Nikolas Schiller writes:

The other day you featured my analysis concerning Google’s censorship of downtown Washington, D.C. I am contacting you with two updates concerning this research.

1. I discovered that the area in question is the exact same area that features Google’s 3D buildings (Google is placing priority of 3D buildings over newer imagery — or simply an easy way to get around saying that downtown D.C. is being censored.)

2. I made a MyGoogleMap outlining the 12 mile perimeter. The exact links to the MyGoogleMap and the KML file.

(Edited to incorporate links.) Previously: Google, Censorship and Washington, D.C.

The government of British Columbia is in talks with Google about supplying information about the province for Google Maps and Google Earth. The potential goes beyond providing transit information, the Vancouver Sun reports: “Government input could include information on highway construction projects, so local residents and visitors to the area would know where they might encounter a delay. In the case of B.C., Google could also have access to the data and images banked in the Integrated Land and Resource Registry, which gives detailed information about all areas of the province.” Thanks to Mike Pegg for the tip.

From what I read about it on Free Geography Tools and GPS Tracklog, Zonum Solutions’ online tool, Color Your Map, seems like a quick way of throwing together a basic choropleth map or even a range map, especially if, as Rich did, you compile county-by-county maps from various states. The tool allows you to colour in countries, states and provinces and, depending on the country, counties (on state-level maps), and export the data in KML format.

On the Making Maps: DIY Cartography blog, John Krygier has a post about nautical symbols, both past (circa 1957) and present.

Google announces the latest Google Earth imagery update with a cryptic blog entry inviting us to guess from the clues; those with less patience can turn to Digital Earth Blog for the answers. (Update: Google’s official answers.) If the Ottawa-area update is any indication, these imagery updates have not yet migrated to Google Maps. (Update, Aug. 1: they’re on Maps now.)

Work is under way to add GeoRSS support to World Wind (via Chad). Meanwhile, Peter reports that in a fall update, KML support will come to Microsoft Virtual Earth (or whatever they will be calling it by then).

Map hacks have been around for a couple of years, but the real revolution in online mapping is much more recent — and involves the ability of amateurs, rather than programmers, to create maps using online tools. That’s the argument in this article in yesterday’s New York Times:

[T]he Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make “mash-ups.” Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight.

Yet that is nothing compared with the boom that is now under way. In April, Google unveiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe.

The article adds some non-Google stats as well: a million maps using Microsoft’s older Collections; 40,000 maps through Platial; 1.3 million traceroutes through MotionBased; 25 million geotagged Flickr photos. The upshot is: a lot of stuff is being mapped — and we’re the ones doing it.

“New World Cartographies: Mapping America, 1500-1776” is a symposium taking place on November 2-3 at the American Museum in Britain in Bath; co-sponsored by the museum and Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, it “will focus on cartographic representations (and misrepresentations) of America before the Declaration of Independence in 1776 which gave rise to the present-day United States.” RAI conference page; conference poster (PDF). Via MapHist.

“Mapping Missouri: Maps from the Collection of the Missouri State Archives,” a touring exhibition of maps from the Missouri State Archives (see previous entry), is on display at Missouri State’s Meyer Library until August 22. Springfield News-Leader.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle profiles local city planner Tom Conoscenti, who “could easily be considered the Brooklyn cartographer these days. As a city planner with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Conoscenti is responsible for producing telling and informative maps of all the development activities under way in Downtown Brooklyn. He produces a new map just about every month.”

Spain may make fiddling with a car’s satellite navigation system illegal (via All Points Blog). Meanwhile, Quebec — where I live — may make them legal. It seems risible that something so widespread is not allowed, however technically and unenforced, somewhere in North America, but you don’t know my province.

Yesterday’s big news was TomTom’s offer of €1.8 billion for fellow Dutch company Tele Atlas. Not really a surprise, given the growth in business of online maps and navigation devices. If the merger goes through, Tele Atlas will continue to work with other clients, but apparently TomTom was its biggest customer. The ability of TomTom’s user base to update the map database was cited as a major advantage of the merger. Press release, FAQ; All Points Blog, Reuters.

