Posts Tagged ‘cartography’
“A map is the greatest of all epic poems”*…
A marmot hiding in plain sight in the Swiss Alps
Errors—both accidental and deliberate—are not uncommon in maps (17th-century California as an island, the omission of Seattle in a 1960s AAA map). Military censors have long transformed nuclear bunkers into nondescript warehouses and routinely pixelate satellite images of sensitive sites. Many maps also contain intentional errors to trap would-be copyright violators. The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying another’s work, he can simply claim to be duplicating the real world— ideally, the two should be the same. Mapmakers often rely on fictitious streets, typically no longer than a block, to differentiate their accounts of the truth (Oxygen Street in Edinburgh, for example).
But there is another, less institutional reason to hide something in a map. According to Lorenz Hurni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these illustrations are part inside joke, part coping mechanism. Cartographers are “quite meticulous, really high-precision people,” he says. Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp. To sustain this kind of concentration, Hurni suspects that they eventually “look for something to break out of their daily routine.” The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their transgressive nature— the labor and secrecy required to conceal one of these visual puns…
Slipping one past one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world: “For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps.”
* Gilbert H. Grosvenor (President of the National Geographic Society, first editor of the magazine, and champion of cartography [and photojournalism])
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As we hide Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1345– according to 14th century scholars at the University of Paris– the Black Death was created… from what they called “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March, 1345.”
AKA the Pestilence, the Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague, the Plague, or less commonly the Great Mortality or Black Plague, the Black Death was actually transmitted by fleas who had fed on diseased rats. It killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.
More on “the greatest catastrophe ever.”
Spread of the Black Death in Europe and the Near East (1346–1353)
“Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North”*…
Your correspondent is off for a week or so to time zones sufficiently distant that regular service will be suspended for about a week. (R)D should return on or around March 15. Meantime…
One of the selections at “Hilarious Terrible Maps.”
[TotH to KE]
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As we find our way, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that General Foods put the first nationally-branded individually-packaged frozen foods– “Birds Eye Frosted Foods”– on sale in 18 retail stores in Springfield, Mass. to test the market. General Foods (recently renamed from the Postum Corporation) had acquired the frozen food business from Clarence Birdseye; inspired by seeing Canadians thawing and eating naturally frozen fish, Birdseye had invented the category in the early 1920s. The initial Birds Eye line featured 26 items, including 18 cuts of frozen meat, spinach and peas, a variety of fruits and berries, blue point oysters, and fish fillets.
Clarence Birdseye and his handiwork
“Maps codify the miracle of existence”*…
Several years ago, I stumbled on a map so shocking to my modern workaday sensibilities that I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “Oh, zounds, look at this old thing,” I almost certainly thought.
We live in a time when the data visualization establishment will have you know that pie charts are garbage graphics only to be employed by foolhardy amateurs. Similarly, your friendly neighborhood Carto-vigilante will put you on notice for allowing something as vile as overlapping symbols to appear on a map. Occlusion be gone! 🙅♀️️🗺🙅♂
But there was a time when people made and proudly shared maps of all kinds with relative impunity. And I believed I’d found one of them. After all, it had overlapping… pie charts! So, I took to Twitter, declared it a “forgotten map type,” and went to bed.
Years (and countless throwaway tweets) later, I stumbled on that map again (so much for being “forgotten,” eh?) and pointed out its goofy New York label. In response, Toph Tucker noted he’d searched my timeline for more “forgotten map types” and come up empty. His comment was, simply, “well this is disappointing….”
Fair.
So, I slowly amassed a more complete list…
Revel in geographer Tim Wallace‘s (@wallacetim) “Forgotten Map Types.” (And/or access them here.)
* Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
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As we find our way, we might spare a thought for a cartographer of a different sort: Claude Elwood Shannon; he died on this date in 2001. A mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer, he is known as “the father of information theory,” of which he was the original architect. But he is also remembered for his contributions to digital circuit design theory and for his cryptanalysis work during World War II, both as a codebreaker and as a designer of secure communications systems.
“Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip”*…
I’m excited to finally share a new design project this week! Over the past year and a half I’ve been working on a collection of ten maps on planets, moons, and outer space. To name a few, I’ve made an animated map of the seasons on Earth, a map of Mars geology, and a map of everything in the solar system bigger than 10km…
Data visualizer extraordinaire Eleanor Lutz has announced “An Atlas of Space.”
Follow her progress on her blog Tabletop Whale, or on Twitter or Tumblr.
[TotH to Kottke]
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As we see stars, we might spare a thought for Daniel Kirkwood; he died on this date in 1895. Kirkwood’s most significant contribution came from his study of asteroid orbits. When arranging the then-growing number of discovered asteroids by their distance from the Sun, he noted several gaps, now named Kirkwood gaps in his honor, and associated these gaps with orbital resonances with the orbit of Jupiter. Further, Kirkwood also suggested a similar dynamic was responsible for Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings, as the result of a resonance with one of Saturn’s moons. In the same paper, he was the first to correctly posit that the material in meteor showers is cometary debris.
Kirkwood also identified a pattern relating the distances of the planets to their rotation periods, which was called Kirkwood’s Law. This discovery earned Kirkwood an international reputation among astronomers; he was dubbed “the American Kepler” by Sears Cook Walker, who claimed that Kirkwood’s Law proved the widely held Solar Nebula Theory. (In the event, the “Law” has since become discredited as new measurements of planetary rotation periods have shown that the pattern doesn’t hold.)
“The map? I will first make it.”*…
Nautical map of the world by Nicolo di Caverio, 1506
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, European powers sent voyagers to lands farther and farther away from the continent in an expansionist period we now call the Age of Exploration. These journeys were propelled by religious fervor and fierce colonial sentiment—and an overall desire for new trade routes. They would not have been possible without the rise of modern cartography. While geographically accurate maps had existed before, the Age of Exploration saw the emergence of a sustained tradition of topographic surveying. Maps were being made specifically to guide travelers. Technology progressed quickly through the centuries, helping explorers and traders find their way to new imperial outposts—at least sometimes. On other occasions, hiccups in cartographic reasoning led their users even farther astray…
How cartography made early modern global trade possible: “First you make the maps.”
* Voss
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As we find our way, we might recall that it was on this date in 1578– the same day that King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (“New Bridge”), the oldest remaining bridge in Paris– that the Catacombs of Rome were (re-)discovered. Underground burial sites in use mostly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, they were decorated with both iconographic and stylistic paintings and mosaics. After their rediscovery, it took several decades to explore and map them; indeed, new discoveries have been made as recently as the 1950s.
Eucharistic fresco in the Catacombs [source]
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected”*…
Change in population aged 65 and older, 2010-2023. [Screenshot: ESRI]
We’re all getting older. It’s the one thing that every single person alive right now has in common. But we’re also getting older as a population, with Americans both living longer and having fewer children. Census projections show a major demographic shift already underway and accelerating in the years to come.
At the same time, populations are not aging evenly, and issues related to aging will impact individual communities in vastly different ways, boosting economic opportunity in some areas while putting a strain on social services in others.
For instance, real estate developers that invest in progressive senior housing projects now could benefit down the road as demand for modern facilities that cater to active seniors grows. Similarly, American tech companies will see opportunity in developing innovative high-tech solutions for senior care, such as health-monitoring devices, ride-share services aimed at seniors, and care-bots. (Take a look at how Japan has embraced high-tech solutions for its aging population for more on how that might play out in the United States.)
On the flip side, social safety nets are likely to face increasing financial challenges with the continued retirement of America’s Baby Boomers, the youngest of whom will reach 67 by 2031. As that happens, rural counties—where people on average rely on Social Security as a larger portion of their overall income—may disproportionately feel the economic effects of aging.
One way to sort out who will be most impacted by aging is to look at age demographics across the country and how they will change over time…
America is aging, but not evenly: “7 maps that tell the incredible story of aging in America.”
See also this essay by Don Norman, the 83 year-old dean of user-centered design (author of The Design of Everyday Things and a former VP at Apple): “I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.”
* Robert Frost
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As we stand up to senescence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Peter Townsend wrote “My Generation”– inspired by the Queen Mother, who’d had his 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighborhood. The song was released as a single later that year and became first a hit, then an anthem.
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive”*…
A map characterizes the Republican trade policy platform in the 1888 election
When PJ Mode began to purchase old maps in the 1980s, he set out to amass a typical collection of world maps. But along the way, his attention turned to unusual maps that dealers weren’t sure how to categorize—those that attempted to persuade rather than convey geographic information.
“Most collectors looked down their noses at these maps because they didn’t technically consider them maps,” Mode says. “But they were fun and they were inexpensive, and over the years I became more interested in them than the old world maps.”
The interest has culminated in a collection of more than 800 “persuasive maps,” as they are now called, which can be found in digital form through Cornell University’s library…
Maps never succeed is depicting reality exactly, fully as it is. But as a digital collection at Cornell University shows, many important maps from our past haven’t even tried. How subjective maps can be used to manipulate opinion: “These ‘Persuasive Maps’ Want You to Believe.”
See also “Maps that Make a Point” and “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”
De l’art de persuader
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As we try to find our way, we might send birthday greetings to a “cartographer” of a different sort: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on this date in 1882. A poet and novelist best known for Ulysses, he was the preeminent figure in the Modernist avant-garde, and a formative influence on writers as various as (Joyce’s protege) Samuel Becket, Jorge Luis Borges, Salmon Rushdie, and Joesph Campbell.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses No. 1, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man No. 3, and Finnegans Wake No. 77, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The next year, Time Magazine named Joyce one of its 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, observing that “Joyce … revolutionized 20th century fiction.” And illustrating that Joyce’s influence was not confined to the arts: physicist Murray Gell-Mann used the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) as source for the elementary particle he was naming– the quark.
Photo of Joyce included in a printed subscription order form for Ulysses, published Paris, 1921
