, linking it up with your GPS unit. Via Winer.

Sometimes it’s all about knowing what your search term is. I wanted to do some species range maps for one of my other projects. Since I’m not wise in the ways of cartography, and because Illustrator would be serious overkill for this little project, I wanted some bare maps that had nothing but country, state or provincial borders, so I could draw the species’ range on them in a new layer. I knew they existed — way back when I was in school, we had a photocopied supply of them — but I didn’t know where to go looking. This Ask MetaFilter question led to a few professional sources, but after searching through a few more sites I came up with the correct search term: outline maps. Whereupon I struck paydirt: this was what I was looking for.

The ones I ended up deciding on were on About.com: they’re a little crude, but had no licencing restrictions that I could see and best served my purposes. The nicest ones were those at the Atlas of Canada, though they weren’t quite what I was looking for — I also needed the U.S., Mexico and Central America to a certain level of detail. For other pages, the always-excellent Perry-Casteñeda Library Map Collection (you should always check it first when looking for maps, something I frequently forget) has an enormous page of links to outline map sites.

Now I have to come up with range maps for 30 species, which, because I’m using separate Canada, U.S. and Mexico/Central America maps, probably means something like 50 maps to do. Zoiks.

Sea Kayaker magazine has an extensive guide to digital navigation — i.e., using a GPS, digitized maps and mapping software — in its February 2005 issue. Via Gadling.

The details of my efforts to get comments working on this blog after the upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 are set out on my personal blog, if you’re truly interested. But insofar as how commenting will work from here on in, note the following:

1. No authentication, TypeKey or otherwise, is required, though a name and e-mail address is. (Your name can be a pseudonym, and your e-mail will not be displayed.)
2. Comments on new posts will not be held in a moderation queue. They’ll appear immediately.
3. Comments on posts older than 10 days will be held in a moderation queue and require my approval before appearing. This is to thwart comment spammers, who frequently target older posts.
4. Comments will be closed on posts older than 45 days. This is to thwart comment spammers completely.
5. Various spam blocking measures are in place. False positives are certainly possible, though, I suspect, unlikely. Let me know if you’re trying to post a legitimate comment and the system isn’t letting it through.
6. Throttling is in place: there are hourly and daily limits on all comments. Normal comment volumes are well below these limits. But in the event of a massive comment-spam attack that somehow gets through the blacklists, these quotas may be exceeded and you might not be able to post a comment. Try again in an hour if that happens.

If all goes well, there should be few to no impediments to participation on this site.

Comments aren’t working the way they should. You can still comment if you’re willing to put up with additional hurdles and error messages, but there’s something up with the TypeKey authentication: my test comments get sent to the approval queue instead of being posted right away. My guess is that I goofed in the redesign of my individual entry templates. I’ll take another stab at it tomorrow. Bear with me in the meantime.

The Boston Phoenix has an interview with the manager of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Office of Digital Cartography and GIS, Carolyn Bennett; the discussion ranges from GIS in general, to the nature of the Office’s work, to one of their projects, the Boston Atlas.

New feature. Map Folksonomies now has its own page; it used to be on the left-hand sidebar. This page links to mapping-related tags used on sites that use tags. So far that means del.icio.us, Flickr, and MetaFilter (including the Ask MetaFilter subsite). If you’ve got suggestions for additional tags or additional sites, let me know by e-mail or in the comments. If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about with this “folksonomies” nonsense, read this Wikipedia page and this Wired News article. As usual, my powers of explanation are not up to the task.

This site provides real-time traffic conditions for the state of Georgia. In addition to the maps showing accidents, construction activity or trip times, you can get current accidents as a list, view traffic cameras and even what’s on those big electronic highway signs. The system behind it has been up and running since 1996, but some of the features are much more up to date, such as PDA, mobile phone and RSS versions. Via Scobelizer.

All right, I think it’s working now. Comments on this site now use TypeKey authentication. If you have a TypeKey identity, you can post a comment and it will show up immediately; otherwise, it will be held in a queue until I approve it. This minor inconvenience was necessitated by a strong influx of comment spam over the last two weeks, which, shall we say, encouraged me to upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 for the comment management features.

Were it not for the fact that readers’ comments have been a real highlight of this blog of late, especially when you’ve been answering questions, I may well have shut down comments altogether. I’m glad I’ve got another option, because I really do appreciate your comments. I hope you don’t find it too bothersome.

I’ve just upgraded the blogging software that powers The Map Room to Movable Type 3.15. This site may not work as expected as I try to work out the kinks. Commenting in particular might be problematic. Patience in the meantime. More anon.