The Missing and Stolen Maps Database has been announced.

In early February 2008, the International Antiquarian Mapsellers Association (IAMA) voted to provide funding for the development and maintenance of a missing and stolen map database. The database is the result of advance cooperation and collaboration between dealers, collectors, librarians and curators. …

This developing database is one of many efforts in the fight against international thefts of cultural property. This is free of charge, fully searchable, international in scope, and accessible using individual usernames and passwords. The title was selected to indicate that not all the reported items are necessarily stolen, as there are other factors that may, at times, result in the disappearance of these valuable historical documents.

We believe that this database will be a useful tool, facilitating more rapid and accurate dispersal of information between relevant groups, including law enforcement. This would speed the retrieval of these valuable stolen documents for libraries, collectors and dealers.

Via MapHist.

In the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, Diane Dretske writes an essay in praise of county atlases:

County atlases were certainly a marketing tool to sell books, but they occurred at just the right time in American history when farms and small communities were beginning to prosper. The atlas became a symbol of local achievements, boasting the accomplishments of farmers. Midwestern farmers were especially fond of the gilt-lettered atlases, putting them on parlor tables and proudly turning to the page where their farms were featured. …

Historic atlases are one of the most requested collections for research at the Lake County Discovery Museum’s archives [where Dretske works]. County atlases are rare, due in part to their heavy use by owners and large size that made them difficult to store properly.

Another find from Modern Mechanix, reprinted from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science: “A colorful map of the United States, complete with rivers, mountains, boundary lines, and other geographical features, adorns a novel rain cape recently introduced. Made in either red or blue, the cape is fitted with a hood, and has extra large armholes to permit it to be worn over a regular coat.”

Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map of the New York subway system, which introduced a Beck-style diagrammatic transit map to the city (and which New Yorkers were not prepared for; the map was controversial and encountered opposition before it was replaced in 1979), is back. Kind of. In an exclusive with Men’s Vogue, Vignelli and his design team have updated the map to reflect 30 years of changes and are selling a limited 500-print run for $299, with proceeds benefiting Green Worker Cooperatives. Via MetaFilter.

Previously: Massimo Vignelli Defends His Map; Eddie Jabbour’s New York Subway Map; New York Subway Maps.

Artist Elizabeth Berrien does wire sculpture; some of her creations are maps. “She’d often felt that the intricate, organic lines of our living planet and its features — continents, great river and mountain ranges — would make a glorious translation into wire.” Via Cartophilia and You Are Here, Hon.

Here’s another map showing country code top-level Internet domains, available as a 24×36-inch poster. “Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30% to fit the layout. At the other end of the spectrum, the smallest type size used reflects those countries with fewer than 10 million residents.” Via Boing Boing.

Previously: Internet Country Code Map.

Speaking of collaborative mapping projects, here are a couple of links:

• Richard Eriksson reports on a meeting of the Vancouver Public Space Network’s Mapping and Wayfinding group. “They are a group of mapping enthusiasts who want to organize collaboratively mapping Vancouver’s public spaces and have some interesting ideas on how to do so, including a web service with a REST interface, but also hand-drawn maps.” Thanks to Richard Akerman for the link.
• Efforts to conserve the San Pedro River in Arizona may be aided by a local volunteer mapping project, the Arizona Republic reports. “To draw the map, hundreds of volunteers converged on the river last summer with notebooks, cameras and GPS units. On foot and horseback, the volunteers charted lengths of the river and used the GPS units to mark the start and end of areas where water flowed. The timing allowed surveyors to track the river during critical summer base-flow conditions.” Thanks to James Fee for the link.

OpenStreetMap adds an export feature that, as you might expect, goes beyond embedding a map on your site:

Want a static map for your blog, without having to spend hours fiddling with JavaScript? No problem - just export in PNG or JPEG. Want a map for a book? PDF or SVG are the perfect formats — fully vectorised, so they look smooth on high-resolution printers at any scale, and are easy to restyle or edit. Want to play with the raw data? Get it in our easy-to-parse OpenStreetMap XML format.