Navteq’s stock was up 20 per cent yesterday as the market assumed that it would be next, the only question being the buyer — which kind of client, another device manufacturer like Garmin, or an online map service like Google or Yahoo?

If you also like satellite images of other planets, proceed immediately to the home page of the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: “During its mission, HiRISE will collect thousands of images of the Martian surface, covering only one percent of the planet. The camera’s advanced optics allow us to see objects a few meters across.” Those images, in glorious grayscale, are available online. Via Ogle Earth.

Previously: Topo Maps of Mars; Google Mars; Topography of Mars.

Nikolas Schiller writes to point out an article in today’s Washington Post about Google’s updated imagery of Washington, D.C., and how Google massaged the fact that the most recent imagery available — 2005 imagery from the USGS — censored several sensitive locations in the U.S. capital:

The newer photos on Google’s map of Washington are from 2005 Geological Survey satellite images released in March. Those photos were updated from images released in 2002 and are much more detailed. Vehicles have structure. People have shadows. Buildings have shingles. Trees have branches.

But in the 2005 Geological Survey images, the White House is blocked out by a white rectangle, and when you zoom in on the Capitol and the Washington Monument, they become a flurry of dots. Rather than use those photos, Google used uncensored images of the area, including the White House and Capitol, from a commercial vendor.

Those commercial images date from 2002 and are at a lower resolution, but they do not censor the sites in question. Nikolas pointed out the censored areas in a blog post earlier this month. He objects to the fact that the censored area is far larger than the area redacted in the USGS imagery; Stefan points out, however, that “Google does not itself mix and match imagery at the sub-tile level. … [T]he only tool Google is left with is a broad brush, and that it sometimes is forced to use it when confronted with governmental censorship as in DC (hence the inability to evade a de facto censorship policy).”

The moral panic over satellite imagery and national security continues.

Last Wednesday’s Toronto Star had a brief item about an 1818 map of Toronto harbour, with lots of detail about the map itself and how it came into the current owner’s possession. Via Map the Universe.

Roger Hart did a better job of covering the issue of Vermont’s ancient and abandoned roads on GeoCarta — which is to say that he covered them and I didn’t: see here and here. In a nutshell, there are apparently a large number of roads and rights of way that have been forgotten or have fallen into disuse. Municipalities have until July 2009 to map them or they become “unidentified corridors”; such corridors will revert to the surrounding landowners in 2015 unless they’re reclaimed. The Bennington Banner reports on this issue, inasmuch as it impacts the tiny town of Readsboro, which is looking to purchase antique maps to try to determine its missing rights of way.

Steve Chilton writes in again with details of this year’s summer school put on by the Society of Cartographers:

I thought that readers of the blog would be interested in the Society of Cartographers annual conference, that is to take place at Portsmouth University on 3-6 Sept 2007. Presentations include ones on map design, GIS, and maritime, environmental and community mapping — within a very full programme that includes many interesting topics, workshops (Pictometry, LIDAR, Sketchup, and Illustrator) and plenty of networking opportunities.

Publicity flyer and video trailer here (PDF, Windows Media).

Previously: SoC Summer School 2006; Society of Cartographers Summer School.

Another online forum about maps — The Cartographers’ Guild — with a decided focus on fictional maps.

The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs — all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.

Although we specialize in maps of fictional realms, as commonly used in both novels and games (both tabletop and role-playing), many Guild members are also proficient in historical and contemporary maps. Likewise, we specialize in computer-assisted cartography (such as with GIMP, Adobe apps, Campaign Cartographer, Dundjinni, etc.), although many members here also have interest in maps drafted by hand.

Thanks to Rob Miller for the link.

Author, blogger and adult filmmaker Audacia Ray, writing about her road trip to LA, has this to say about in-dash GPS systems:

I like not having maps crumpled up on the floor of my car, or misfolded in my bag — I am a messy person, I can’t help it. But digital directions are very destination oriented. I do really love knowing where the fuck I’m going — or at least, depending on the digital voice to tell me where to turn. But I don’t feel like I’ve gotten any perspective on the lay of the land of either San Francisco or Los Angeles as a result. I can navigate the blocks surrounding my destination point, but that’s about it. The tech I’m using gives very little idea of what life outside my little digital window is like.

