At the Royal Geographic Society’s annual conference in London, British Cartographic Society president Mary Spence complained that satellite navigation and Internet mapping were obliterating knowledge of the landmarks lining the way from point A to B. See coverage from the Independent, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph. There’s also the RGS’s press release, which said that, at the session, Spence was to warn

that the focus of internet maps on providing driving directions produced by internet giants has meant that the whereabouts of the thousands of churches, ancient woodlands, stately homes and eccentric landmarks which make up the rich tapestry of the British landscape could disappear from public consciousness. …

“Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history — not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography — at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”

My own reaction, based on what I have here (I’d love to have seen the full text of the session, which Ed Parsons also participated in), is that I don’t think I should be obliged to use a map showing these landmarks if I’m not looking for them. It’s the cartographic equivalent of forcing me to eat my vegetables — a GIS layer you can’t remove. But Glenn raises the point of spatial reference systems: I might not need to know the location of a cathedral to get from point A to B, but someone else might.

I think we’re looking at competing views of how to do a map: a comprehensive, all-in-one method showing plenty of extra information you might need, and a focused method showing only the information you will need. The fact that one has historically been paper-based and the other has generally been computer-based is not necessarily always true. There’s nothing to stop computer maps from showing cathedrals or other landmarks; as Ed Parsons is quoted as saying, you can have many different maps showing — or excluding — many different things. Where we are, in other words, is at the end of an era in which one map has to perform many tasks. This may well be a difficult concept for some cartographers to grasp.

(I wonder if this is an Ordnance Survey map thing; I don’t think North Americans would assume a highway map would be an adequate substitute for a topo map, or vice versa.)

Spence’s argument about the loss of map-reading skills is something we’ve seen before. (For example, her point about failing to recognize Ordnance Survey map symbols conflates general map skills with a familiarity with Ordnance Survey products.) The democratization of information invariably leads to complaints of a decline in quality — e.g., more people are reading, but they’re reading trash. An argument can be made — and Ed did make it — that Internet mapping is making cartography accessible to the cartographically clueless.

To what extent were Britons who currently use MapQuest or in-car navigation systems previously using Ordnance Survey maps with a high degree of skill, anyway?

Via All Points Blog, GeoCarta, and Vector One.

Previously: GPS Isn’t Making Us Dumb; A Third of Britain Can’t Read a Map.

Nevada in Maps is a nice collection of more than 4,000 maps and atlases from the collections of the University of Nevada at Reno and Las Vegas, the State Library, and the Nevada State Historical Society. The collections mostly date from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, and include topo maps (1863-1968), geologic and mining district maps and atlases (1863-1968), highway maps (1917-2005), and survey plats (1867-1927).

A sub-site, Nevada History in Maps, goes further back, draws on more sources, and focuses on the discovery and settlement of the area. At right: Colton’s Territories of New Mexico and Utah (1855) (Nevada Historical Society and the DeLaMare Library, University of Nevada, Reno). Via MAPS-L.

A real find via Slashgeo: an internal document about the Imagery Interpretation Section (5 MB PDF) of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Division, dating from 1963. The document’s purpose was to promote the Section’s work to unit commanders. It also gives a real sense of the work of aerial reconnaisance at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the interpretation of aerial imagery was very much in the public eye.

TypeBrewer is a site about font choices in mapmaking. “TypeBrewer offers a quick and easy way to explore typographic alternatives and see the impact that various elements of type have on the overall look and feel of a map. TypeBrewer is designed for mapmakers who want to learn more about map typography and get practical design specifications for starting a map project.” Using a Flash-based interface, you can select different type styles and see the impact of font size, density (how much is labelled) and tracking (letter spacing). Via La Cartoteca.

The Journal of Terrestrial Observation is a new peer-reviewed journal that is published simultaneously online and as a hardcopy quarterly. Its mission is “to examine the multi-disciplinary theories, models, technologies, and applications associated with earth observation in the broadest sense. The Journal will cover a wide range of topics including satellite remote sensing, aircraft reconnaissance, and proximate sensing utilizing in situ instrumentation.” Via Slashgeo.

Hot on the heels of the P6000 with its built-in GPS, Nikon has announced a GPS accessory for its digital SLRs. The GP-1 clips to the hotshoe and has two cables: one that plugs into the new D90’s GPS/remote port, and one for the 10-pin PC connector for higher-end cameras. (If your camera doesn’t have a PC connector or is a D90, it isn’t compatible.) Like other geotaggers, it will apparently embed geolocation data in an image’s EXIF data. No price yet; MacCentral reports it’s shipping in November. See Richard’s take.