The British Cartographic Society has announced its 2008 annual symposium. Mapping 2008: Making the Most of Maps will take place from September 3 to 6 at the Harben House Conference facility in Newport Pagnell. No site yet; here’s the press release.

Previously: Mapping 2007.

Richard sends along links to two separate models of the city of Moscow. First, this one, an exhibition that opened in 1977. It’s more than 400 square feet in size, and has lighting inside the buildings that turn on and off depending on the time of day; the cost and size are why the museum that houses it is trying to sell it. Yours for only $3 million.

Next up, a 12×12-metre, 1:500 scale model of Moscow by a Russian architectural firm (or at least that’s what Google Translate tells me; the page is in Russian).

Previously: Scale Models of Cities.

Our friend Tony Campbell has put together a Web page on cartographic chronograms. But what, you may ask, is a chronogram? In a nutshell, it’s a date encrypted into a sentence or inscription. Tony’s short explanation suffices very well:

A chronogram is a sentence or inscription in which specific letters (M,D,C,L,X,V,I), capitalised and interpreted as Roman numerals, have their values added up so as to give a hidden date, e.g. ‘LIncVIt In Isto MonasterIo reLIgIosVs fr. LanDeLInV s bIeheLer IbI professVs’ (= 1781).

(There’s also the inevitable Wikipedia entry.)

But what does this have to do with maps? From Tony’s e-mail to MapHist, where he announced this project:

Chronograms are ‘fun’; indeed, along with acrostics, crosswords, and so on, they are kept alive today as ways of stretching the brain, and particularly linguistic agility. But, for cartographic historians, they can another purpose. … [M]ost of the maps concerned are dated ONLY by their chronograms (though remember that the chronogram’s year may not always be a publication date). In some cases the chronogram has pointed to a lost prototype.

Tony’s page lists 19 known examples of chronograms on maps.

A collection of maps of Pittsburgh on the occasion of that city’s 250th anniversary. “This selection of maps and views presents a history of the city and region from [1758] to near the present; some can be seen on other pages of this website. There are few earlier large scale maps of the region because there was nothing there of interest. The earliest regional map appears to be the manuscript Mercer’s Map (#1753.1) and there are a few manuscript maps of Fort Duquesne built 1754-55, see the 1750s pages for the existing maps.” Via MapHist and Map the Universe.

Previously: Historic Pittsburgh Map Collection.

The Mapping of Ukraine: European Cartography and Maps of Early Modern Ukraine, 1550-1799, which opened yesterday at the Ukrainian Museum in New York, “includes 42 original maps published by European mapmakers over a 250-year period. A majority of the maps in the exhibition are from the Museum’s Marie Halun Bloch Collection, which consists of 52 maps bequeathed to the Museum by the Ukrainian American writer of children’s books upon her death in 1998.” Until October 5.

Two map publishers — Compass Maps and GeoCenter publishing group — are in court over an origami-based method of folding maps, The Times reports in a brief article. “Compass Maps say they created the ‘star-fold’ map and developed the brand over several years. The maps have a special pattern of perforations and creases to allow them to open and close hundreds of times before tearing.” Via GIS Lounge.

From the April issue of Wired, a map showing U.S. state-level laws banning or restricting mobile phone use while behind the wheel.

Until Mariner 4 photographed craters on Mars in 1965, Earth-bound telescopes were the only way to map the red planet. BibliOdyssey looks at Schiaparelli’s 19th-century maps of Mars, which gave rise to the idea that canals — canali or channels in Italian — criscrossed the Martian surface. It was an optical illusion, but it was an idea that Percival Lowell took up as proof of intelligent life on Mars. (See also io9.)

The Vulcan Project’s map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions is now available in a per-capita version. Suddenly it looks a lot less like a population density map. Via Andrew Sullivan.

