What are the relations between digital cartography and hand-drawn maps?
The science is dividing the field of knowledge into disposable knowledge and reusable knowledge. Google maps are falling into the first category, while axonometric maps belong to the second, because they're suitable for being reused. An 11-year-old hand-drawn map still looks beautiful, whereas 11 years from now Google maps will be dated. Google and others are failing to present the beautifulness of our planet to us when doing their digital atlases.

Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes.
Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

Reparieren leicht gemacht (1972), Verlag Das Beste, Stuttgart, 23 x 26 cm, 568 pp
Do you think the actual possibility of processing big datasets will affect other fields of visual design beyond data representation?
The digital has had a great impact not only on the production of information, but also on how to get to the sources. But this speed comes at a cost that shouldn't be underestimated, and that cost is precision. In the early days, information designers controlled the entire process and physically possessed the information. Nowadays, if you're doing a data visualisation using bytes that aren't on your hard drive, or that you don't even own, then you're dependent on other people. That's the digital drawback. The moment authoritarian countries decide to cut the wires, all the knowledge will be gone.

"Fellow Nestoria fans, this week we went live with a significant change to our service - in most countries we've moved away from Google maps and are now relying exclusively on OpenStreetMap maps served by MapQuest.

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At the time, looking at Steve as he showed me the GPS device he was using to map the details of our meeting (which took place in a little cafe in Soho across the street from the John Snow pub), the idea of creating a viable map via volunteer submissions seemed preposterous in the extreme. But I watched as OSM grew and grew from those humble beginnings. Now, less than six years later, that map powers Nestoria thanks to millions of man hours of contribution by individuals and organizations that recognize the power of open data."

"The present study examines ways of creating analytical hill-shaded images by applying more than one light sources, in order to eliminate, at a certain degree, two deficiencies present in single lighted hill-shaded images. ... This methodology aims to achieve a more balanced result of hill-shading, in such a way that the perception of the initial optimal lighting is preserved, as well as, the major relief forms in all directions are revealed or even sharper local details are enhanced."

"The idea behind resolution bumping is simple: by merging low-resolution and high-resolution GTOPO30 data of the same area, hybrid data are produced that combine the best characteristics and minimize the problems found in the originals. The technique uses GTOPO30 data in 16-bit grayscale format in Photoshop. Two copies of a GTOPO30 file are used, one high resolution and the other downsampled to a lower resolution, these can then be blended together by a proportional amount controlled by the user. This yields a new grayscale "DEM" that, if merged in the right proportions, combines the readability of the downsampled data with all the detail one expects to find in mountainous terrain - without the graphical noise. Resolution bumping in effect "bumps" or etches a suggestion of topographical detail onto generalized topographic surfaces."

"The aerial perspective effect is an essential design component of traditional shaded relief, which is based on natural observation. The concept is familiar to anyone who has hiked up a mountain--the veiling effects of atmospheric haze cause topographic features in the distance to look fainter than features in the foreground. When aerial perspective is applied to map shaded relief, higher topographic features should be shown with slightly more contrast than lowland features because they appear closer to readers who, theoretically, view the map from above.<br />
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... Fortunately, there is a simple procedure for introducing aerial perspective to digital shaded relief."

"Destination maps are navigational aids designed to show anyone within a region how to reach a location (the destination). Hand-designed destination maps include only the most important roads in the region and are non-uniformly scaled to ensure that all of the important roads from the highways to the residential streets are visible. We present the first automated system for creating such destination maps based on the design principles used by mapmakers. Our system includes novel algorithms for selecting the important roads based on mental representations of road networks, and for laying out the roads based on a non-linear optimization procedure. The final layouts are labeled and rendered in a variety of styles ranging from informal to more formal map styles. The system has been used to generate over 57,000 destination maps by thousands of users. We report feedback from both a formal and informal user study, as well as provide quantitative measures of success."

"Being a list of Digital Humanities GIS (Geographical Information Systems) projects. See this post for background. Not included here are projects directed at digitizing old maps; valuable though that is, what I list here are investigations. It is far from complete; I will be adding to it for the next few months, and then hopefully it will be replaced by a crowd-sourced version."

