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This is a portion of a 1858 map of property lines along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The map reminded the author of shotgun houses -long, narrow houses with all the rooms stacked in a line, one behind another. Is there any relation between the two? Maybe the odd property shapes point to the fact that every landowner wants a bit of riverfront. See the entire (enlargable) map at Strange Maps. Link
Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes:
Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the state and planet, famous landmarks, or slightly randomly selected (but loosely based on facts) from my brother and myself.
Link via Geekologie
Dimensions is a neat feature from the BBC that overlays historical or ecological events over modern maps centered on the postal code of your choice. The above map that I created shows the Great Wall of China shielding Lubbock, Texas. Other options include the route of the original Marathon, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the ongoing floods in Pakistan.
Harvard University graduate student Bill Rankin owns the site Radical Cartography. It’s filled with unique and imaginative maps, such as the above world map plotting relative population by lines of longitude. Other maps include displays of an actual cartographic “axis of evil”, US counties named after Presidents, and youth skater culture.
Link via Geekosystem | Rankin’s Professional Website
Online map services like Mapquest can take you to the doorstep of a building, but what do you do if you need navigational help inside a building? A research team at the University of California at Berkeley responded to that need by creating a backpack-sized device that instantly creates 3D models of interior spaces:
Grad student Nicholas Corso dons a backpack brimming with lasers and cameras. As he hikes the hall, the lasers scan everything from floor to ceiling and the cameras capture a panorama.
“The idea,” explains Professor Zakhor, “is that you wear a backpack, you walk inside the building. You’re done. You push a button and out comes this model.”
The model is textured (covered) with the photographs.
The team is also behind the technology that creates 3D views of major cities on Google Earth. So, why not fly into the buildings and not just around them? The outdoor version relies on GPS but you can’t rely on GPS indoors. So, the team in the imaging lab combined a new breed of miniature laser with an inertial management unit (IMU) like the ones that guide missiles.
Video at the link.
Link via DVICE | Image: KGO-TV, Screenshot by DVICE
Though I was not a fan of Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curly my young uncles were and I was subjected to many episodes of The Three Stooges television show when I was a kid. I never saw Malice in the Palace but the map is interesting.
Malice in the Palace(1949) is set in a fictionalised, funnified Middle East, where Moe, Shemp and Larry run the Cafe Casbah Bah. Two of their customers, Gin-A Rummy and Hassan ben Sober, are plotting to steal a giant diamond from the tomb of Rootentooten. However, when they discover the diamond is already in the possession of the Emir of Schmow, they start yammering and are kicked out of the Cafe. The Stooges then decide to retrieve the diamond themselves, using a map left behind by the unsuccessful plotters.
The map, shown briefly in the film, is of a continentful of countries with strange names and odd shapes, clearly designed to look and sound ‘foreign’. What does this ‘Map of Starvania’, designed merely for the purpose of unsophisticated comedy, unconsciously reveal of mid-20th-century America’s attitudes towards the exotic, the un-American?
Doug McCune, who descibes himself as a “data visualization engineer”, created 3D crime maps for San Francisco. They look like topographical elevation maps because raised portions represent reported criminal incidents. Pictured above is a display of prostitution in the city.
No, it’s not just a weird work of art, but a demonstration by two scientists about how a slime mold can be used to plan road and communications networks efficiently:
Physarum polycephalum, a type of slime mold, grows tendrils in search of food and withdraws extraneous arms to focus on the most efficient paths between sources. Although the American map is just an illustrative model made for Popular Science, researchers in the U.K. have used slime mold to create similar replicas of local roads and railways, backed up by computer models. Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, found that, left to its own devices, the slime mold mimicked a good part of the country’s actual road systems. Because slime mold finds the paths that are most resilient to faults or damage, it could be used to make mobile-communication and transportation networks hardier.
Videos at the link.
Link | Photo: Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones
English Russia is a marvelous blog filled with pictures of strange and inventive things from Russia. One offering in its archives is a post about “local globes” — the practice of taking local maps and fitting them around globes so that one locality is imagined as a whole world:
In Russia and other post Soviet countries there were a real craze on independence after they finally got it with USSR collapse. Sometimes this took some weird forms like, for example, making the globes of their own country. Yes, those were just like regular globes we used to see on geography classes but instead the whole world only their own country was mapped on it.
These things were officially on sale and still you can buy something like “the globe of Ukraine” in shops of Kiev.
So then people went further and decided to make the globes of their local cities or even villages.
At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.
Link via Make | Image: Collage by Sean Michael Ragan of Make
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Artist Stephen Walter made an enormous, detailed, hand-drawn map of London. It’s called “The Island” and is a satire of Londoners’ alleged view that their city is independent of the rest of the UK. In an interview about his work, Walter said:
Discoveries such as the First Earl of Salisbury having honeymooned, in 1589, in what is now a dodgy part of Edmonton caused much amusement. The map charts the birthplaces of famous people such as Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Palmer, Noel Edmonds and Phyllis Pearsall (the originator of the London A-Z). It notes where Winston Churchill went to school, the gymnasium where Arnold Schwarzenegger trained, where the speed of sound was first recorded, the place where Oliver Twist was taught to thieve, the hotel where Hendrix died, sites of old palaces and prisons and the main encampments of the peasant revolts …
Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Interview
If explorer Amerigo Vespucci were alive, he’d be 556 years old today. Born on March 9th, 1454, Vespucci was neither the first European to reach the New World nor the first to take back news of it, but he was the first to realize that the western hemisphere was not part of Asia or any part of the world known to Europeans. Vespucci’s discovery coincided with the rise of the printing press, which made world maps available to more than a few people.