I told you Iran was campaigning against the use of the name “Arabian Gulf”; this time they’re accusing Google Earth managers of “knowingly or unknowingly” provoking conflict in the region. Wow. Illegal and insulting? Via Ogle Earth.

Top Causes Of Errors In Online Mapping Systems: “Causes of internet map errors range from digital mapping methodology, data errors, data interpretation errors, usability errors, and errors in interpreting user queries.” Detailed. Via Slashgeo.

Yesterday, Peter Batty announced a new social-networking application that operates within Facebook: whereyougonnabe? In beta (naturally), this app lets you map your current and future activities and see what (and where) your friends are doing at the same time. The idea, apparently, is to see when you and your friends are in the same place, in a hey-look-we’re-both-in-Paris-that-weekend sort of way. See also Glenn’s post.

It looks like a good app, but the usual caveats regarding the network effect apply: the more people use it, the more useful this is; if no one you know uses it, it’s not much use at all. I would very much like to see integration with Facebook events, geotagging event addresses, but for all I know that may not be possible within the confines of the Facebook application space. Importing calendars would be a bonus, too: the fewer times I have to enter an event, the better. The Google Earth export is a nice touch, though.

Safari compatibility would also encourage me to use it more; they’re working on it.

WorldChanging has a review of An Atlas of Radical Cartography — and it’s by Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art. “An Atlas is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking and original publications i’ve read in a long long time,” she writes (previously).

On The Medieval Review, an online journal, Camille Serchuk reviews Alessandro Scafi’s Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth, “a beautifully produced multidisciplinary survey of the history of the cartography of Eden” (via MapHist).

Vector One has a two-part review of Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship: part one, part two.

• Buy An Atlas of Radical Cartography at Amazon.com
• Buy Mapping Paradise at Amazon.com
• Buy Placing History at Amazon.com

Apologies in advance for the inside baseball, but in light of the fracas that has developed over All Points Blog’s link to a map-related story on Daily Kos, a partisan Democratic blog, let me say the following:

1. I saw the Daily Kos link on All Points Blog, and decided against posting it myself — not because I disagreed with its politics, but because I didn’t think it was very interesting, and wouldn’t be of interest to anyone who wasn’t a political junkie.
2. If I see an interesting map story on a site whose politics I disagree with, I will quite likely post it anyway. I will link to left-leaning and right-leaning sites as appropriate. (I will say that there are some sites and philosophies I consider beyond the pale: Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism come to mind. But if a creationist site, for example, had an interesting map on it, I even as a staunch evolutionist would link to it. And then mock them silly.)
3. Linking to a site does not constitute an endorsement.

James says people are being a little hard on the All Points Blog team. I think that’s an understatement.

Historic Aerials “provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.” Covers a good chunk of the U.S., with multiple years available for some urban areas. Imagery is freely available but not downloadable; it’s also watermarked. Interesting nonetheless. Via Glenn.

JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has announced a lunar map generated by the Kaguya (Selene) probe: “Using the Laser Altimeter (LALT) aboard the Lunar Explorer KAGUYA, JAXA acquired data covering the entire Moon’s surface and produced a topographical map of the Moon in cooperation with the National astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Geographical Survey Institute.” The probe will continue to take additional measurement points (it’s now above six million) to enhance the map’s accuracy. Via Gizmodo, which has a gallery of the maps (I can’t find them on the Kaguya site).

Update: See also Universe Today.

All Points Blog has a roundup of the seemingly contradictory news stories about the TomTom-Tele Atlas merger and the European Commission.

Previously: EU Formally Objects to TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal; EU Investigates TomTom-Tele Atlas Deal.

What drives Glenn nuts about media coverage of Google Earth “is that most of these ‘writers’ refer to the imagery as being ‘Google’s’ as if a big bird is circling the Earth capturing high-res imagery almost daily. Hey man, the imagery is licensed from commercial image providers (like DigitalGlobe), government agencies, and others — most of us in the geospatial arena know this but I wish the writers would get it straight, perhaps even do a little research and fact finding!”