"The Tabula Peutingeriana (Peutinger table, Peutinger Map) is an itinerarium showing the cursus publicus, the road network in the Roman Empire. The original map of which this is a unique copy was last revised in the fourth or early fifth century. It covers Europe, parts of Asia (Persia, India) and North Africa.<br />
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It is a very schematic map: the land masses are distorted, especially in the east-west direction. The map shows many Roman settlements, the roads connecting them, rivers, mountains, forests and seas. The distances between the settlements are also given. The three most important cities of the Roman Empire, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch, are represented with special iconic decoration."

British childrens' book about maps.

"I wanted to be able to load in any polygonal geodata file (supported by the chosen web mapping framework) and resize the features based on any numerical attribute in order to form a noncontiguous cartogram. The advantage of implementing this within a web mapping framework is obviously that additional data layers from various sources can easily be over or underlain.<br />
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As a test and proof of concept for both frameworks, I wanted to reproduce Olson's graphic (above) as best as I fairly easily could. Olson used 1970 Census data to show the number of people aged 65+ by state; here I'm updating it with estimated 2009 data. Specifically, I'll be loading this Geocommons data layer uploaded last year."

"The result: vivid maps that offer fresh ways to look at race, traffic, tourism and crime in San Francisco and other cities. Some, like his maps showing the racial makeup of cities throughout the country, have attracted national attention and started a dialogue about continued segregation. Fisher, 37, spoke with Chronicle reporter Will Kane."

Andy Woodruff:

"In its geographical form Boston is, for lack of a better word, unique in this country. (Permit me to use the word 'Boston' loosely to describe the urban settlement centered on Boston, ignoring arbitrary administrative boundaries.) Culturally and physically speaking, it is an eminently mappable city. And I've witnessed the pride in the city that can be inspired by maps that speak to the character of Boston. This is part of my motivation in creating this site.

'Bostonography' could mean a lot of things, but my idea of it is maps and graphics that describe Boston and life in Boston, and the underlying stories about the city."

"This essay examines the connections between geography, cartography and military intelligence in Britain during the First World War. It focuses on the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and its wartime activities on behalf of the British intelligence service. Evidence is presented on the role of the RGS in the dispute between the so-called 'westerners', committed to an all-out clash with Germany on the western front, and the 'easterners', who argued that the key to deadlock in western Europe lay in the Ottoman Empire. For a short period, the RGS became a significant metropolitan focus for those advocating a British intervention in the Middle East coupled with an Arab revolt against the Turks, the campaign popularly associated with T E Lawrence. The essay concludes with an assessment of the significance of geography to the British war effort and an evaluation of the impact of the war on the institutions and prestige of the discipline."

"The map beads are stacked on a wire, every 10th bead is white. Why turn to a simple table when you could count beads on wires stuck in a map?

Further pin map considerations must be taken when attempting these protruding pin maps: such a bead map 'should be mounted on several layers of corrugated straw-board to allow the long pins to sufficient depth in the mounting to hold fast.' One does not want teetering map pin beads!

The Harvard map sports six layers of straw-board, and a total thickness of 1 and 1/4 inches. Not only does such a sure base support the extensive beadage in the Boston area, but it is also 'extremely light and very convenient to handle.'"

"The World Glass tileset is a map of the world featuring labels and borders for countries and provinces, major cities, and detailed land and water. Despite its heavy use of transparency it is intended to be used as a base map. It is designed to allow users to quickly and easily customize the colors of the map by changing a single property - the background. Any color or image can be used, but darker backgrounds will work the best. All of the elements of the map are white with varying degrees of transparency (thus the map will appear invisible if put on a white or very light background)."

Jeff Warren's masters thesis:

"Geospatial tools and information play an important role in urban planning and policymaking, and maps have diverse uses in legal, environmental, political, land rights, and social arenas. Widespread participation in mapmaking and access to its benefits is limited by obscure and expensive tools and techniques. This has resulted in poor or nonexistent maps for much of the world's population, especially in areas of urban poverty. In particular, public access to recent and high-resolution satellite imagery is largely controlled by government and large industry. This thesis proposes balloon and kite aerial photography as a low-cost and easy to learn means to collect aerial imagery for mapping, and introduces a novel open-source online tool for orthorectifying and compositing images into maps."