The link is safe for work; the rest of the site is not.

Another web page dedicated to generating electoral district boundaries through a computer algorithm as a way to prevent gerrymandering — in this case, the algorithm looks for the “shortest splitline,” which in itself does not take into account any intervening geographic features. The presumption is that this method is fairer and more democratic, which I think is a little naive. But it’s an interesting approach. Via MetaFilter.

Previously: Computer-Generated Electoral Districts.

One of my favourite web writers ever, Maciej Ceglowski, announces “an experimental set of Flash and JavaScripts add-ons to the Google Maps API” that allows for the presentation of very large datasets — the Million Marker Map:

One challenge we’ve faced is finding a way to display the 27,000 restaurants in New York without writing our own mapping engine from scratch. Current JavaScript maps from Google or Yahoo become noticeably pokey with just a few hundred markers on them, and effectively unusable once the number exceeds a thousand. The solution we’ve come up with is a kind of forced marriage between Flash 9 and the Google maps API that we’re releasing today as a standalone component called the Million Marker Map.

Maciej says it’s a buggy demo at the moment, but the component supports, in addition to million-marker-sized datasets, vector overlays.

Krygier and Wood are also involved, as two of several authors, in another cartography blog, CartoBlog, which seems to flow from the CartoTalk forum. The most recent entry, Allelopathic Maps and Google’s “My Maps”, is a good one: it argues that user-annotated maps are creative:

Map design in this case is much less about the traditional realm of map design — the “base map,” symbol choices, visual hierarchy, layout, etc. as there are so few options in this realm of design. Map design is more about what you choose to map: a very creative endeavor that can be poisoned by what we think maps should show.

Bit of a problem: the archive and category links don’t appear to work. Via Map the Universe.

Most trail maps are spare and functional: without context, you might not even know that trees and mountains are involved. But geography graduate student Molly Holmberg has produced a watercolour map of the trails and open spaces of Bangor, Maine for the Bangor Land Trust, the Bangor Daily News reports. This is not the first watercolour map for Holmberg, whose web site has a gallery of other hand-drawn maps — an interesting thing to see coming from a geographer.

The reports of Slashgeo’s death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Global Concepts in Maps is an abbreviated excerpt from a longer educational film about map projections; more information here. I want to see the whole thing, but my, that doesn’t mean it’s good.

The risible style of 1950s educational films is imitated in “Your Map Collection” (part one, part two) a modern production by (and about) the staff of the University of Washington Libraries Map Collection. The sepia filter and sense of humour misfire, but hey, it’s a staff video.

Via MapHist.

Introducing the Hipster GPS: “Inspired by 43Folders’s Hipster PDA, the Hipster GPS takes a similarly low tech approach. Also, the price of entry is far below that of an electronic GPS system.” Photo by James Foreman. Via 43Folders.

Google’s Mapplets, announced at the end of May, is coming along nicely: it’s now fully integrated into the “My Maps” tab of Google Maps, and you can save Mapplet content to a personal map. Google LatLong, Google Maps API Blog; see also Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania.

Mapplets, you may recall, are a way that mashup developers can send their content to the Google Maps interface: users don’t need to visit the developer’s site to access their map data. This announcement makes it that much easier to access and manipulate that data.

Previously: Mapplets; A Google Maps Roundup.

To read some of the commentary about the iPhone’s implementation of Google Maps, you’d think that a mobile mapping application is worthless without GPS. But is it?

All Points Blog’s Joe Francica doesn’t say so outright, but in this dismissive post, he argues that Apple missed the mark by not creating a social-networking- and location-based megadevice (rather than, well, a phone).