I will have something on the Microsoft Live Maps/Virtual Earth update presently (once I go through all the material, and there’s a lot to go through). In the meantime, though, Yahoo Maps hasn’t been idle either, with a huge imagery update: “Going wide, we’ve made big improvements in our wall-to-wall coverage of the United States, improving our back-drop data for a number of complete states, including California, Oregon, New York, the Carolina’s, and numerous other states in the west and midwest. … Going deep, and I think more importantly, we’ve enabled up to 2 extra zoom levels of aerial photography and satellite imagery for the Satellite button for hundreds of cities around the U.S.”

Previously: Yahoo Maps Updated.

Another profile of map publisher (and now GPS maker) DeLorme, this time from the Bangor Daily News’s Bill Graves. DeLorme got its start mapping Maine, so no surprise that the Maine media likes to cover the company’s history: local success story.

Previously: DeLorme’s Early History.

AutoCarto 2008, the Cartography and Geographic Information Society’s international research symposium on computer-based cartography, takes place September 8 to 11, 2008 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. “CaGIS invites cartographers, geographers, geospatial analysts, GIScientists, and others conducting research on the cutting edge of the geospatial sciences to submit paper abstracts and posters on a variety of topics, as well as websites demonstrating an innovative cartographic application or method.” Deadlines vary. Thanks to Keith Clarke for the link.

Greg writes to mention that the housing-search site HotPads also has a foreclosure heat maps layer. From the site: “HotPads Foreclosure Heat Maps portray the markets hit hardest by the recent housing crisis and the increased foreclosure rates. These foreclosure heat maps visually illustrate the foreclosures per capita and display color-coded foreclosure rates by county and state.” Greg says, “A more detailed version of the foreclosure map you posted a few days ago, this one lets you zoom down to the street level in your neighborhood.”

Previously: Mapping the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.

Paul Anderson writes to inform us that his Gallery of Map Projections (see previous entry) has moved to a new server hosted by the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is the new address.

Andy Anderson wrote to point to an older (2006) item from Education Week that is nonetheless worth a look: Mapping Out High School Graduation. From the article: “The EPE Research Center mapped 2002-03 graduation rates for public school districts across the nation. Low levels of graduation (shown in red) predominate in urban centers nationwide as well as in the largely rural communities of the South, Southeast, and Southwest. The national graduation rate is 69.6 percent.”

In Baltimore Festival of Maps news (note that I’ve given it — along with two earlier large exhibitions — a separate subcategory), the Washington Post reviews the Walters Art Museum’s iteration of Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. The Post already reviewed the Chicago festival, though that was by a different writer. Via MapHist.

GPS Review has a clip from an episode of (the U.S. version of) The Office that satirizes the news stories about GPS-navigation-related accidents.

You’ve probably heard about this by now. An Absolut Vodka ad in Mexico has stirred up a furor in the United States. The ad, which depicts a pre-1836 map of Mexico that includes territories since lost to Texas independence and the Mexican-American war behind Absolut’s slogan, “In an Absolut [i.e. perfect] World,” was clearly playing with nationalistic fire: in appealing to Mexican nationalism, it dredged up nativistic anxieties in the U.S. But even without the nationalist subtext, it was a boneheaded move on the V&S Group’s part, for which they have apologized.

Trying to place this affair in some larger context, the Los Angeles Times looks at “alternative cartography,” including maps we’ve seen before like the Jesusland Map — maps changed to make some larger point.

If the Absolut backlash was an overreaction, and sometimes came from places that one should not be proud of, it was nevertheless understandable. Cartophilia says, “get a sense of humor … you won the war, remember?” In response, allow me to make the following analogy. Imagine the reaction in Europe if, say, Absolut published an ad showing the pre-World War I boundaries of Germany; the fact that we won the war — twice — would do nothing to assuage the uproar that would cause.