Martin Waldseemüller, a modernist-humanist German clergyman and cartographer, reprinted “The Four Voyages of Amerigo” in 1507 with his own “Cosmographic Introduction.” He opined:
I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part … America, after Amerigo [Vespucci], its discoverer, a man of great ability.
Waldseemüller included a map of the the new lands, on which the name “America” makes its earliest appearance.
The map was popular. The name caught on, and it stuck.
And it spread. America was first used as a name for only the southern continent of the New World, but Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map included both North America and South America.
And that is precisely why many of us live in America instead of Christopha or Columbia. Link
The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.
It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.
At the time of its creation, it was intended as “an encyclopaedic summary of the world.”
Link. Previously on Neatorama: The [other] Largest Book in the World
The Photonics Research Group of Ghent University in Belgium created a 1 trillionth scale map that measures only 40 micrometers across. That’s about half the width of a human hair. It serves a purely decorative purpose on a new type of microchip that the team is developing:
The silicon photonics technology that is being developed with these chips integrates optical circuits onto a small chip: Light can be manipulated on submicrometer scale in tiny strips of silicon called waveguides or photonic wires. Using the unique properties of silicon, combined with state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, these silicon photonic circuits can pack a million times more components on the same footprint as today’s commercial glass-based photonics.
Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups’ languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.
This map by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy is an attempt to demonstrate what areas of the world are comparatively accessible by land and water travel. The cartographers concluded that much of the world commonly thought of as inaccessible is not:
The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.
Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.
Map Link and Article Link via Volokh Conspiracy
Infographics are not new, they are just easier to make and pass around on the internet. BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters, pages, and pamphlets from the Victorian era that make information into an art form. Pictured is the Tableau De L’Histoire Universelle (History of the Universe Chart).
This is a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.
The designer has employed something of a metaphorical display choice: civilisations are presented as a series of rivers — the widths likely imply the comparative population level of each group versus the world’s population — which ‘flow’ down through history.
See also graphics on geography, biology, astronomy, and more. The pictures are all linked to larger Flickr versions. Link
This map by James Richards overlays a map of the United States with the flags of countries with populations equal to the respective states. You can view a much larger image at the link.
Link via Strange Maps | Flags of the World
Cartography blog Strange Maps has a map of the British Isles showing current place names translated into modern English. It’s one from a collection known as The Atlas of True Names. You can view a larger image at the link.
Link | Other Maps of Translated Place Names | News Story
The above image is a selection and compression of an enormous interactive map of the almost two hundred manned and unmanned exploratory missions in our solar system over the past fifty years. It was created by graphic designers Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Click on the link and use the box in the upper-right corner of the screen to choose what area you’d like to see, and zoom as needed.
The richly decorated Carta Marina, from 1539 might seem a little crude by today’s standards but modern satellite imaging revealed that the sea monsters shown in parts of the ocean on the map actually correspond to well known storm fronts, dangerous currents and maritime hazards. This was perhaps just a method of depicting this at the time, as a warning to sailors venturing into these areas
This picture is just a small detail of the Carta Marina. See the full map and many others in a roundup of old maps at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Believe it or not, explorers believed California was an island for a very long time and this map depicts that assumption. It would take over 50 years after the creation of this map before it was confirmed that California is indeed attached to the mainland of America.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by johnny.
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Cross-Stitch Ninja made this map of the first world of Super Mario Bros. 3 by zooming way in on a screenshot of the game, and making one pixel=one stitch.
You can make your own video game cross-stitch patterns by following the instructions at Spritestitch.
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The human brain is wired to recognize faces everywhere, but it turns out that there’s also a strange mania called cartocacoethes: the uncontrollable compulsion to see maps everywhere.
Strange Maps blog has a post about these "accidental maps" – for example, the africa in milanesa to the left:
“I was cooking this typical Argentinian food called milanesa, when I found the map of Africa in my saucepan,” writes Manuel Barcia from Argentina. “This typical dish is made out of a cut meat from the back of the cow, called nalga, covered with a mix of mashed bread and eggs and then fried. I always say that each piece of meat looks like an undiscovered island or some unknown place, but this looked just like Africa.”
I can’t imagine the time it must have taken to put this together! Even if you don’t care that much about the map itself, it’s worth it just to go through and read the clever names of some of the establishments – the Texas Cheesecake Depository cracks me up.
Link via Instructables.
Filipino American artist Michael Arcega has created a series of maps made of Spam luncheon meat.
Spam was used as ration by the United States Armed Forces during WWII. It ultimately spread through many Southeast Asian nations as a standard source of meat. Spam’s diasporic nature is symbolic of America’s ongoing influence on many nations. S-P-A-M is M-A-P-S in reverse.
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