The only thing I can see that is somewhat innovative is the integration the iPhone has with its other features. That is, when you select a particular POI, let’s say a restaurant, and you touch the pin location on the map display, the user is able to see and then dial the phone number for that establishment. That’s cool, I’ll admit. The ability to view traffic maps is just a yawner. It’s just a feature of another website. Routing? Please don’t insult me. Where is the “live” link to my location? Show me my friends, my pets, my car and everyone and everything else in my network. Show them to me on the map as my “in-network” favs. The map features are basically static. It lacks the “wow” factor so common to Apple products and for a company that prides itself on catering to the gen X’ers, Y’s or whoever, the opportunity to establish the iPhone as the primo location-based social networking device was a huge miss. Even local search, the hottest thing going, is simply web-based look up on the iPhone. Without GPS, (or Wi-Fi triangulation) it’s simply just a web browser.

Continue reading this entry »

I’m working on a big post on Google Maps on the iPhone today — or, more precisely, on the reaction to Google Maps on the iPhone — and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to finish it. In the meantime, here are a couple of Google Maps-related items: geocoding for UK addresses is now available through the API, and a new version of Google Maps for the Palm OS (see previous entry) has been released.

The Fantasy Atlas is a German-language collection of maps from various fantasy (and some science fiction) novels. That there are so many entries speaks to the fact that it’s virtually impossible nowadays to write a fantasy novel without creating a map of the secondary world in which it takes place. Via MapHist.

Global Cities, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London until August 27, “looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.” Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens visited the exhibition earlier today; he writes that it’s “a social geographer’s dream and a wonderful place for toddlers to explore. It’s a bit like Google Earth unplugged: population density maps you can climb, and big glorious imagery of cityscapes on the walls.” The photo above, of one of those climbable density maps, is by Stefan, and comes from his Flickr photoset of the visit.

The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog.

The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here), has moved to a new address.

Other new blogs:

• Cartographismes, Dominique Taléghani’s blog of imaginary and artistic maps.
• Virtual Earth: A Developer Blog is another (rare) voice on the Microsoft side of the online map world.
• Two GIS blogs: GeoMusings, Thinking in GIS.

Via Strange Maps, James and James again.

A Russian version of Google Maps was launched yesterday. Major cities — like Moscow, obviously — get building outlines and subway stations: the full, mature Google map treatment. Other cities — I tried Ufa, a city of one million in the Urals — only have major highways. The Moscow Times reports that a recent government directive lifting restrictions on precise geographical data enabled the site to be launched — or at least made its legal situation less tenuous. If the FSB shows up in Mountain View, we’ll know. Via Ogle Earth.

Arno Peters was not the first person to come up with a map projection as an explicit critique of the Mercator projection (or at least its use as a general world map rather than as a navigation tool), nor was he the first to spend years proselytizing his creation. Bernard Cahill did the same thing beginning in 1909. His projection, the octohedral “butterfly map,” is the subject of this site run by Gene Keyes, who has spent no small effort of his own on the projection. The site contains a gallery of octahedral maps and Cahill’s 1909 article from The Scottish Geographical Magazine, in which he introduced the projection. That article is a must-read, if only for the account of how the 1908 San Francisco earthquake disrupted Cahill’s work and a critique of the Mercator projection that seems eerily contemporaneous. Thanks to peacay for the link.

See also Carlos Furuti’s page on polyhedral maps (see previous entry).

Darren McEntee writes, about my post about using Google My Maps KML in mashups,

Can you please add a small piece of info in regards how to add a KML file to Google My Maps? I have tracked some past trips of mine via GPS, and saved a few KML files on my server, but I would really like to add my trips to the Google My Maps. If you have time please post this information. I can not find much data on the net about this.

There are people more qualified to deal with this question, and maybe they’ll even post in the comments, but here’s my stab at it:

Darren has it backwards, I think: My Maps is a way of creating KML easily, and storing it, not of displaying it. He doesn’t need it: he’s already created the KML and uploaded it to his server. What he’s looking for is a way to present it, and there are several options for that. A simple link on a web page would allow people to view his KML in Google Earth, and would also get him indexed by Google.

But the point of the entry Darren referenced was that you could integrate a KML file made with My Maps into a mashup, because the Google Maps API reads KML as a map layer. Just add the following code — after var map(); but before function(load); —

var geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://server.com/dir/file.kml");

Darren doesn’t need My Maps to show his trips; he can do it on his own web page.

What am I missing?

A nice touch. In its most recent update, Microsoft Virtual Earth added shaded relief to its road maps.