Other examples come to mind: “Absolut Malvinas” for the Falklands, an “Absolut Québec” that includes Labrador. What can you come up with? I hereby call for your best shot at a fake Absolut ad on a controversial cartographic theme. (See, for example, Nikolas Schiller’s take on the District of Columbia and the U.S.-Mexico border.) Post a link to your creation in the comments, or add it to The Map Room’s Facebook page. (I’ll set up a Flickr group as well if there’s sufficient interest.)

The Vulcan Project, which quantifies North American carbon dioxide emissions, has released maps that shows U.S. CO₂ emissions at 100-kilometre resolution — far more detailed than previous efforts. The maps are also updated more frequently. Their most notable finding is that the southeastern U.S.’s carbon footprint is bigger than expected, whereas the northeast’s is smaller. More from CNet’s Green Tech Blog, MetaFilter, Very Spatial and Wired Science. Here’s the press release.

Chad follows up on his previous post about Google’s contour lines (previous entry) with one that notes one important shortcoming of online maps: almost none of them show where the water is. To be sure, major rivers and lakes are shown, but not smaller bodies. He concludes that “online maps are meant more for road directions and not really a hiking, fishing, hunting, off roading tool.”

I think we’re starting to see an increasing realization that online maps are not cartographic Swiss army knives.

How does a global mapping provider like Google deal with disputed map names? (Think, for example, of Iran’s campaign in favour of the Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf, or South Korea’s on behalf of the East Sea instead of the Sea of Japan.) A national map can pick sides, but an internationally available website or application (i.e., Google Earth) can’t help but get into trouble from one side or the other.

Google’s Director of Global Public Policy, Andrew McLaughlin, explains in a must-read post on Google’s Public Policy Blog how Google manages to find a balance, at least insofar as contested names for bodies of water are concerned. The policy they’ve implemented is called Primary Local Usage.

Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. “Caribbean Sea” in English, “Mar Caribe” in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it. …

For language clients other than English, we display only the preferred name in the relevant language. For example, the Japanese client of Google Earth shows “Sea of Japan” in Japanese (日本海), while the Korean version shows “East Sea” in Korean (동해). In these cases, we still include both labels in the click-box political annotation. We believe this solution makes our product more helpful to users in each language by presenting the name they expect to see, but without sidestepping the existence of a disputed alternative name. In that way, we provide more, rather than less, information while maintaining a good user interface and experience.

McLaughlin also outlines some alternatives not taken, such as adopting the recommendations of international organizations or academics, and explains why they weren’t adopted.

Via Ogle Earth.

Previously: Custom Globes and Contested Geographies; Sea of Japan, East Sea, Sea of Korea; Review: From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow.

Géoportail, the mapping site of France’s Institut géographique national, is getting an API this month, Renaud Euvrard reports (in French). Two APIs, actually — regular and pro versions — with a 3D API slated for the summer. (Géoportail’s coverage is limited to France and its overseas territories and departments.)

On A List Apart, an online magazine about web design by and for web designers (who can be an obsessively exacting lot), Paul Smith has an article about going beyond the Google Maps API (or presumably others) for a site’s embedded maps:

Ask yourself this question: why would you, as a website developer who controls all aspects of your site, from typography to layout, to color palette to photography, to UI functionality, allow a big, alien blob to be plopped down in the middle of your otherwise meticulously designed application? Think about it. You accept whatever colors, fonts, and map layers Google chooses for their map tiles. Sure, you try to rein it back in with custom markers and overlays, but at the root, the core component — the map itself — is out of your hands.

The result is Google Maps fatigue. We’ve all experienced it. It manifests not only when we yawn at YAGMM (Yet Another Google Maps Mashup), because there are high-quality web apps deploying the Google Maps API seamlessly and with great success. Despite this, and despite the fact that Google itself continues to refine and improve the base application, the fatigue remains. It’s the effect of seeing the same elements over and over again across the web. As web developers, we live with constraints, so to a certain extent, the Google Maps API is similar to Verdana and Georgia — they’re common components we know will work well. But if it were possible and practical to make a substitution, wouldn’t you do so?