A thing Aaron made:
"prettymaps is an experimental map from Stamen Design. It is an interactive map composed of multiple freely available, community-generated data sources:

1) All the Flickr shapefiles rendered as a semi-transparent white ground on top of which all the other layers are displayed.
2) Urban areas from Natural Earth both as a standalone layer and combined with Flickr shapefiles for cities and neighbourhoods.
3) Road, highway and path data collected by the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project.
In all there are four different raster layers and six data layers (that means all the map data is sent in its raw form and rendered as visual elements by the browser) that may be visible depending on the bounding box and zoom level of the map."

"As you can see from my examples, this was not some incremental improvement that Microsoft gave to Bing Maps - no, this was a vast overhaul. In truth, it seems as though Microsoft has left nothing unchanged in the 'new' Bing Maps. And yet even though the 'new' maps are unusually light on detail (especially in how few cities they seem to show), they're now among the most aesthetically pleasing maps on the web."

"Liz and Tim are in Chicago giving a series of mapping workshops and making contact with some of our collaborators up there.

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One big point of discussion was how to deal with the embedded biopolitics behind data sources like US Census data that we use in our maps - as 3Cs, we often talk about how we 'queer' data or statistics by pulling map stories out of them that they weren't intended for. But data sources often come so tightly bound up with state politics, white supremacist racial policies, definitions of family structure, etc., that queering them might require more conscious work than we always put in."

Via Muki Haklay: "the Experimental Cartography Unit operated within the Royal College of Art to encourage new designs and innovations in map making. It was established in 1967 and operated until the late 1980s. The booklet provides a description of the main processes of assembling maps at the ECU in the middle of the 1970s, and what is especially interesting is to see some amazing outputs of maps from that time, which, unlike the typical crude output of Symap, are beautiful and clear."

"Loading, projecting, and drawing geodata

I'm getting into more canvas and JavaScript for interactive mapping. Much of the Flash/ActionScript work I've written or come to rely upon is directly portable to JS/canvas. What's missing is a sweet RIA framework and IDE for the kind of development Flash and Flex have made possible for years.

Luckily it's not hard to roll our own interactive web map using web standard technologies. In this post I'm just showing off the basics: dynamically loading geodata, projecting it client-side, and rendering to the canvas element."

A.J. Ashton:
"We just finished a custom tile set for UNICEF's 'An Iraq Fit For Children' campaign. This campaign surveyed hundreds of Iraqi children to learn how they feel about themselves, their communities, and the future of their country. Part of the website will map the results to different governorates and districts to give a visual sense of the issues that matter most to children in different parts of the country."

Andy Woodruff:

"And so it was nice to run across this map of every building footprint in Montgomery County (Dayton), Ohio while idly browsing the 'Maps' folder on my computer.
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Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it's fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It's not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map."

"We just added seven new map tilesets of Haiti to MapBox.com, created after the January 12 earthquake. Two of these sets are of terrain baselayers - one is a clean grey tile designed to be overlaid with data visualizations and the other is a terrain tile showing color-coded elevations in Haiti - and both cover the entire island. We also created three sets of overlays that work with the terrain data to show roads, collapsed buildings, and seismic data from the earthquake."

You unfold the corners to get a 2X view of that part of the world. Pretty cool paper product.

Nathaniel Kelso:
"Tom and I are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Natural Earth, free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. This is a NACIS and MapGiving co-branded product with assistance from the University of Wisconson-Madison cartography lab, Florida State University, and others.
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Natural Earth Vector solves a problem that many NACIS members face: finding vector data for making publishable-quality small-scale maps. In a time when the web is awash in interactive maps and free, downloadable vector data, such as Digital Chart of the World and VMAP, mapmakers are forced to spend time sifting through a confusing tangle of poorly attributed data."

Ed Parsons: "It's usually more fun when you're a bit controversial, so I thought, you know, who do I really dislike in life?-- cartographers, more than anybody else. So I thought OK I'll have a go at cartographers. With the fair likelihood that there wouldn't be any cartographers in the room. not realizing that my whole talk was going to then be videoed and put onto YouTube by that guy sitting in the corner. So, sorry cartographers."

Andy Woodruff:
"Time for a follow-up on a my short post about typographic maps nearly a year and a half ago. Maps made up of type are, as the kids say, the bee's knees. As typography- and map-based designs are rather popular in general, more of these typography maps crop up every so often. Here's another short list of some more maps I have encountered since writing last year."
I would never say "bee's knees".

"Today the Google Maps team is rolling out a number of refinements to the look and feel of our maps, the biggest such changes since we first launched about 4.7 years ago. In that time we've been steadily adding details like walkways, address labels, bus stops, new country coverage, and improved satellite imagery, but the look of the map hasn't changed much.

Today's changes are intended to keep the same information-rich map while making it easier to pick out the information that is most useful. The changes affect both the 'Map' and 'Hybrid' styles, and include numerous refinements to color, density, typography, and road styling worldwide."

"Cartography 2.0 is a free online knowledge base and e-textbook for students and professionals interested in interactive and animated maps. I (Mark) pitched the idea to my co-authors because I knew that, as teachers, we were all frustrated with the inability of traditional textbooks to keep pace with Web technologies. Nor could we find any comprehensive online resources that provided the same breadth and depth we've come to expect from a professionally produced textbook. The kind of knowledge that is needed to make dynamic maps spans many (traditionally separate) fields and we set-out to answer a basic question we've been asked many times: what's the important stuff I need to know about making great on-demand/interactive maps?"

Chris Heathcote:
"After seeing James' quick attempts at making maps with Cloudmade, I had a play, and made some maps of the UK, pulling out everything apart from the roads and rail. Sure, it's a well-worn metaphor, but there's something in the infrastructure making the landscape."

"United States Geological Survey (USGS) large scale topographic maps at a scale of 1:24,000 have been traditionally distributed in paper form. Scanned versions of these maps are now available through the Internet as raster representations. Instead of common raster format presentation, the solution presented here is based on a vector approach using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG provides many advantages compared to the use of a raster-based presentation, such as the quality of the graphical representation, maintenance, actualization, interactivity, and extensibility through other Web programming languages. The purpose of this research is to propose an optimal and logical structure of a SVG document with a minimal file size that would be universally applicable for all USGS large scale topographic maps. This study shows that SVG is a promising technology for delivering high-quality, fully-vector topographic maps via the Internet, both in terms of graphic quality and interactivity."

"Old Map App allows an iPhone user to explore the effects of time on geography and urban development. The application displays layers of geo-referenced historical maps projected onto a modern coordinate system, so that the same location can be compared over time. Layers can be faded, adjusted, and explored freely. If the user is located with the region of the historical map, the user's position will be mapped on the old maps to the position of the compass indicator."

"The chart legend lists various aeronautical symbols as well as information concerning terrain and contour elevations. You may identify aeronautical, topographical, and obstruction symbols (such as radio and television towers) by referring to the legend. Many landmarks which can be easily recognized from the air, such as stadiums, pumping stations, refineries, etc., are identified by brief descriptions adjacent to small black squares marking their exact locations. Oil wells are shown by small open circles . Water, oil and gas tanks are shown by small black circles and labeled accordingly, if known. The scale of an item may be increased to make it easier to read on the chart."

"L.A.'s Cartifact recently released Cartifact Maps, a Flash-based tilemaps viewer with custom cartography and advanced map browsing tools. The historic overlays and beautiful cartographic design are perhaps of most interest, but I'm equally impressed by their implementation of a novel map browsing UI featuring a magnifying glass or 'lens tool'."

"Despite her widespread use in offices and businesses worldwide, Arial (who steps behind its elegant original Helvetica) doesn't make too much sense on maps.
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As nicer and more appropriate cartographic fonts do exist and after reviewing our typographic short list, we finally decided to go with FF Transit.
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Transit is a quite pragmatic yet beautiful foundry, following the famous Frutiger. She has been designed by Erik Spiekermann and his former company MetaDesign in 1990. The initial usecase was to have a unifying font for a unified mass transit authority after East and West Berlin became united into BVG (Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe). And as unifying is near to the United in both our company name and production philosophy, this seemingly was a good omen."

"In celebration of their 40th year, the academic journal Antipode is offering free online access to 40 of their best articles, including a handful by David Harvey and one by Mike Davis."

"Examples of map symbols used to show trees and forests on old Russian maps (1700s & 1800s) are documented in 'Izobrazhenie Lesa Na Kartakh by Liudmila Andreevna Shaposhnikova'. The title is roughly translated to 'How Forests are Depicted on Maps.' The book was published in Moskva, former USSR, in 1957."