Examples of exaggeration in maps. The problem is that the maps’ pixels are larger than the points they depict: space junk appears larger, entire neighbourhoods seem to be under foreclosure and — in the above case, a map of anthropogenic fire — “each pixel represents around 1000 square miles. Looking at the image its not hard to imagine that the entire world is aflame.” This is a normal issue with maps: at even large scales, parallel roads and railroads have to be offset to be depicted, for example, or they’d be on top of each other, and are shown at thicknesses that, if they were to scale, would be a mile wide. Via Kottke.

From the Times’s career section, an article featuring two people working in the cartography field: Jon Ford, a survey geologist with the British Geological Survey, and Edward Mainwaring, a cartographer with the Ordnance Survey.

This is interesting: an article about map collecting in India.

Sanjay Jain of RS Books and Prints, South Extension, that is famous for its collection of antique maps, says, “The love for maps is connected to the sense of discovery. It’s a real pleasure, for instance, to peruse a rare 18th century plan of the city you live in.” Getting your hands on a 16th or 17th century map is difficult, and even a small map costs Rs 5,000-10,000, while 18th and 19th century maps cost at least Rs 2,000-5,000. The map Indie Ancienne (1798-1802), for instance, which is just 13 by 17.5 inches costs Rs 10,000 and is the costliest in Aryan’s collection. A small map of 18th century Italy, with exquisite drawings of castles and people, also commands around Rs 10,000. Prices are jacked up if restoration is required.

You see this passage in a different light when you discover that 10,000 rupees comes to about $234. This isn’t exactly Graham Arader territory. Via GeoCarta.

A follow-up to this story: James Brubaker has pleaded guilty in federal court; he had been charged with stealing rare books — or pages torn from them — and selling them on eBay. Though he was largely busted for thefts from Western Washington University, a total of 109 libraries may have been stolen from. Sentencing is set for September 15; the 74-year-old Montana resident remains in custody and faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Via MapHist.

Previously: Montana Man Arrested for WWU Map Thefts; WWU Collection Vandalized.

A few quick map and map-related gems to share with you:

• Claire showcases another collection of map tattoos.
• Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps: Mark Simonson notes that the maps used in the Indiana Jones movies are anachronistic.
• Presenting the annoying (and quite likely offensive) Sat Nag: “Press the button on the front and a very well-recorded, patronising woman’s voice will come out with one of a host of hysterical Sat Nav-type commands.” Oh dear. Via Gizmodo.
• Modern Mechanix: Blind Get Fair Map Printed in Braille, from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science.
• Boing Boing has a hand-drawn 1955 map of New Jersey’s prisons.
• A replica of Paris built from refuse. Also via Boing Boing.
• A 150-year-old map of New York’s Central Park was on display last week. Maybe I should have told you sooner. Via MapHist and GeoCarta.

La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools, by Gary E. Sherman.

Jeff Thurston reviews Analyzing Urban Poverty: GIS for the Developing World, by Rosario Giusti de Pérez and Ramón Pérez and published by ESRI Press.

• Buy Analyzing Urban Poverty at Amazon.com
• Buy Desktop GIS at Amazon.com
• Buy GIS for Web Developers at Amazon.com

Imaginary Coordinates, a controversial exhibition that juxtaposed contemporary Israeli and Palestinian art with antique maps of the region, has been closed prematurely by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, which had been putting on the show as part of Chicago’s Festival of Maps. It had originally been scheduled through September, and has already been closed and reopened to change the lighting and the language of some labels. Critics charged that parts of the show were anti-Israel, which put the Jewish museum in an uncomfortable spot.

The problem with the ABC News article entitled “Will GPS Make Us Dumb?” is that it makes a false juxtaposition: map-reading skills with navigation devices’ turn-by-turn directions:

“One effect of an increased dependence on GPS will be that peoples’ ability to read maps will further decay,” [Middlebury College geography professor Anne] Knowles said. “Americans are generally poor map readers. Some cannot read maps at all because it’s not part of our education.

“But what will grow, instead, will be better geographic imagination and awareness. People will see the connections between places more clearly — not quite as accurately — but will better imagine how to get from one place to another because of this technology.”

People have been giving one another directions — verbally, written out turn-by-turn, or in crude hand-drawn maps — for approximately forever; a GPS navigation system is not exactly a new paradigm. It simply allows for geographical awareness without cartographic literacy — in that sense, the analogy with spell-checking is apt, but not in the way that the article’s author expects: spell-checking doesn’t make you less literate; it removes the requirement for you to be more literate. Ditto here: GPS isn’t making us dumb; it’s making it easier for us to stay dumb.

Via GeoCarta.

• MetaCarta has a blog. “As you can tell by its name, this is a corporate sponsored blog. That said, the goal of the blog is to open up discussion on a wide-range of geography-related issues — not to be a PR mouthpiece for MetaCarta.” Via GeoCarta.
• Y! Geo is a new blog about Yahoo’s geo technologies; it replaces the mapping side of the now-defunct Yahoo Local and Maps blog. (Foolish to nuke the previous blog and all its archives, though.) See also James.
• Her Majesty of Maps abdicates.

Oh, hi. No, I’m still here. My contract — I’m now in the 12th month of a 10-week contract — finally wraps up this week, and the last few weeks have been crazy. Hence, not as much time or energy to post as originally forecast. But starting next month I will be returning full-time to the web, and not a moment too soon: I have a tremendous backlog of reviews to work on, plus a couple of new features to launch.

Other programming notes:

Apologies to Roger and Gordon for having your excellent comments land in the moderation queue; they have now been posted. I’m making a point of marking as trusted as many commenters as I can, which should bypass moderation. Tweaking the comment filters is yet another thing on my summer to-do list.

A minor redesign last night results in fewer ads on the site: ads are a necessary annoyance, but there’s not much point in annoying readers with ads that generate little revenue.

The new 3G iPhone’s GPS is only one of several location-finding methods. From Apple’s page:

iPhone 3G uses signals from GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers to get the most accurate location fast. If GPS is available, iPhone displays a blue GPS indicator. But if you’re inside — without a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite — iPhone finds you via Wi-Fi. If you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, iPhone finds you using cellular towers. And the size of a location circle tells you how accurately iPhone is able to calculate that location: The smaller the circle, the more accurate the location.

Location-finding came to iPods Touch and the original iPhone in January: old iPhones can use cell towers, and everything can use Wi Fi, so everything using this platform has at least one option. This is no doubt handy for iPhone application developers using the Core Location framework: they presumably can be agnostic about how location information comes to their app.

Richard notes some potential uses; the iPhone’s camera supports geotagging.

Mapping applications for the iPhone apparently include TomTom’s navigation software and Loopt, which uses the Virtual Earth engine.

A lot of commentary is suggesting that mainstream GPS manufacturers are shitting themselves in the face of competition from the iPhone — the implication being that a dashboard-mounted iPhone, which could run all sorts of navigation software, would render a Garmin nüvi or suchlike redundant. I’m skeptical of such punditry. My impression is that the GPS marketplace is a lot more specialized than people think — handheld units don’t compete with dashboard navigation systems or geotaggers — so the dashboard systems will likely still be driving people into the river for many years to come.

Previously: On the iPhone and Its Lack of GPS; An Apple/Mac Roundup.

On the occasion of the CSAA’s announcement that it’s getting out of the business of publishing paper maps, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Caille Millner has this to say:

I am saddened, but not surprised, about the death of the paper map, about its slow-but-sure eclipse by Mapquest and GPS and all of these other digitized forms that allow people to persist in their delusions: their delusions that the only “starting points” and “destinations” that matter are the ones relevant to their immediate needs, their delusions that the only purpose of a map is to decide where you should turn right or left. And when the time comes when an insistence on using paper maps, and globes, and atlases draws the frustration and impatience of other people, leads them to believe that the person in question is “out of touch” or failing to “keep up with the times” or “slowing us down,” then I will gladly take up those mantles, and you had best hope that others do too.

Take it from someone who is far less emotional about this subject than I am: Curt Sumner, the executive director for the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. “There are a lot of uses for which just data, digitized map data, are OK,” he told me. “It’s just not good for every use.” When I asked him for a few examples of where digitized data was creating headaches for the professional surveyors he represents, he offered small examples like water lines, fire patterns, and right-of-way property rights. He mentioned that his organization had a rider on a bill in Congress “going forward right now” to require the preservation of documentation of monuments that show right-of-way access (railroad tracks, for instance) because “when the old maps get destroyed, there’s no way to determine who has the right of way.” Then there the “engineers and fire departments, who really need more accurate information than what’s stored on geographic information systems. You know, to build infrastructure.” He added that many “official” centers for maps — county recorders’ offices around the country, for instance — are in the process of digitizing their maps, and not all of the old maps are being kept.

Previously: CSAA Getting Out of the Paper Map Business; Why Paper Maps Are Still Produced; The Decline of the Paper Map; Decline of the Road Map.

Update: Chad adds an interesting point to the paper maps question, in the context of using a GPS: “What do you do if you get no signal, or your batteries run out, or it breaks?”

The wonderful blog Modern Mechanix reprints another contemporary article about early aerial photography: “He Made Sky Mapping a Big Business” was first published in the May 1936 issue of the eponymous magazine.

Previously: “Flying Cameras Map America for War”: Aerial Photography in 1939.

On May 13, a fire destroyed the faculty building at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands; the fire was feared to have destroyed the faculty library’s holdings, including a significant map room, which was on the main floor. Fortunately, it appears that most of the collection has survived intact. Links are in Dutch; I had to resort to online translation tools. Via MapHist.

New Zealanders take note: Charting the Peaceful Sea: Maps of the Pacific, 1642-1846 is an exhibition taking place at the Dunedin Public Library until August 30.

Twenty-one maps by more than eleven different explorers are on exhibit, which takes viewers from the first appearance of New Zealand on a map in the seventeenth century through to charts of the fearsome ice barrier of unexplored Antarctica from the mid-nineteenth century. The exacting cartographic work by eighteenth-century explorer Captain James Cook forms a major portion of the exhibition with nine first- and early-edition maps by Cook on display.

Free admission. More details from the Otago Daily Times.

Try to find a fantasy novel without a map; but what about what we science-fiction and fantasy enthusiasts call “mainstream” fiction? “My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers — every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind — and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction,” Austin Kleon writes. “Some of my favorite ‘lit’ry’ books are accompanied by maps.” He provides examples, and so do his commenters. Via atlas(t).

Modern Mechanix reproduces a 1914 AT&T advertisement showing a map of telephone exchanges in the United States. The accompanying text pumps AT&T’s agreement to connect all telephone subscribers “regardless of who owns the exchanges” and notes that the incipient monopoly only owned a minority of the exchanges.

Two more recent Google-related items:

• North Oaks, a rather xenophobic town in Minnesota — the streets are privately owned — has asked Google to remove it from Street View; Google has complied with the town’s request. Google’s gotten into trouble for its cameras trespassing on private property; the twist here is that the whole town is private property.
• The Google Maps API Blog has been replaced by the Google Geo Developers Blog, to reflect the company’s larger scope.