Depending on your application, Google’s choices about what display on the map and how to display it might not work for you. On a general-purpose map, for example, it’s great to see the outlines of building footprints, as Google is starting to display in certain cities — but such outlines might only constitute visual clutter for your application. Google decides what information is conveyed to your users, but it’s not necessarily what they need or want.

Smith outlines the various layers of the so-called map stack — the servers hosting the mapping application, the web server, the tile image server — and some alternative (read: open-source) ways of delivering each.

Via Geobloggers.

Google Transit comes to Chicago.

The Baltimore Festival of Maps has a YouTube channel, which has a few short clips (less than two minutes each) about the Walters Art Museum’s keystone exhibition, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. They’re nicely done; here, for example, is part four:

Via You Are Here, Hon.

The New York Times: “Mary Meader, who as a spunky new bride in the 1930s took off on a 35,000-mile journey to advance geographic knowledge by making unprecedented aerial photographs of South America and Africa, died Sunday in Kalamazoo, Mich. She was 91.” Via MAPS-L.

The New York Times has more about the continuing efforts to restore at least part of the so-called Texaco Map, the terrazo map from the 1964-65 World’s Fair; see also this related blog entry about the return of a missing letter. Via MapHist.

Previously: Restoring the Texaco Map.

Two years ago, I reported that a number of government documents in a Western Washington University library had been vandalized; at least 648 maps and coloured plates had been torn from at least 108 volumes in the United States Congressional Serial Set. Last month, they arrested the man who, authorities believe, did it.

James L. Brubaker, 73, of Great Falls, Montana, was charged on March 27 with interstate transportation of stolen goods in federal court. The charges relate to the items stolen from WWU, but authorities, executing a search warrant on Brubaker’s home last December, found 1,000 books taken from at least 100 libraries across the country, along with 20,000 single pages torn from books. Brubaker was apparently selling them on eBay under the name “montanasilver”; according to records found during the search, he completed 9,000 eBay transactions in 2007, grossing nearly $500,000.

eBay proved to be Brubaker’s downfall. WWU librarian Robert Lopresti had begun an investigation after the thefts; among other things, he set up a number of searches on eBay that would e-mail him if something was offered for sale that matched certain keywords. Within a month, Brubaker was receiving more matches than the rest of eBay combined. The next step was to buy two maps from Brubaker to see if they matched the books they were stolen from: for that, Lopresti recruited two associates elsewhere in the country. The maps matched, and the investigation continued from there.

Lots of coverage on this subject, from which the foregoing has been derived:

• Book thief’s trail leads to Electric City (Great Falls Tribune, March 27, 2008)
• Man charged with stealing library’s historic documents (Great Falls Tribune, March 28, 2008)
• Montana man facing federal charge in theft of WA library books (Associated Press/Seattle Times, March 28, 2008)
• Pay Dirt in Montana (Smithsonian, April 2008)
• Washington Librarian Helps Nab Montana Library Thief (American Libraries, April 1, 2008)

But above all else, don’t miss Lopresti’s own account of the theft, his investigation, and his struggle to find a law enforcement agency willing to do something about it. One problem was that the individual items were only $30 or so — small potatoes in comparison with the items that Forbes Smiley stole. Brubaker — who has been charged, but not convicted — apparently made it up on volume.

Via MAPS-L and MapHist.

Previously: WWU Collection Vandalized.

For a school dissertation (PDF), Nicolas Kayser-Bril has generated cartograms that “show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief in 2007” — countries that received more coverage appear larger in these cartograms: see the original (in French) and the expanded English-language version.