This is something Google Maps lacks, but Google Karten notes that the map tiles from the Shaded Relief world map (see previous entry) can be added as a layer in your mashup; instructions here.

On MapHist, John Hessler writes:

Two new books on Waldseemüller and the context of the creation of the 1507 and 1516 world maps are due to be released in the next few months.

The first, by Seymour Schwartz (an author whose work you all know), Putting “America” on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States, will be released in August 2007 by Prometheus Books. This book contains a nice summary of the current and past scholarship on the 1507 map and a biography of its re-discoverer Joseph Fischer.

The second, by John Hessler, entitled The Naming of America: Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio, will be released in late December to coincide with the encasement of the 1507 World Map by the Library of Congress and is published by the LOC and designed by the art publisher Giles of London. This book contains an introduction to new scholarship on both the 1507 and 1516 world maps, focusing mostly on their use by their first owner Johannes Schöner and the map’s relationship to the other parts of Schöner’s extant Library in Vienna. The book also contains a new heavily annotated translation of Waldseemüller and Ringmann’s Cosmographiae Introductio with a commentary on the text that identifies place names and the sources for Waldseemüller’s quotes from classical and contemporary literature. This is topped off with a sheet by sheet facsimile of the 1507 world map.

For all those interested in Waldseemüller and his circle it should be a great year of reading. If that is not enough for you, however, in 2009 two more books will also focus on Waldseemüller and Schöner. One written by the former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Toby Lester, entitled The Fourth Part on the World: The Epic Story of the Voyagers and Thinkers from Marco Polo to Vespucci Who Created the Waldseemüller Map of 1507 and Ushered in the New World, published by the major trade house The Free Press, and a second book by Hessler entitled Johannes Schöner and the Nuremburg Astronomers 1473-1545 by a major university press (details not yet final).

(Reprinted with permission; links added.)

Previously: More About Waldseemüller; Waldseemüller Map Formally Transferred; Waldseemüller Map Stamp Issued; Encasing Waldseemüller’s Map; Waldseemüller’s Map Goes for £545,600; Auction of First Map of the New World.

• Buy Putting “America” on the Map at Amazon.com

A new display beginning July 20 in the Maps Reading Room lobby at the British Library: Hollar as a Mapmaker. “The display celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Czech artist and etcher Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677). Best known for his landscapes, portraits, fashion plates and depictions of antiquities, Hollar also had a lifelong love of maps and earned a living by etching them. It’s a small exhibition with an accompanying leaflet, and will feature some of the most outstanding but little-known decorative examples of his work, which incorporate views and portraits.”

Update, July 13: Radio Praha notes the 400th anniversary of Hollar’s birth; see also the Wikipedia entry on Hollar (whose first name, in Czech, is Václav).

Don’t miss this article if you’re at all curious about how Google Earth works on a technical level — how data measured in terabytes and terapixels get sent over a relatively straitened Internet connection and processed by a relatively limited home computer. (Those broadband, video and processor requirements aren’t there for nothing, folks.) A bit over my non-technical head, but worth a read — it’s by Avi Bar Ze’ev, one of the early developers of the program (when it was still Keyhole Viewer). Via Ogle Earth.

KPIX-TV, the San Francisco CBS station, has a report on geotagging that covers at least two of the three bases — viz., manually geotagging photos and syncing photos with a GPS data logger — and mentions a couple of geotagging sites. I’m puzzled by the somewhat gratuitous privacy-and-security implications tacked on the end of the item, though. Via Science Library Pad.

Unfortunately, Slashgeo is closing down, for an all too common reason: too much work to do in Alex’s spare time. Too few people who shared his enthusiasm for the project. And, though he doesn’t say it explicitly, for too little money: he floated the idea of ads last month so that he could hire some people to take on the workload, and the coup de grâce, as he puts it, is having his AdSense account terminated — before, seemingly, he could even get it off the ground. To be sure, Alex has been brooding on Slashgeo’s future and direction for some time. In the end, it was too much, and I can’t say I blame him. I’d be hard pressed to maintain The Map Room if it had to compete with a day job for my attention — especially if I couldn’t make any money from it.