Geotagging has been available on Nikon digital SLRs for some time, just through third-party or DIY means. It’s certainly the first geotagger that embeds the coordinates in-camera without requiring a PC terminal, though that’s simply because of the new port on the D90. See previous entries: DIY Geotagging for a Nikon digital SLR; GeoPic II: Another Nikon Geotagger; Jobo Photo GPS; Another DIY Camera GPS Project; Solmeta DP-GPS N1.

A Sony ad campaign for its Walkman digital audio players shows subway network maps made from black Sony earphones. (Because they can’t be white earphones, silly.) In addition to the New York subway map poster making the rounds, there are also map posters for the London Underground (surprise, surprise) and the Sydney Metro. Via Gizmodo.

Mother Jones’s interactive map showing U.S. military presence worldwide from 1950 to 2007 is making the rounds online. But it’s a little misleading: it’s a heat map, but its scale is logarithmic, which tends to overemphasize smaller numbers. Trends, if any, are hard too see. And sometimes the numbers in question are in the low double digits — are we mostly mapping embassy personnel? Via Boing Boing.

Last Olympics post for a while, I promise. This page is a Google Maps mashup that plots all medallists on their hometowns. It’s considerably cruder than the Earthgamz plugin (see previous entry), which also covers all athletes, but is more broadly functional. Via Google Maps Mania.

At the other end of the spectrum, I whipped up some very basic heat maps, using Google Spreadsheets’s map widget, showing the number of Olympic last-place finishers per country in this summing-up post on DFL.

Previously: Mapping Olympic Athletes; More Olympics Maps; Mapping the 2008 Olympics; BBC Olympics Maps.

The Virtual Earth evangelist blog reports that trial versions of Microsoft’s MapPoint 2009 and Streets and Trips 2009 are now available as free downloads: MapPoint 2009 North America, Streets and Trips 2009.

Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009.

• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2009 at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2009 with GPS Locator at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft Streets and Trips 2009 at Amazon.com

The most notable thing about MapQuest’s new beta version is that there’s a map on the home page. That should give you an idea of how far down the field MapQuest’s competitors have taken things, and how far behind MapQuest has gotten: the default version still has just address and directions forms. The new version — detailed here and here — does catch up a little bit: there’s an option for a “copy and paste” address field, standard among the competition. It’s still not as easy to zoom, though. See reactions from All Points Blog (“Continuing on its ‘too little, too late’ strategy …”) and Digital Earth Blog.

The Earthgamz Summer Olympics Google Earth plugin maps Olympic athletes to their hometowns; it uses the Windows-only embedded Google Earth plugin on the page, but you can also download the (somewhat unwieldy, in my experience) full KML file for use within Google Earth itself. Via AnyGeo and Google LatLong.

Previously: More Olympics Maps; Mapping the 2008 Olympics; BBC Olympics Maps.

Good magazine’s interactive map showing some of the more famous journeys from history and literature — everything from Magellan to Moby Dick — is pretty cool. Via Kottke.

North Carolina Maps digitizes old maps of North Carolina; in beta (who are they, Google?) for the moment, but plans call for more than 1,500 maps, ranging from the 1590s to the 1960s. It’s a collaboration between the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center. According to the announcement, about 750 maps are available so far; the Outer Banks Center’s maps are coming in the fall. Via MapHist (thanks again, Tony).

Harm de Blij’s new book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, which examines the differences between those who are globally mobile and those who are bound to their home terrain, is reviewed by About.com’s Matt Rosenberg and by Catholicgauze.

Previously: CSM Review of Why Geography Matters.

• Buy The Power of Place at Amazon.com

A couple of thoughts on the Rental Car Rally, which ran earlier this month between New York and Montreal. First, here’s CNet’s Caroline McCarthy’s take on the event:

The surprising truth? A large number of the driving squads had nothing but paper maps on them, making the overnight rally — with six backroad checkpoints, most of which were marked with nothing but a set of coordinates, to ensure that you couldn’t just take I-87 the whole way — a pretty difficult affair. But even with GPS, there was some head-scratching when everyone’s Garmins and TomToms navigated them right to the shores of Lake Champlain and recommended that they take a ferry. The gadgets were right: teams that drove onto the Grand Isle ferry arrived in Montreal hours before teams that chose to drive around the lake.

As I said, a couple of thoughts. First, car rally rules have changed to make use of available technology. In the car rallies my parents competed in forty years ago, a set of coordinates would never have been used; they counted left and right turns. GPS has changed the game. And on that note, it’s interesting that the rally’s directions were implicitly based on following the GPS, but not every team was prepared to offer their gadgets that implicit trust. Can’t imagine why.

Heat maps of the Olympic medals, using Google Spreadsheets’s map widget: this one generates a map from a live results feed; Google Maps Mania creates a few using static medal numbers for the top 15, but divides the results by GDP and population. There’s a lot of potential for mapping Olympic performance, but there are plenty of variables involved, especially if you’re going to cross-reference a country’s population, income or size of Olympic delegation. There should be cartograms, at the very least.

One more: via Google Maps Mania, a map of the marathon route.

Previously: Mapping the 2008 Olympics; BBC Olympics Map.

• David Lanegran’s Minnesota on the Map: A Historical Atlas “brings together for the first time stunning but rarely seen maps of Minnesota through five centuries”; the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin has more: “The maps include early city plans of Rochester, Red Wing, Preston, Wasioja and the lost town of Beaver in the Whitewater valley. There are state highway maps, early plat book maps, maps showing the growth of cities, picture maps designed to attract tourists, and maps of projects that never came to be.”
• Drawing Battle Lines: The Map Testimony of Custer’s Last Fight comprises 90 contemporary maps of the 1876 battle of Little Bighorn. More from the Associated Press; via GeoCarta.
• A rather turgid review of the second edition of The National Atlas of Sri Lanka.
• I was not aware of ESRI Press’s ESRI Map Book series, which I guess is published in conjunction with the ESRI International User Conference, until the ESRI Mapping Center blog announced volume 23 earlier this month: “The twenty-third volume of the ESRI Map Book showcases the innovative and inspiring accomplishments of GIS users around the world. … More than 100 full-color maps are featured from distinct industry categories such as cartography, environmental management, government, natural resources, planning and engineering, tourism, transportation, and utilities.”
• Coming in November: The KML Handbook; via Google Earth Blog.

• Buy Minnesota on the Map at Amazon.com
• Buy Drawing Battle Lines at Amazon.com
• Buy ESRI Map Book, Vol. 23 at Amazon.com
• Buy The KML Handbook at Amazon.com

For the latest developments in the case of César Gómez Rivero, who is facing charges related to the theft of maps from Spain’s National Library, see this July article from El Pais and this more recent article from the Uruguayan version of El Pais. If, that is, you read Spanish. Which I do not. Via MapHist.

Previously: Australia Returns Stolen Map to Spain; Of 19 Stolen Maps, 11 Have Been Recovered; Map Thief Surrenders; Some Maps Stolen from Spanish Library Recovered; Map Theft Updates; Spanish Map Theft Update; Maps Stolen from Spain’s National Library.

Mental Floss’s three controversial maps will be familiar to regular readers of The Map Room: Percy’s 38-state map of the U.S. (Rob even draws a new version of Pearcy’s map), the Mercator projection (in the context of the Peters projection movement), and the Chinese map purportedly proving the Menzies theory. Via Infonaut.

Map Hawk, a side project by Directions Media’s Joe Francica, is a blog that “will cover the use of maps, mapping technology and location-based information in the media”; topics so far include the U.S. elections, the recent Russia-Georgia crisis, and newspaper map design. Via All Points Blog, naturally.

A display of unusual gadgets and inventions at the British Library includes a wrist-based routefinder that used miniature scrolling maps to indicate your destination. The Daily Mail and Ananova (which have pictures) call it the 1920s-era equivalent of satellite-based navigation, but I don’t think that’s the right metaphor — I think it’s more like TripTiks in a wristwatch. Via MapHist (thanks, Tony).

The genetic map of Europe, which shows the genetic relationships between various European populations and which was published in Current Biology, “bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map,” the New York Times’s Nicholas Wade writes. “The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.” Finland is quite divergent, as is, to a lesser extent, southern Italy. Thanks to Richard for the link.

Google is denying reports that detailed maps for Georgia and the other countries of the Caucasus on Google Maps disappeared as a result of the conflict between Georgia and Russia. The data was never there in the first place; they were simply three of several countries for which detailed maps are not available via Google. Google says that

we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren’t satisfied with the map data we had available. We’re constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data.

However, they’re changing that position:

We’re hearing from our users that they would rather see even very basic coverage of a country than see nothing at all. That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort.

It’s not just the Caucasus — Argentina and South Korea are still largely blank.

When we last heard about cartographer David Imus, he was getting rave reviews for his map of Alaska. Now the revised edition of his map of Oregon is getting similarly favourable reviews, at least if this article in today’s Eugene Register-Guard is any indication. The article goes behind the scenes and looks at how Imus puts his maps together. To say that Imus is exacting would be a gross understatement. Interesting.

Previously: The Best Map of Alaska?