Kayser-Bril concludes that online media is far less parochial, and that traditional newspapers “are highly selective in their coverage of world news. Looking at the three British dailies, editors favour countries that are bigger and more populous, but also closer to home and better developed. They also give more room to the countries of origin of British immigrants, especially if they are white (look at the size of Australia and New Zealand).”

At right, top to bottom: the Australian, the Daily Mail, and the blogosphere. The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy critiques his methodology. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Richard Florida’s singles map of the United States, which charts which metropolitan areas have a surplus of single men and women, first appeared in the Boston Globe; it’s been getting a bit of buzz around the blogosphere. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s inspired by a similar map from National Geographic in 2007.

Too many clichés can come to mind to explain why there is a surplus of single men in California or single women in New York. You can read too much into a map. Florida’s point is how the quality of a city’s dating scene has an impact on migration; if Florida’s arguments are about the “creative class,” says Julio Gonzalez Altamirano, let’s look only at singles aged 18-44 with at least a bachelor’s degree — at which point the sex-ratio disparities practically disappear.

Via Andrew Sullivan and Cartophilia; see also Ezra Klein.

More of Florida’s maps here.

EarthBrowser is a virtual globe application I hadn’t encountered before. It’s $24 shareware and runs on Mac and Windows, but the current buzz is about the next version, version 3, which uses the Adobe Air cross-platform framework. The beta is in private testing and is not available for public download, but Digital Geography has a preview. Noel writes that it “in a number of respects will be a genuine alternative to Google Earth, indeed possibly a better classroom tool for studying certain topics, especially weather and tectonics.” Via Digital Earth Blog and Slashgeo.

Don’t miss Cartophilia’s blog entry on inflated views — maps where one portion is distorted in size to reflect its self-importance — for example, a New Yorker’s, or California’s, or Texas’s, view of the United States or the world. The New Yorker cover from 1976, “View of the World from Ninth Avenue,” is the most famous example, but I was surprised to learn how many other maps of this sort there were as well. Parochialism knows no boundaries.

GIS: An Overview is a very basic introduction, but it seems to me that that sort of thing is necessary. Via About.com Geography.

PC World’s How to Buy a GPS Device is slanted very heavily towards car-mounted GPS navigation systems, which I guess are the most common, and barely mentions handheld devices. There are a lot more instances of GPS than those that go in your car, though. Via All Points Blog.

Contour lines have been added to Google Maps’s terrain map layer, which adds its their usefulness (especially, for example, in a mountain context).

But it has some way to go before it’s a suitable replacement for a topo map; Chad notes that a lot of other details are not included: “One thing that is missing … where is the water? There should be two creeks going by the town.  Now while this is a ‘that is pretty to look at’ feature, this is not good for any serious use.  It is missing a lot of details and landmarks for hiking and biking. I would not use this beyond a basic reference.”

I will also note that the relief shading is a little pixellated at the zoom levels at which the contour lines appear.

In other, older Google Maps-related news that occurred over the past month or so and that I’m only getting to now:

• Public transit directions have been added for Białystok (Poland), Perth (Australia) and New Jersey Transit.
• Google Maps data is now user-editable; here’s a video tutorial and the FAQ.
• Thirteen cities and a national park have been added to Street View.
• Rafe Needleman reports that, according to a source, Street View will be coming to Google Earth (Digital Earth Blog).
• Street View has been added to the Google Maps API.
• A way to add text and labels to maps within the Google Maps API (Google Maps API Blog).
• The Google Chart API now includes maps — let a thousand choropleth maps bloom (Mapperz). (Nikolas Schiller complains that it leaves out the District of Columbia.)
• There is now an official Google Maps blog in French: BloGoMaps (RenaLId).
• Recent imagery and layer updates for Google Earth and Maps include roads in 94 new countries.

Remember those two Blaeu globes I was telling you about — the ones that belonged to the royal family of Liechtenstein and were being auctioned by Christie’s? They were bought, by a private collection, for €800,000. Via Map the Universe.

A sobering collection of choropleth maps from the U.S. Federal Reserve that illustrate the subprime mortgage crisis. From the press release:

The maps, which are maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will display regional variation in the condition of securitized, owner-occupied subprime, and alt-A mortgage loans. The maps and data can be used to assist in the identification of existing and potential foreclosure hotspots. This may assist community groups, which can mobilize resources to bring financial counseling and other resources to at-risk homeowners. Policymakers can also use the maps and data to develop plans to lessen the direct and spillover impacts that delinquencies and foreclosures may have on local economies. Local governments may use the data and maps to prioritize the expenditure of their resources for these efforts.

To be updated monthly; only data for December 2007 is currently available. Thanks to August for the link.

The Planetary Society Blog reports:

On Monday, with no fanfare, JPL posted the first detailed topographic map of part of Titan. I suppose the map doesn’t strictly qualify as a pretty picture, but it is a tremendously important data set. …

The RADAR team produced this map by comparing two views of a strip of land near Titan’s north pole. During the two flybys, which took place on February 22 and April 11, 2007 (known as the T25 and T28 Titan flybys), the RADAR instrument looked at the same area from slightly different directions. By using parallax — how points shift relative to each other as seen from the two different viewpoints — the wizards at the United States Geologic Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona computed the color-coded topographic map. In a map spanning 1,700 kilometers across the surace of Titan (that’s about 10 percent of the moon’s circumference), there is only about 1,300 meters of vertical relief. This is a very, very flat area.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS. Overlay by Emily Lakdawalla.

Previously: “Extraterrestrial Islands in a Methane Sea”; Mapping the Solar System: Mercury and Titan; Huygens Probe Images of Titan.

A Seattle Times column on how national boundaries obscure reality — i.e., how Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca are a single body of water: “Go to any store and look for a map depicting the sprawling inland sea stretching from Olympia to Campbell River, B.C. Unless you look in the marine-chart section, you won’t see it. Maps end at the international border at the north tip of Washington. Others pick up in the same spot and go north. So do those in our minds.”

I learned about the New Jersey State Atlas, a Google Maps mashup of New Jersey state data, on MetaFilter Projects, where its creater, John J. Reiser, posted it. Here’s how he introduced it:

Originally a product of “hey, what can I do with Google Maps and mapserver?” the site has slowly grown into more of a “hey, what should people in New Jersey see on a map?” I live and work in New Jersey, and am a civil servant of the State. I feel that publicly available information should not just be available, but also accessible. New Jersey provides a massive amount of information online, but it’s not always easy to use. By putting some of these available data sets online in a friendly, intuitive format, I hope that people within Jersey will use them to inform themselves.

It doesn’t work in Safari and the text is only in Chinese, but this eerily cartoon-like, three-dimensional map of Shanghai is still worth a look. (I think I just had a Sim City flashback.)

Via MetaFilter, where one commenter noted that similar maps of other Chinese cities are available through the interface.

Cartophilia has a brief review of Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, Vincent Virga’s book featuring maps from the Library of Congress.

Vector One reviews John Blake’s Charts of War: The Maps and Charts That Have Informed and Illustrated War at Sea.

• Buy Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations at Amazon.com
• Buy Charts of War at Amazon.com

Roundups of April Foolery related to Google Maps and Google Earth are available at Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania. X-ray and thermal imagery, copyrighted landscapes, and smiley faces abound.

And how is this not an April Fool’s joke? Are people not paying attention?

MapQuest’s announcement about partnering with Garmin jumped the gun somewhat; Garmin’s announcement says that the send-to-GPS feature is available with Google Maps as of today, but MapQuest only as of April 15. Announced earlier than Google, but available later. Rich notes: “The Google Maps feature, available as of today, allows you to send one location at a time. At MapQuest you can select multiple destinations, though the feature will not be implemented there till later this month.”

The Cambridge University Library’s Map Department has reopened in its newly refurbished map room (no relation). Via MapHist.

Previously: Cambridge Map Department Will Be Renovated.