(It does surprise me that he couldn’t make a go of it financially, given the traffic data he cites, which is something like four or five times my daily traffic — excluding RSS in my case, including it in his.)

About a month’s worth of links related to Google Maps from my increasingly preposterous queue. Because the news wasn’t all about Street View.

• The imagery update announced in early June for Google Earth was applied to Google Maps only a week later.
• More cities have transit data.
• Expanded coverage of India and Maps for the United Arab Emirates have now been added to Google Maps. A few weeks ago, Sweden got a localized version with transit and business data.
• Businesses can edit their local search listings; people can add reviews to them.
• Google continues to integrate maps into its other products: YouTube videos can now be geotagged.
• More on Mapplets (see previous entry); they’re also browsable.

(I’ve also been accumulating some Yahoo Maps content, for a later post.)

Timothy Thomas writes:

There are no good, hi-res images of the 1502 Cantino Planisphere — one of the earliest maps from the age of discovery. This object is included in the current exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC.

The exhibition website includes a flash image of the Cantino World Map with a zoom function. I stitched together the complete image with screenshots. This was laborious, but, I believe, useful. I also think it is the only hi-res example of the Cantino Planisphere now available for potentially general use (there is no copyright on this work).

I have uploaded my work (3525×1650 PNG file, 11.9 MB) here. You may download it and/or link to it [on The Map Room] to spread it among interested parties. Please credit me for the assemblage of the same. I am a graduate student in the humanities at the University of Chicago.

There is also an excellent monograph on the planisphere here.

Zoom (June 30 to August 18, Santa Monica, California). A group exhibition of map art at Santa Monica Art Studios’ Arena 1. “Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material, not as an exploration of actual geography or the time/space continuum but rather as a matter of charting, subverting or deconstructing the very idea of mapping as a representation of the world.” Includes work from artists we’ve seen before, including Cusick, Katchadourian, Kozloff and Trigg. Via Map Lovers Tribe.

Mapping the Pacific Coast: Coronado to Lewis and Clark (June 30 to September 30, Astoria, Oregon). The touring Quivira collection (see previous entries: 1, 2) comes to the Columbia River Maritime Museum. Via MapHist.

300 Years of Mapping Orleans and Cape Cod, 1600-1900 (July 5 to September 1, Orleans, Massachusetts). A “summer exhibit” at the Orleans Historical Society; includes a Tuesday lecture series. Via Map History/History of Cartography.

Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art (June 13, 2008 to September 14, 2008, Cincinnati, Ohio). Next year at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. From the announcement: “This exhibition addresses the subjective nature of mapping, how we locate ourselves in consideration of changing boundaries and territories, and how we give visual form to boundaries, territories and land masses. Artists in this exhibition confront the politics of naming of places, cartographic attacks on ethnic sensitivity, maps as evidence in boundary disputes, extension of terrestrial boundaries into nautical masses, and maps as scientific and political voice.” Via The Enquirer.

Oh. I seem to have made PC World’s 100 Blogs We Love (relevant page here; the single-page printer friendly version is easier to peruse), among some much more impressive company.

Travel blog Gadling has a post warning against blind faith in the directions given by a GPS navigation system — a subject near and dear to my heart, as previous entries will attest. The latest example comes from Italy, where an Audi driver ended up on the railway tracks. I’m beginning to wonder whether GPS systems are a convenient excuse: blame the gadget when you do something stupid.

More on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, the 500th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year.

The Library of Congress reports that construction of the hermetically sealed encasement for their copy of the map — the last surviving copy of the map (rather than the globe gores) — is now under way. Via MapHist.

As for the globe gores, there are four surviving copies, one of which is at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, which has a page commemorating the anniversary, pages about Waldseemüller, and pages about the gores in particular. Where the map is quite large, the globe the gores would make would be quite small: only a few inches across, and with a concomitant reduction in detail. Via Map the Universe.

Previously: Waldseemüller Map Formally Transferred; Waldseemüller Map Stamp Issued; Encasing Waldseemüller’s Map; Waldseemüller’s Map Goes for £545,600; Auction of First Map of the New World.

Image credit: James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota.