Posts about mapgasm

The Quest For The London Flood Map

2013-12-11 22:43

the extent of potential flooding of London if the Thames Barrier wasn't in place". If you know London at all, it's certainly an arresting image but like so many times when I encounter a map, I want to interact with it, move it, see whether where I live in London would have been impacted. So I started investigating.

Some background context is probably in order. On December 5th. the UK's Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the East Coast of England. A combination of a storm in the Atlantic to the north of Scotland, low atmospheric pressure and high tides were all combining to push a massive swell of water through the narrows of English Channel, in effect squeezing the water through the Dover Strait. As the North Sea and English Channel are relatively shallow, the sea would back up and had the potential to flood large areas of the East Coast of England as well as the areas surrounding the tidal stretch of the River Thames and that means London and possibly even where I live in Teddington, which marks the upper limit of the tidal Thames. Thankfully for those of us who live West of Woolwich, the Thames Barrier exists to protect London from such flooding, though I'm sure this is less of a comfort to those people who live to the East of the barrier.

My morning's reading today has been dominated by a map image that the UK's Environment Agency released on December 6th that, to quote the Tweet, shows "the extent of potential flooding of London if the Thames Barrier wasn't in place". If you know London at all, it's certainly an arresting image but like so many times when I encounter a map, I want to interact with it, move it, see whether where I live in London would have been impacted. So I started investigating.

Some background context is probably in order. On December 5th. the UK's Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the East Coast of England. A combination of a storm in the Atlantic to the north of Scotland, low atmospheric pressure and high tides were all combining to push a massive swell of water through the narrows of English Channel, in effect squeezing the water through the Dover Strait. As the North Sea and English Channel are relatively shallow, the sea would back up and had the potential to flood large areas of the East Coast of England as well as the areas surrounding the tidal stretch of the River Thames and that means London and possibly even where I live in Teddington, which marks the upper limit of the tidal Thames. Thankfully for those of us who live West of Woolwich, the Thames Barrier exists to protect London from such flooding, though I'm sure this is less of a comfort to those people who live to the East of the barrier.

But back to that map. It's a nice overlay of flood levels on the Docklands area of London based on satellite imagery. The cartography is simple and pleasing; light blue for the River Thames and Bow Creek, darker blue for the banks of the rivers and a washed out aquamarine for areas that would be flooded. But it's a static image. I can't pan and scroll it. The Tweet from the Environment Agency and the image itself contained no context as to where it came from or how it was made. So I browsed over to the Environment Agency's website in search of enlightenment.

The Environment Agency is a governmental body and that's very much apparent from the website. It simply screams corporate website produced by a large contractor. But no matter, I'm not here to critique website design; I'm here looking for a map. So I looked. I searched. If that map is on that website it's not wanting to be found. It's the map equivalent of the planning application for the demolition of Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard**. But what I did find was this map ... the Risk Of Flooding From Rivers And Seas map. With this map I could finally find out what risk there was of flooding to my local area. Eventually.

Now it's only fair to state upfront that the original version of this post, from this point onwards, was less a critique of a map and much more of a scathing flaying alive of a map. But thankfully before I posted this, I'd also taken the time to read Gretchen Peterson's Getting Along: The Objective And The Subjective In Mapping. After rereading my original post, it was only too evident that calling it a critique was unfair as it was far far too subjective. So I rewrote it, trying to adhere to being objective wherever I could be.

So let's start ... this map has some significant flaws. The questions are why and what could be done to rectify those flaws?

The map starts zoomed out to encompass the entirety of England, with no apparent flood information at all. There's a prompt to "enter a postcode or place name", but I know where I live so I try to zoom in by double clicking. The map's click event is trapped as I'm told to "zoom in query the map" which I work out to mean I have to use the map's zoom slider control. But if you take the time to write some code to trap the act of clicking on a map, why not go one step further and use the double click paradigm for map navigation which is by now almost universal? But this is also a flood map, so why not use my web browser's built in geolocation facility to automatically zoom the map to where I am right now, or at least present the map in a form where there's some flood information available. Why make the user do all of this additional work? With a few simple lines of Javascript code, the map could be made so much more immediate and easily usable.

So I started to zoom in, using the pan control. The next zoom level was less than visually pleasing. Jagged, blocky and pixellated place labels are scattered across the map. It's almost as if the map's tiles were hand rolled, but more about that in a minute.

When zooming, the map's centre had changed and after my initial double click zooming attempts were rebuffed, I feared that I wouldn't be able to pan the map without recourse to the pan controls. Indeed my first attempt at panning looked more as if I was trying to drag the map image out of the browser window. But then a few seconds later the map redrew itself. This was less a slippy map and much more a slow-py map.

After zooming in a further 3 times, the pixellation on the place labels had cleared up but the map itself was washed out and faded, almost as if there was a semi transparent overlay on top of the underlying base map, which itself looked like the Ordnance Survey map style. It also looked, to be frank, a bit of a mess. Given that I was trying to find out flooding information there was far too much information being displayed in front of me and apart from the map's legend, helpfully marked legend, none of it was flood related. Yet.

One further zoom level in and I finally found what I was looking for. A visualisation of what looked like an overflowing River Thames. At first sight this explained the washed out nature of the map I'd seen earlier. Surely this was due to an overlay containing the flooded areas but rather than overlay just the flooded area, the entirety of the map was overlaid, with the non-flooded areas being made translucent to allow the underlying map to bleed through.

The great thing about Javascript web maps is that, if you know how, you can actually break apart the layers of the map and see how it's constructed. Doing just this led me to discover that the flood data I was seeing wasn't an overlay. With the exception of the map's pan and zoom controls, the map is a single layer. Whoever was behind that map has made their own tile set with the flood data an intrinsic part of the map. All of which is extremely laudable but at higher zoom levels the tile set just doesn't work and the choice of underlying base map leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Finally, after several more pan and zoom operations I could see my local area. But it had taken 7 attempts at zooming in and almost as many panning operations to keep the map centred on where I wanted to see. Now it's true that entering my postal code would have taken me there immediately but one of the habits we've developed when viewing digital maps is to be able to dive in and get where we want to go by interacting with the map itself and not neccessarily with the map's controls.

Even when I'd found the information I want, the flood data seems placed on top of the base map almost as an afterthought, despite the two data sets being baked together into a single map layer. I can appreciate the cartographical choice of using shades of blue for the two flood zones, but the pink chosen to show existing flood defences is a questionable, albeit subjective, choice. The flood data just doesn't sit well on top of the underlying Ordnance Survey map, whose map style just clashes with the flood data's style. Finally and probably worst of all, the map is slow, almost to the point of being unusable. All of which makes me wonder how many people have come across this map and just simply given up trying to find the information they're looking for. If only the map looked as good as the original graphic that started me on this map quest (pun intended). Surely someone could do better?

Maybe someone will. The flood zones are available via WMS from the UK's data.gov.uk site, though that very same site warns you that registration is required and they're not under an open license. Even taking a simpler base map approach and overlaying the tiles from the WMS would make the map far more accessible and easier to comprehend. Some of the data itself looks like it could be available from Environment Agency's DataShare site, though it's only fair to say that this site and data.gov.uk does suffer from the same lack of discoverability and ease of use that the flood map suffers from.

For geospatial information such as flood data, there's no better way to make it easily comprehensible and visible than on a map. The mere fact that there is such a map is to be applauded. It just could be so much better and this would take a trivial amount of technical acumen from anyone who's used to making even simplistic digital maps. This map could be amazing and shine so brightly but as it currently stands, it can only receive the same score as I saw too many times on my school report cards. "B-. Could try harder."

Image Credits: Environment Agency.

Doctor Who And The Underground Map; Enough Is Enough

2013-11-27 13:03

Ken Field probably won't like it. This one is Doctor Who related. All the usual suspects are present. Each line representing one of the Doctors? Yes. Stations representing monsters and adversaries? Yes. Vague notions of interchanges between the lines? Oh yes.

Now I'll freely admit I've been more than guilty of writing about re-workings of this particular map, at least 12 times. Doctor Who has been on, then off, then back on our TV screens for 50 years; longer than I've been around, but only by 2 years.

Oh look. It's another reworking of Harry Beck's London Underground map. Ken Field probably won't like it. This one is Doctor Who related. All the usual suspects are present. Each line representing one of the Doctors? Yes. Stations representing monsters and adversaries? Yes. Vague notions of interchanges between the lines? Oh yes.

Now I'll freely admit I've been more than guilty of writing about re-workings of this particular map, at least 12 times. Doctor Who has been on, then off, then back on our TV screens for 50 years; longer than I've been around, but only by 2 years.

But I'll also freely admit that Ken has a valid point. The tube map rework has been done to death. This is not to denigrate the amount of work that's been put into such a map. Far from it. This is an obvious labour of love and many hours have been put in to make the map not only what it shows but how it shows it.

But it's time to move on. Time to choose another way of representing interesting data. Time to move away from yet another map based around either the Underground map or some other, mass transit, map.

Though I often break them, my New Year's Resolution for 2014 will be no more posts on variations of the London Underground map.

Doctor Who Tube Map by Crispian Jago

Making Maps The Hard Way - From Memory

2013-11-23 08:59

Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".

In his book A Zebra Is The Piano Of The Animal Kingdom, Jarod Kintz wrote "when you're a cartographer, having to make maps sort of comes with the territory". He's right. When your business is making maps you should be able to do just that. But what if you're not a cartographer? What if you had to draw a map of the country you live in? From memory? What would that map look like?

Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".

Or maybe your lovingly hand drawn map would look like this one, which is my personal favourite for no other reason than the helpful arrow in the North East corner pointing to Iceland (Not The Shop). Readers of this blog who don't live in the UK should know that in addition to being a Nordic island country that straddles the boundary between the North Atlantic and Artic Oceans, Iceland is also a chain of British stores that specialise in frozen food.

I'd like to think that I'd be able to do better than this final example from someone who has applied a significant amount of cartographical license and really, really needs someone to buy them an atlas. I'd like to think that. I might even try to do this myself, but in the interests of preserving what little reputation I have, I'd only post my attempt if it was any good.

Maps courtesy of BuzzFeed.

King George III Was A Fellow Map Addict

2013-11-21 15:52

George William Frederick of Hanover, better known as King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is full of details but misses out one key aspect of his life. In addition to concurrently being King, Duke and prince-elect of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was also a map addict and avid map collector.

During the course of his reign between 1760 and 1801, George amassed a collection of around 60,000 maps and views, all of which were housed in a room in Buckingham House (which eventually became Buckingham Palace in 1837) which was right next to his bedroom.

Upon his death, the map collection was bequeathed to the nation and now resides in the British Library and last night a lucky group of people, Alison and myself included, were given a rare chance to get to grips with some of the collection that focused on London. I use the phrase get to grips in the most literal sense. This was no viewing of maps in frames or behind glass. The maps were spread over the table of the library's boardroom and we were encouraged to get really close and do what we so often want to do with an old map but aren't usually allowed to. We got to touch them. We were even allowed to take photos too.

The Wikipedia entry for George William Frederick of Hanover, better known as King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is full of details but misses out one key aspect of his life. In addition to concurrently being King, Duke and prince-elect of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was also a map addict and avid map collector.

During the course of his reign between 1760 and 1801, George amassed a collection of around 60,000 maps and views, all of which were housed in a room in Buckingham House (which eventually became Buckingham Palace in 1837) which was right next to his bedroom.

Upon his death, the map collection was bequeathed to the nation and now resides in the British Library and last night a lucky group of people, Alison and myself included, were given a rare chance to get to grips with some of the collection that focused on London. I use the phrase get to grips in the most literal sense. This was no viewing of maps in frames or behind glass. The maps were spread over the table of the library's boardroom and we were encouraged to get really close and do what we so often want to do with an old map but aren't usually allowed to. We got to touch them. We were even allowed to take photos too.

But how did George manage to amass such a prolific collection in 40 odd years? The collection started as the everyday working map library of previous British monarchs, dating back to 1660 and including maps from the times of Charles II, James II and Anne. With this smaller collection as a starting point, George continued his childhood fascination with maps and grew the collection by almost any means possible. When you're a King almost anything and any means are possible.

Some maps were formally commissioned by George, or were presented to him as gifts as a sort of cartographic backhander. Some came into the collection during times of war or conflict, particularly some of the military maps in the collection. Some were stolen outright from foreign sources, whilst some came from much closer to home, from his own subjects.

There are stories that George would make random and unannounced visits to people who just so happened to have fine maps on their walls. If George expressed a liking for a map, this was supposed to be a signal that the map's owner, might, just possibly, want to consider giving the map to the King, as a gift you understand. Most people who were the beneficiaries of one of the King's unannounced visits took the hint and the collection grew steadily. But people also got wise to having their houses gatecrashed by their monarch and learned to keep their good maps hidden away. Just in case the next knock on the door turned out to be the King.

At the British Library, George's map collection is formally known as King George III's Topographical Collection, often shorted to the informal KTop. Of the 60,000 maps in KTop over 1,000 are of London. Work has been started on cataloging and ultimately digitising at high resolution all of the London maps. We will all get to benefit from this as the images will be made available for all to come and see on the British Library's website. This is no trivial endeavour. To catalogue and digitise just the 1,000 London maps in the collection will cost £100,000, of which £10,000 is hoped to be raised through public donations. Yet this is just the start. The final goal is to do the same with the remaining 59,000 maps in the collection.

But until then, the collection remains safely stored somewhere in the depths of the library's buildings on London's Euston Road. I count myself very very lucky indeed to not only have seen some of the KTop with my own eyes but to have been able to reach out and touch a part of cartographic history.

Maps For When The Ice Caps Melt and When The Magnetic Poles Reverse

2013-11-07 07:22

mapping the might have been; things that were planned and made it onto a map but which never came about. Now it's time for the opposite; maps of things that haven't yet come to be but which probably will. It's less mapping the might have been and more mapping the will be.

The planet we live on is one giant magnet, with poles that roughly align with the geographic poles which marks the axis on which the Earth spins. We're used to the notion that North is up at the top of the planet and South is on the other side. But what if these poles reverse? About every half a million years or so this happens and when it does, everything changes and magnetic compasses will no longer work the way we expect them to. When this does happen, maybe the map of the world that we're so familiar with will look something like this.

About 2 years ago I wrote about something I called mapping the might have been; things that were planned and made it onto a map but which never came about. Now it's time for the opposite; maps of things that haven't yet come to be but which probably will. It's less mapping the might have been and more mapping the will be.

The planet we live on is one giant magnet, with poles that roughly align with the geographic poles which marks the axis on which the Earth spins. We're used to the notion that North is up at the top of the planet and South is on the other side. But what if these poles reverse? About every half a million years or so this happens and when it does, everything changes and magnetic compasses will no longer work the way we expect them to. When this does happen, maybe the map of the world that we're so familiar with will look something like this.

From examining the magnetic patterns in rock, scientists have calculated that the process of geomagnetic reversal has happened more times than you'd think, almost 20 times in the course of our planet's history and they estimate this will happen again. But probably not for another 2000 or so years so you won't need this map just yet.

On a shorter timescale, you might need these next maps a bit sooner. You don't need to be a scientist to know that our planet is slowly but surely warming and the polar ice caps aren't as big as they were. But what would the map of the world look like if all the polar ice melted? In Europe a lot of familiar cities would go the way of Atlantis; London, Venice, Amsterdam and Copenhagen would all vanish slowly under the rising seas.

While on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, most of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C, Miami and New Orleans would also be no more.

Whatever your views on the topic of climate change, these National Geographic maps are a sobering and grimly fascinating view of what might and probably will be.

Map credits: Amazing Maps and National Geographic

Introducing The Next Generation Of Portable Navigation Systems

2013-10-23 11:30

Panning, zooming and rotation can be performed without image degradation; it's fast, working smoothly within picoseconds. It also respects a user's privacy, it's impossible to hack and there's no need for any antivirus or firewall.

It's unbreakable, private and portable and goes by the name of MAP. Trust me, you'll all be using one sooner or later.

Today's digital maps, both on the web, on our mobile phones and in our cars are almost ubiquitous. But they're not without their problems. They need recharging, updating and most need some form of network connectivity and that's even before you look at the potential privacy aspects of who's watching your position. But now there's the next generation of portable navigation system.

This unprecedented technological revolution works without cables, without electronics, without a network connection and is both compact and portable. Integrated into a flexible cellulose based pad, it expands from the size of your pocket to as much as 48" via the patented FUF technology (folding and unfolding).

Panning, zooming and rotation can be performed without image degradation; it's fast, working smoothly within picoseconds. It also respects a user's privacy, it's impossible to hack and there's no need for any antivirus or firewall.

It's unbreakable, private and portable and goes by the name of MAP. Trust me, you'll all be using one sooner or later.

The Curious Cartographical Case Of The Island Of California

2013-10-15 13:03

I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

We've become firmly accustomed to the instant gratification of Internet Time, which can be roughly summarised as "I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

But that all changed in 1602.

A merchant, Sebastián Vizcaíno, was appointed by the Viceroy of New Spain to examine the coastal regions and make new maps. On board one of Vizcaíno's expeditions was one Antonia de la Ascensión who wrote ...

that the whole Kingdom of California discovered on this voyage, is the largest island known…and that it is separated from the provinces of New Mexico by the Mediterranean Sea of California.

This geographic blunder was further reinforced by Antonia Vázquez de Espinosa, who wrote in 1615 that ...

California is an island, and not continental, as it is represented on the maps made by the cosmographers.

The notion of California as an island was thus firmly cemented in the minds of the day's cartographers, featuring in the first general atlas of the world that was published in England between 1626 and 1627. Even European cartographers finally gave up in their portrayal of California as a peninsula and by 1650 all maps of note showed the Island.

And so it remained until 1705 when a Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Kino, made a report of his journeys, with an accompanying map, that showed that California really was attached to the rest of the North American continent. Even then, it took until 1746 when another Jesuit, Fernando Consag, tried and failed to sail around the non-existant island, to put an end to the Island of California.

Despite this, it took a further 50 or so years before maps showed California as we now know it to be, part of North America and not, as de Montalvo wrote, being close to the Asian mainland and also "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise".

Next time you get annoyed and frustrated by a modern map not being entirely up to date, you can rest assured that it'll probably take a month or two at the most to be updated and not a half century. In the meantime, the Island of California remains an enduring oddity in the history books of exploration and cartography and one which is showcased on Stanford University's web site as part of the Glen McLaughlin collection.

Image credits: Stanford University Library and the Glen McLaughlin Collection

Men Pointing At Maps? Hell, Yeah. But Where Are The Women?

2013-10-11 11:30

Fuck Yes Maps!, run by a boy and two girls who blog about maps because they're awesome. No disagreement from me on that point.

Slightly more cartographically centred but similarly named is Fuck Yeah Cartography! that sets out to explore interesting representations of space. Apparently. There's also Fuck Yeah Maps, not to be confused with the Yes variant mentioned earlier.

If maps and globals are more your thing, the aptly named Maps and Globes might appeal, which is curated by Emily who's addicted to planar surfaces.

Tumblr also seems to be populated by blogs about people ... doing ... stuff. Think Stormtroopers Doing Things if you will. So it's probably a logical extension to this that there's now Men Pointing At Maps. No, really.

All of which is good for showing just how many carto-nerds and map-geeks there are out there on today's Interwebs. But it does beg a question. Where are the women pointing at maps? Surely maps and pointing aren't a purely patriachal occupation. Someone should start a rival about women pointing at maps. Someone probably will ...

Despite having a lot of NSFW content, estimated at between 2% to 4% by the site's founder, Tumblr is also the microblogging site that some maps and cartography aficionados call home. The scope and range of these is simply staggering. But now there's a new, albeit tenuously, related maps Tumblr in town.

For general maps enthusiasm, there's Fuck Yes Maps!, run by a boy and two girls who blog about maps because they're awesome. No disagreement from me on that point.

Slightly more cartographically centred but similarly named is Fuck Yeah Cartography! that sets out to explore interesting representations of space. Apparently. There's also Fuck Yeah Maps, not to be confused with the Yes variant mentioned earlier.

If maps and globals are more your thing, the aptly named Maps and Globes might appeal, which is curated by Emily who's addicted to planar surfaces.

Tumblr also seems to be populated by blogs about people ... doing ... stuff. Think Stormtroopers Doing Things if you will. So it's probably a logical extension to this that there's now Men Pointing At Maps. No, really.

All of which is good for showing just how many carto-nerds and map-geeks there are out there on today's Interwebs. But it does beg a question. Where are the women pointing at maps? Surely maps and pointing aren't a purely patriachal occupation. Someone should start a rival about women pointing at maps. Someone probably will ...

The Tube Map To End All Tube Maps That's Made Of Tube Maps

2013-10-10 13:16

London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.

At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.

But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.

Despite Transport for London owning the copyright (and enforcing it) on Harry Beck's iconic map of the London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.

At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.

But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.

Thus Maxwell Robert's curvy Tube map rework sits on a station in Edgware's place called Curvy and on a line called Reworked, while the early pre-Beck era map sits where Ealing Broadway should be and at the interchange of the Metaphor and Official lines.

This is verging dangerously close to genius in my book and Esri's Ken Field deserves some form of award for taking the time and effort to put this together. My one minor and extremely subjective niggle is that the explanatory text in the sidebar says click the stations to go to further details. My first exploratory foray into this map, clicking on the station names, yielded multiple popup dialog boxes saying No information available. Luckily Barry Rowlingson helpfully pointed out that what I should have been clicking on was the station interchange circles and the little offset lugs from each line and not the name itself.

Will this be the last word in Tube map pastiches? Probably not. Does it take a certain sort of mad cartographical endeavour to bring this all together? Probably. Has it wasted far too much of my time digging into the Tube maps I already know and showing me ones I didn't? Maybe. Have I had masses of almost educational fun playing with this map? Absolutely.

Bad Cartography - Stansted, Essex (Airport) vs. Stansted, Kent (Not An Airport)

2013-08-05 17:05

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

If there's one thing that stands out more than a map that says "you are here", it's a map that says "you are here" and seems to get the map wrong.

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

London has three major airports, of which Heathrow is the only one that's anywhere near Central London. The other two, Gatwick and Stansted, are out in the so called Home Counties, in Sussex and in Essex respectively. But that's not what the inflight map seems to show. Or does it? The map seems to show that we were flying directly over Stansted but that somehow London's third airport had mysteriously been moved from the north east of London to south of the River Thames, somewhere south of Gravesend.

My gut reaction was that the inflight map was just wrong. But the clue to this in all in the name Stansted (and not Stanstead as it's commonly misspelt). There is indeed a Stansted (a small village notable for a lack of airport) in Kent as well as a Stansted (and an airport) in Essex.

All of which makes me wonder just what the map's cartographers were thinking when they thought to put the village of Stansted, with a population of around 200, on an inflight map and with seemingly equal billing with some of the UK's major cities and manage to confuse it with a major UK airport. This isn't a recent map slip up either, as Wikipedia reports that this has been in place since 2007.

In early 2007, British Airways mistakenly used inflight 'skymaps' that relocated Stanstead Airport, Essex to Stansted in Kent. Skymaps show passengers their location, but the mistake was luckily not replicated on the pilots' navigation system. BA blamed outside contractors hired to make the map. "It was the mistake of the independent company that produced the software," said a spokeswoman. "The cartographer appears to have confused the vast Essex airport, which handles 25 million passengers a year, with this tiny Kent village, also called Stansted, which has a population of around 200".

Time for a refresh of British Airway's inflight maps I think.

The Rise And Fall Of Empires. On A Map Of Course

2013-07-24 10:53

One of the things we loose in today's up to date maps on the web and on our mobiles is how things used to be; the temporal problem of digital maps for want of a better phrase. It's not that there's no data on the past, it just doesn't surface very often.

But sometimes the data does surface and then people make maps of what used to be. Take the British Empire for example. When I went to school in the early 1970's there were maps of the world in almost every class room and they were old maps. Whether down to a lack of funding or as a reminder of what Britain used to be, these maps still showed the extent of the empire, in a pale shade of reddish-pink.

Or there's the growing and then shrinking extent of the Roman Empire, spanning 27 BC through to 1453 AD.

There's a whole load more Empire maps over at io9.com. However nice it is to see maps of the past, I have the same problems with these maps as I did of the maps of the changing boundaries of Europe. A static map or an animated GIF cry out for the modern interactivity of a web map. Looking at the maps above I just want to pan and zoom them and run the timeline forwards and backwards. But finding the geospatial data to do this is no easy thing.

But as a comment on my post on the maps of Europe pointed out, there is some data out there. Maybe when I get back from my summer vacation I'll make the empire maps that I want to see.

Photo Credits: Roman Empire map and British Empire map on Wikimedia.

Just Because You Can Put Things On A Map Doesn't Always Mean You Should Allow Anyone To Put Things On A Map

2013-07-11 12:20

Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.

This is a lesson that Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

You take that crowd sourced information and put it on a map so fellow hay fever sufferers know what to expect in their neighbourhood and with the presumed side effect that if you are a hay fever sufferer then maybe you might want to pop out and buy some Benadryl to help cope with the symptoms.

But people are ... creative and whilst you might get an accurate map of high pollen count areas you might also find that people want to be ... well let's just call it artistic.

First of all a series of map markers across Westminster, on the bank of London's River Thames seemed to spell out a word that rhymes with duck. Note that for those of you with a sensitive disposition or who are reading this at work, the screen shots below have been pixellated out for your comfort and convenience; you can click through for the NSFW versions if you so choose.

This was followed in quick succession by another word, this time rhyming with bit, appearing across London's Docklands area.

Who knows how far the creative hay fever sufferers of the United Kingdom would have taken this but it wasn't to last. Benadryl noticed this new form of map art and quickly took the social pollen count site down and it has since reappeared, though this time there seems to be some checks in place so that users can report high pollen count areas and only high pollen count areas. But whilst their developers were frantically trying to put some safeguards in place, it has to be said that Benadryl put up a temporary replacement that shows a certain sense of style and a whole lot of class.

Screen shot credits: Us vs. Them.

How To Order Your First Holiday Beer? With A Map Of Course

2013-07-09 13:05

Finally Summer has arrived in London just in time to coincide with the annual population exodus known as the summer holidays. But wait. When you arrive at your holiday destination, how do you order a beer? If you're lucky, you'll remember some rudimentary French or Spanish from your school days. But what about other languages? Surely there's a map for this essential information?

Luckily and to paraphrase the mantra of there's an app for that, there's also a map for that. Whether it's beer, bier, cerveza, pivo, birra or øl, this handy guide to beer throughout Europe and its environs will help you get that first cold beer of the holiday into your hands.

A tip of the hat and a cheers on Untappd is due to Sitaram Shashri for sending yet another mapping gem my way.

Mapping Posh London vs. Hipster London

2013-07-02 16:56

posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.

If you live in a city for any period of time, you form a mental image of what quantifies certain areas or neighbourhoods. If someone mentions, say, posh London, I instantly think of the area around Mayfair and Knightsbridge. But you could put this personal and biased view on a map?

It turns out Yelp has done just that, producing a heat map of my home city of all the reviews that mention posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.

The same applies for the term hipster. I'd immediately associate the area around Hoxton and Old Street (AKA Silicon Roundabout) with all things hipsterish. As it turns out, so do Yelp's reviewers.

All of which is oddly comforting. Maybe my mental map of a city isn't so personal and subjective after all.

A tip of the hat is due to Chris Osborne for pointing out these mapping gems.

150 Years Of The London Underground Map. In Lego.

2013-06-17 12:45

On the way through South Kensington Tube station this morning, I spied a new Underground map. That's nothing new, the Underground map seems to be changing frequently these days. But this map was very noticeably different.

There was no Victoria or Jubilee lines at all. The Piccadilly line terminated at Hammersmith and Finsbury Park and had stations that have been closed for years; Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road. The Central Line stopped at Liverpool Street.

Did I mention the entire map was made of Lego?

It's all part of the celebrations marking 150 years of the London Underground network. In addition to the South Kensington map, which shows the tube network circa 1927 and which also explains the closed stations and missing lines, there's another 4 maps scattered across the network, if you know where to look.

At Piccadilly Circus there's a map from 1933, the first of Harry Beck's iconic designs. At Green Park there's a 1969 map. At Stratford there's an up-to-date 2013 map. Finally at King's Cross St. Pancras there's a view of how the map might look in 2020, with Crossrail up and running.

Photo Credits: picolin and vicchi on Flickr.

Less A Map Of Vinland, More A Map Of Fakeland

2013-06-04 16:35

Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.

The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.

Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?

Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.

Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.

Some uses of maps have remained relatively unchanged through the ages. We still use them to find out where we are and how to get somewhere else. Governments still use them to say "this is mine, that is yours". But as our planet has now been pretty comprehensively mapped, we don't use them to say "I got here first" that much anymore.

Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.

The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.

Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?

Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.

Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.

Luckily in 1957 a map of Vinland came to light, as part of short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartaorum (The Tartar Relation). The Vinland map seemed to be dated from the 15th Century and in true mappa mundi tradition showed the world as it was known then, with Africa, Asia, Europe as well as a landmass labelled Vinland to the South West of Greenland. Coincidentally, three years after the Vinland map emerged, an archeological dig uncovered a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Surely this proved the authenticity of the Vinland map?

In the years since, the Vinland map has attracted controversy with as many people believing its authenticity as those who thought it a fake.

Enter John Paul Floyd, a Glaswegian researcher who seems to have proved that the parchment the Vinland map is drawn on is a genuine 15th Century relic. That's the parchment, not the map though. Floyd has discovered that the Hystoria Tartaorum was displayed at an event in 1892 and again in 1926 and on both occasions the document was conspicuously map free. Add to this the fact that the Vinland map uses textual idioms more consistent with the 17th Century than 200 years ealier and that the map includes characteristics found in 18th Century reproductions of a 1463 world map and all the evidence is pointing to the Vinland map being a fake created sometime between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Leif Ericson may have been the first European to visit and colonise the Americas, but there still seems to be no map known that says he did it first.

If you're one of the people who have a Times and Sunday Times paywall account, there's more coverage on the Sunday Times website; for the remaining 99.999% of the population, there's additional coverage over at BoingBoing.

Photo Credits: Wikipedia.

Test Drive The New Google Maps Preview; With A Little Bit Of Cookie Hacking

2013-05-30 12:22

request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

There's a new version of Google Maps for the web but so far it's not for everyone. You need to request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

The key to unlocking the new preview is held in a cookie called NID. If you change the cookie's value from one impenetrable string of characters to another, equally impenetrable string of characters, the preview will automagically get unlocked. There's several ways to modify a cookie; as I use Chrome on a daily basis I used the Edit This Cookie extension, but there's other ways to do this depending on your browser of choice. Once you've found the NID cookie, change its value to ...

67=MzRdy0T16I7lw9REhtIF5N5lkuoSy1s7cJGFa24wZ6pRK0kRpU9SqiTWy9r_DQ4UxdmHjSeMImvsqgrVUbC0T9FhuESvl__dlkZwRBTxkzxWcdq8vDcpuvnuve6yI78LeqFFK21yc0_6Bp3cHS4Z3a6nwwBQm_fW8DfHF7lv6OrkDosmMa-GaDOLVXR2ewK5-xAk

... and reload the page. Hey presto. Welcome to the new Google Maps.

One final word of warning; this is a hack. It's likely to change or go away at any time. If you're a Chrome user, it also seems to wreak havoc with Chrome's omnibox searches as well. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Welcome To The United States; A Cold War Tourist Map For Soviet Visitors

2013-05-21 12:35

Governments and authorities like maps. They're a useful way of clearly saying this is mine, that is yours. They're also useful for saying where you can and more importantly, where you can't go. This is all too evident in a surprising map of where Russian visitors to the US were permitted to visit during the 1950s.

In the mid 1950s America and Russia were in the middle of the game of oneupmanship, with added nuclear weapons, that was the Cold War. Despite the uneasy detente between the two countries, if you were one of an elite group of Soviet citizens you were actually able to visit the United States. But not all of it. Large swathes of the US were closed to prospective Soviet tourists.

What makes this map interesting is not so much the slice of relatively recent world history that it portrays but more of the questions it poses. What were the criteria that were used to determine where a Cold War era Soviet visitor could and couldn't go?

You can make some educated guesses. It's not unreasonable to assume that major ports, coastlines, industrial areas and military and weapons areas were off limits. But that doesn't cover the full scope of the open and closed areas.

Over at BoingBoing, there's speculation that this was as much a tit-for-tat set of restrictions as it was a set of restrictions based on what the US Government didn't want Soviets to see. As Cold War era historian Audra Wolfe, the author of the Slate article on this map, notes

The main premise is 'strict reciprocity'. X% of Soviet coasts are off-limits, therefore X% of US coasts are off-limits, too.

Photo Credits: Rockefeller Archive Center, Item record: Rockefeller Family Archives (III) Record Group: 4 Nelson A. Rockefeller – Personal, Series: Washington D.C Files, Subseries: O.9 Special Assistant to the President Declassified Materials, 1954-1956, 1969 Box: 4 Folder 94.

Open Data Yields Tangible Results - And Tangible Maps

2013-05-07 18:54

2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

In January of this year I made a hopeful prediction that 2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

Now all if this could be taken to be simply my crowing with delight over maps. But there's a deeper context to all of these tangible maps. Both the London Wall Map and SplashMaps have come about due to one single thing ... open data. The case has often been made, though equally as often misunderstood, that open data is an economic stimulus. As many people ask why should we give something away for free as ask for data to opened up to the public.

Both of these maps wouldn't have been financially possible without access to open data; the pre-open data era licensing costs and restrictions alone would have put paid to any startup opportunities an aspiring entrepreneur came up with. But in these maps, the proof of what open data can do has become very real, indeed very tangible.

The Changing Map Of Europe's Boundaries

2013-05-01 12:45

courtesy of the BBC, dates from 2005 and covers the years between 1900 and 1994. Starting wit Imperial Europe and fast forwarding though two world wars, plus the Cold War and taking in the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the expansion of the European Union.

The boundaries of Europe's constituent countries have changed a lot in my lifetime. Some countries don't exist anymore whilst others have come into existence. But it takes a map visualisation to make you realise just how much the map of Europe has changed.

Actually, it takes two map visualisations. The first, courtesy of the BBC, dates from 2005 and covers the years between 1900 and 1994. Starting wit Imperial Europe and fast forwarding though two world wars, plus the Cold War and taking in the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the expansion of the European Union.

The other map takes a much wider view, ranging from 1000 AD to the present day. It's oddly fascinating to watch the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires go from dominance to vanishing entirely.

But the purist in me finds as much to dislike as to like in both of these maps. The BBC one is just two small and cries out for the ability to pan and zoom the map. For some unexplained reason, the map is ... tiny and, though I hesitate to use the word in this content, the cartographer has obviously been experimenting with differing shades of colour to try and clearly delineate the countries but didn't experiment hard enough.

The LiveLeak map is also small and while the video containing the map can be enlarged to full screen, there's a loss of crispness to the map. For a map with such a wide timespan, it would have helped massively to have some kind of timeline accompanying the animation, so you can see just where in history you are.

Two maps. Both interesting. Both, for me, ultimately flawed. This sort of map just cries out to be reworked. If only I could find a suitable boundary data set spanning over a thousand years.

Marvellous Miniature Map

2013-04-26 17:37

Photo Credits: Jane McDevitt on Flickr.

Some maps are works of art; this miniature marvel is no exception. You'd be forgiven for thinking it's deserved of a place hanging on someone's wall, but the truth is that this map is far more likely to end up in a rubbish bin.

That's because this marvellous miniature map lives on the cover of a box of matches and empty boxes of matches have a very short shelf life before they end up in the rubbish. Which is a crying shame as this beautiful map with Mount Fuji in the background, a house and what looks like a tram deserves a kinder fate than that.

Photo Credits: Jane McDevitt on Flickr.

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

2013-04-26 10:46

Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE Maps, formerly known as Nokia Location & Commerce. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

There’s a lot of URLs in the slides to follow and rather than try to frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you really need to know about. If you go there right now, this link will 404 on you but sometime tomorrow this where my slides and all my talk notes will appear here.

https://vtny.org/mo

In today’s global market place when you choose a brand name you normally do some research to make sure that the name you choose doesn’t mean something unfortunate in another language. Most brands succeed at this …

… some don’t

But the names of most of the places in the world came about long before globalisation and the reach of today’s interwebs. A name that can have totally innocent or meaningless connotations in one language can appear amusing when viewed in another language

Naming a village at the bottom of a hill half way along a traditional 12 mile race from the town of Newmarket seemed perfectly rational in the 1840’s and it’s only today that the name probably induces a snigger or two

The same probably goes for a town believed to be named after Focko, a Bavarian nobleman in the 6th century. Today this Austrian town is more noted for having it’s signs regularly stolen and vain, but apocryphal efforts to rename the town to Fugging

The word ‘intercourse’ used to mean ‘fellowship’ and ‘social interaction’. It still does, but there’s another colloquial meaning that makes English language speakers snigger. Of course, it’s the former meaning of the word that forms the etymology of the Lancaster County Pennsylvania town.

And if you live near an area of coastline which relies on fishing, it’s totally natural to name your town after a suggestively shaped piece of wood that you would use to pivot the oar on your fishing boat. At least that’s what people would commonly understand the name of this town in Newfoundland to mean in 1711 which is the first recorded instance of this name for this town in this area.

There’s a lot more of them … I know of at least 250 more, some more prosaic than others and some more profane than others.

For a long time I’ve had a list of these, sitting in a file on my laptop. The product of a Friday afternoon when someone I worked with thought that cataloguing the rude place names in our geographic data set would be a really good idea. And there the file sat, taking up a small amount of disk space.

And then someone, actually this someone, said some fateful words to me …

And so I did … in 8 easy steps

Step 1. Make coffee. An essential element to any form of geographic or cartographic endeavour.

Thus fortified I moved onto step 2; trying to geocode the raw data and weed out those places which seemed to be more a product of wishful thinking than any geographical reality. I now had a basic list of place names, long/lat coordinates and the full name of the place according to the geocoder.

Step 3 was to convert this raw list of names and coordinates into something that I could manipulate easily and so with the help of a couple of hacked together command line scripts which made use of PHP’s built in JSON encoding, I was able to spit out a file in GeoJSON

… which looked something like this. a FeatureCollection array containing a the coordinates and formatted labels for each place name.

Step 4 was to select a mapping API which could easily handle GeoJSON. Most modern APIs do but I’d wanted an excuse to play with Leaflet and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to do so. Leaflet also has a simple and flexible way to convert GeoJSON into a series of push pins or polygons on a map canvas. The only thing I was less than happy with was the map tiles that I’d initially used.

Enter Step 5; using a custom OSM derived tile set called Toner from San Francisco’s Stamen.

Thus armed with my data in GeoJSON format, my map tiles of choice and a custom push pin icon, all it took was 35 odd lines of JavaScript, plus some supporting HTML and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map was born. But this was still sitting on my laptop …

Thankfully I’d registered the geotastic.org domain a while back and this seemed like the ideal place to put the map

So to step 6. Open up an SSH connection to one of my web hosts, this one kindly donated as payment in kind for some WordPress hacking for a friend, and push the whole lot onto the public internet.

Step 7 was sharing the code and underlying data on GitHub in the vague notion that someone might like this as a working example of a map.

And finally step 8 was writing a blog post, tweeting about it and then moving on with life and forgetting about the map.

All of this happened on February the 6th. I forgot about the map, forgot about the blog post, forgot about the tweet and got on with my day job

But then …

Someone pinged me an email which basically said ...

you need to look at Twitter, search for the URL of that map of rude places, see what's happening

So I did. People seemed to like the map, or maybe they liked what the map was showing, or both. Who knows? All I know is that it started proliferating across Twitter at a frantic speed. This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t what I intended. You put stuff onto the internet to satisfy whatever motive you have, whether it’s to blog, to tweet, to release code on GitHub or any other of the multitude of reasons. Most times it gets ignored. But sometimes, just sometimes, something strikes a chord and you find yourself on the receiving end of the phrase ‘going viral’.

Of course, it’s not just individuals who read Twitter. It’s individuals who work for companies that read Twitter as well. Before I knew it the map was appearing in the traditional media as well as social media

From the Huffington Post …

… the Daily Telegraph

… the Independent

... and further afield, such as the Sidney Morning Herald

… into regional publications such as Germany’s Der Spiegel

… and Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet, even if this is a Danish Equivalent of the UK’s red-top tabloids. There’s loads more examples of this that I won’t bore you with, most of them unoriginal pieces that copied and pasted other articles. I even ended up getting interviewed on US and Irish radio chat shows

But talking of the tabloids …

This also got picked up by the Daily Mail which provided the only negative view of the whole episode. It would have been nice it the journalist responsible could have spelt my name correctly and if you’re going to lift the copy and paste my blog post wholesale, ignore the Creative Commons license that specifies attribution and don’t rewrite it, littering it with other spelling and grammatical errors. But we live in an imperfect world.

So what lessons have I learned by making the Vaguely Rude Places map?

Firstly, if something’s going to go viral on the interwebs it happens very very quickly and without you necessarily noticing it initially

From a minimal number of hits, presumably from Twitter followers and connections on other social networks, things started to take off around February the 10th, peaking on the evening of February 19th with, to me, a staggering 48,000 hits an hour, totally 310,000 hits for that day.

Having bandwidth really helps if the equivalent of being Slashdotted happens to you. Thankfully, the geotastic.org domain lives on a server with absolutely no bandwidth restrictions. If I’d have hosted this on my main, paid for, web host, I would have ended up using a year’s worth of bandwidth allocation in less than 48 hours.

Since February, my web server's analytics tell me the map has been viewed almost 30 million times; 22.2 million of those in February alone and most people stay and explore for around 5 minutes. Roughly 75% of traffic came from referrals. Surprisingly the lion’s share of referrals were not from Twitter or Facebook but from key worded Google searches. Maybe word of mouth is still more powerful than social media.

By March, traffic had ramped down to around 2.2 million hits

And this month has so far produced around 96,000 hits, at least when I took this snapshot at the start of the week. Extrapolating this out, it’s not unreasonable to predict around 1 million hits this month but I fully expect this to tail off even further

None of this surprises me now, today’s viral hit is quickly forgotten as the next big thing happens and people’s attention goes elsewhere. I’m more than happy about this. I never set out for this to go viral. I never set out to make something that made social media briefly buzz or to get written about in the more traditional press or to end up speaking to people on radio shows. It’s been fun.

In fact this has been the most successful thing on the internet I’ve ever done, which probably says something about what I do and about what people seem to like. But now the fuss has died down I’m glad to go back to being someone who makes maps for a living and writes the occasional blog post or PHP or JavaScript code which is usually maps based. The Vaguely Rude Places map turned my life upside down for a few brief weeks. Life goes on and it was good to get back to normal again. And now I leave you with the last word on the subject …

… which my old friend and ex-colleague from our time at Yahoo had to say. I think this tweet and the animated GIF of Bert and Ernie sums it all up rather neatly. You can see the full animated GIF here.

Thank you for listening

Organic Pigs Or Organic Pig Waste? Mapping The Pros And Cons Of Each US State

2013-04-12 11:58

Where you choose to live is always a trade off between the pros and the cons, the good and the bad. It probably comes as no surprise that if you're a resident of Iowa and you have the most organic pigs in the United States you will also have the highest amount of pig waste.

But who would have thought that the downside to having the most organic mushrooms is that your state has the most amount of dams in need of repair. Apparently, this is the case if you live in Pennsylvania.

And maybe the cause of the highest binge drinking rate that you'll find in Wisconsin is all those acres of organic corn that's grown in that state.

A lot of the statistics, from sources including the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, look like they're issued by the Department Of Stating The Obvious and makes me wonder how much the residents of each U.S. State agree with how it's seen that their home State excels or doesn't.

Image Credits: Mother Nature Network.

Mapping Heavy Metal With A Little Help From The CIA

2013-04-04 12:20

Encyclopedia Metallum detailing the Heavy Metal bands per country and mashing it up with population data from the CIA World Factbook (yes, this really exists) to make a map of Heavy Metal bands, by country, per capita.

If there's an unwritten law of digital map making it is this: given a data set with a geographical element, someone, somewhere, will probably make a map out of it.

A prime example of this law is mining data from Encyclopedia Metallum detailing the Heavy Metal bands per country and mashing it up with population data from the CIA World Factbook (yes, this really exists) to make a map of Heavy Metal bands, by country, per capita.

While I'm not the biggest fan of heavy rock, the resulting map does, err, rock.

Credit is also due to my lovely wife who, knowing my penchant for all things map related, pointed this out to me in the first place.

Image Credits: Reddit user depo_s via GIS Lounge.

Pigs On A Map

2013-04-03 14:36

Each time I find a new map I always end up learning something, sometimes directly from the map, sometimes from the content of what the map is trying to show. But I always end up learning something. In the case of this map, from H. W. Hill and Co from Decatur, Illinois circa 1884, I learnt that ...

That you really can put pigs on a map.
That in the 1880s each US state (apparently) had a nickname for a pig. Or is it that the States have nicknames that are best represented by pigs? Or maybe something else entirely.
What a hog ringer is. Apparently it's a device for putting rings in the noses of pigs. Ouch.

How much use this information will be to me is yet to be decided, but every piece of information you learn might come in useful someday, even from this map.

Image Credits: US Library of Congress.

You May Have Helped Map The Internet Without Knowing It

2013-03-21 11:20

over 900 million things connected to the internet. This isn't the amount of things, computers, mobile phones, tablets, that use the internet, but the number of things that have a public IP address. Maybe by correlating the locations of these public IP addresses you could make a map of the internet?

According to the Internet Systems Consortium there's somewhere over 900 million things connected to the internet. This isn't the amount of things, computers, mobile phones, tablets, that use the internet, but the number of things that have a public IP address. Maybe by correlating the locations of these public IP addresses you could make a map of the internet?

Almost anything is possible, but the devil's in the details. Firstly you'd need to find all those internet connected things which respond to an ICMP Ping request, which is a technical way of asking something on the internet are you there? That's a really big amount of things to ask this question of and that would take a lot of time for just one computer to do.

But a researcher tried to do this and in preliminary research found out that an awfully large amount of these internet connected things were servers running some version of UNIX and a scarily large amount of these also either had a root account with a password of root or admin or even no password at all. The root account is a superuser or administrator account on a UNIX system; if you can login with this account you have total control of a UNIX machine.

This is where things get technically interesting, legally dubious and morally questionable in pretty much equal measure.

The, so far anonymous, researcher wrote a small piece of code that could do three things. Firstly, run a scan of a very small subset of those 900 million odd connected things. Secondly, make a copy of itself on another of those connected things which were running UNIX and which had a wide open root account. Thirdly, make that copy of itself, small, unnoticeable, not consume too much system resources or bandwidth and delete itself after it had finished.

This is what's know as a botnet and this botnet mapped the internet and vanished once it was done. At its peak, there were over 420,000 servers unwittingly participating in this map making endeavour. You may even have contributed to the map without even being aware of it. If you know that you have a wide open UNIX server you probably did and you should also run, not walk, and lock down your server right now.

As a map, the Internet Census 2012 map is interesting. As a piece of technology, the map's origins are fascinating. You can also see why the researcher who did this chose to remain utterly anonymous, though I have to wonder how long his anonymity will last.

Re-imagining Berlin's U-Bahn And S-Bahn System

2013-03-14 13:48

U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

This is another mass transit map, but this time it's not of the London Underground system, but the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

Not content with reworking London's Underground network maps, Maxwell Roberts has turned his sights on Berlin's, producing not only a rework map which looks very similar to the official London map, but also one which is all curves, with not a straight line to be seen.

I hope that both Berlin's BVG and S-Bahn Berlin are aware of Maxwell's work. As a fairly regular traveller to Berlin, I use the U and S-Bahn a lot and whilst the official map is accurate, it's not the easiest of thing to use at times.

Photo Credits: Maxwell Roberts via The Local.

Countries That Cry; Countries That Don't (100% Mercator Free)

2013-03-06 09:52

the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn't Mercator's.

March the 5th 2013 marked the 501st birthday of Gerardus Mercator, whose map projection appears on virtually every web map you'll find on the interwebs today. It appears he's none too happy about the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn't Mercator's.

I've been using a lot of Natural Earth's vector data to make maps recently and so Tom Patterson's rather beautiful Natural Earth projection seemed fitting and avoided the wrath of Gerardus into the bargain.

Continuing my dabblings in Mike Bostock's D3, reworking the Countries That Do And Don't Cry For Me map that did the rounds on the internet some years back took up a couple of spare hours last night; making maps is addictive it seems.

The full map is here, hosted on maps.geotastic.org ... and for those who don't get the cultural reference, this song from a certain 1970's musical might help.

The Great British Map; Or Great Britain vs. The United Kingdom vs. The British Isles

2013-02-27 16:53

another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.

So if the ISO 3166-2 code is GBR, how come the country is called the United Kingdom?
But if England is a country and the United Kingdom is a country, how come England is part of the United Kingdom?
What about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.

Last night I made another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.

So if the ISO 3166-2 code is GBR, how come the country is called the United Kingdom?
But if England is a country and the United Kingdom is a country, how come England is part of the United Kingdom?
What about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.

I'd been looking for a good source of geographic vector data that I could use to easily overlay polygons on a map and came across a rich source of free vector and raster map data from Natural Earth. But instead of overlaying that data on top of a standard slippy map using a JavaScript maps API to tap into a tile server's bitmap tiles, I soon wondered whether I could actually make a map from the vector data. It turned out I could and decided to revisit the structure of the group of islands I live on one more time and try to visualise the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. The end result, punningly entitled the Great British Map, looks something like this ...

When the page first loads you'll see the coastlines of Britain, Ireland and towards the bottom, the Channel Islands. There's then five ways of looking at this particular map.

There's the group of geographic islands that's termed the British Isles; these show up in purplish-grey and if you're observant, the Channel Islands vanish as they're not part of this island group.

Then there's the individual geographic islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle Of Man and The Channel Islands; these show up in green.

There's two sovereign states, The United Kingdom of Great Britain And Northern Island and the Republic Of Ireland; these show up in red.

Next comes the administrative countries which make up the United Kingdom; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These show up in yellow.

Finally, there's the Crown Dependencies, the self governing possessions of the British Crown; the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are these and they show up as purple.

What's missing from the map? The British Overseas Territories, which is a polite way of saying what's left of the British Empire that didn't gain independence and which the United Kingdom still asserts sovereignty over. These are Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

If you're interested in how I actually made the map, read on.

The source data from the map are two public domain datasets from Natural Earth; the 1:10m map Admin 0 Subunits dataset and the 1:10m Populated Places dataset. This data includes shapefiles which can be converted into GeoJSON format by the GDAL ogr2ogr command line tool. I extracted the vectors for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands from the Admin 0 Subunits dataset, keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 country codes.

$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "adm0\_a3 IN ('GBR','IRL','IMN','GGY','JEY','GBA')" subunits.json ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits/ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits.shp

I then extracted the place data from the Populated Places dataset, again extracting data for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands, this time keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country codes. Not entirely sure why one dataset uses Alpha-2 and the other uses Alpha-3 but go figure; the data is free, accurate and open so who am I to complain?

$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "iso\_a2 IN ('GB','IM','JE','GG') AND SCALERANK < 8" places.json ne\_10m\_populated\_places/ne\_10m\_populated\_places.shp

Finally, I merged subunits.json and places.json into a single TopoJSON file, with the added bonus that TopoJSON is much much smaller than GeoJSON. The source GeoJSON weighed in at 549 KB whereas the combined TopoJSON is a mere 78 KB.

$ topojson --id-property su\_a3 -p NAME=name -p name -o great-british-map.json subunits.json places.json

The main reason for use of TopoJSON is not that it's much more lightweight than GeoJSON, but that Mike Bostock's excellent D3 JavaScript library can easily slurp in TopoJSON and inject SVG straight into an HTML document. Which is precisely what the map's underlying code does. There's a lot more that D3 could do with this map, but it's early days and for a first step into a new maps library, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.

Speaking of code, it should come as no surprise that the map's code base is available on GitHub. The Great British Map is based on great D3 tutorial that Mike has written on vector mapping using Natural Earth, so the similarity between Mike's map and my map is entirely intentional.

You Were Here; Mapping The Places I've Been To According To Foursquare

2013-02-26 09:07

another map. While I don't think for one moment this one will be as wildly popular as my last map was, this one is just as satisfying and a whole lot more personal.

At 8.01 PM on the 11th. of October 2009 I checked into Sushi Tomi in Mountain View, California. This was my very first Foursquare check-in. Since then I've checked-in on this particular location based service a further 12,394 times. Each check-in has been at a place I've visited. As this is a location based service, each check-in comes with a longitude and latitude.

This sounded to me like an ideal candidate for a map. But how to go about making one?

Over the weekend I made another map. While I don't think for one moment this one will be as wildly popular as my last map was, this one is just as satisfying and a whole lot more personal.

At 8.01 PM on the 11th. of October 2009 I checked into Sushi Tomi in Mountain View, California. This was my very first Foursquare check-in. Since then I've checked-in on this particular location based service a further 12,394 times. Each check-in has been at a place I've visited. As this is a location based service, each check-in comes with a longitude and latitude.

This sounded to me like an ideal candidate for a map. But how to go about making one?

I could have written some code to use the Foursquare API, but I've been running an instance of Aaron Cope's privatesquare for a couple of years now, which meant every check-in I've ever made, give or take the last 6 hours or so, is sitting comfortably in a MySQL database.

So I wrote some code to go through the database, extract each checkin and make a list of each place I'd checked into, the place's coordinates, the place's name and how many times I'd checked into that place. Armed with this information, I could then spit this out in GeoJSON format, which made making a map no more complicated than some mapping API JavaScript, in this case the Leaflet API. OK. There was some slight complication. I need to do some cleverness to make each checkin a CircleMarker, where the radius of the circle was proportional to the number of check-ins. Thankfully Mike Bostock's D3 library does this with ease.

It's not the most classy of visualisations. But I do like that the map shows me the global picture of where I've been over the last 4 or so years. As you zoom into the map, it's fascinating to see the patterns of my movements in areas I seem to go to on a regular basis, such as the San Francisco Bay Area ...

... or Berlin ...

... or even Dar Es Salaam ...

... as well as my journeys around my home country.

But there's still a lot of things that the map doesn't do.

The z-index, or stacking order, of the markers is based on each place's coordinates; ideally this will be adjusted so that the larger markers, those with the most check-ins, stack underneath the smaller ones so they're not obscured. I also want to add the ability to see some form of timeline and add some richer data about each place to the marker's popups.

But for now, it does the job I set out to do and to make life easier, should you wish to do the same, you'll find the source code up on GitHub.

What next? Well, now that I can download my Twitter history, I think all of my geotagged tweets are suitable candidates for some mapping ...

Literally A Map Of Riches

2013-02-25 13:15

This map however, is not a pointer to riches, instead it's made of riches.

A large-scale, unique and intricate portrait of our Earth - a planet which is surely a jewel of the universe - innovatively created from 330,000 hand-cut pieces of stained glass, 1238 jewels totalling 260 carats, and over 6900 LEDs.

Most maps are pointers to something; from today's turn-by-turn voice guided navigation to the "X marks the spot" treasure maps of legend.

This map however, is not a pointer to riches, instead it's made of riches.

A large-scale, unique and intricate portrait of our Earth - a planet which is surely a jewel of the universe - innovatively created from 330,000 hand-cut pieces of stained glass, 1238 jewels totalling 260 carats, and over 6900 LEDs.

I've written before about maps as art, but this is both a map, a work of art and the map as art and with a tip of the hat to Sitaram Shastri for the heads up. Check out jeweloftheuniverse.net for loads more pictures of this gorgeous map.

Gravity Sucks But It Sucks Variably (Also Available As A Map)

2013-02-22 14:37

As children we all learn the hard way that gravity sucks though a succession of scraped and bruised knees and elbows. We probably also learned in physics lessons that there's the gravitational constant, denoted by a capital G.

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But what I certainly didn't learn was that while gravity sucks, it doesn't suck consistently. In fact, gravity sucks variably, as this 2010 map from ESA's Goce (Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite shows.

So it should come as no surprise that not only does gravity suck variably on Earth, it also sucks variably on the Moon.

This map comes from two NASA probes, Ebb and Flow, which formed part of the agency's GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) project. Ebb and Flow spent 351 days orbiting in formation around the Moon before crashing to the surface at the end of 2012.

So gravity still sucks; it just sucks variably.

Image Credits: Wikipedia, ESA and NASA.

Mapping Meteor Strikes; There's A Lot More Than You'd Think

2013-02-20 14:56

meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.

I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

Last week's 10,00 ton and 55 feet's worth of meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.

I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

On the subject of the last thought, it turns out this has happened before. A few times. Actually close to 35,000 times. The Meteoritical Society has a data set detailing these. It would make a great map. Which is exactly what Javier de la Torre, co-founder of CartoDB has done.

A map of impact points would be effective enough, but Javier's use of a heatmap not only shows the global spread of the debris which has been raining down on our planet since 2,300 BC but also shows the density of strikes, which makes the map simultaneously more effective and accessible.

There's also been far more strikes in the United Kingdom than I would have either thought or feel vaguely comfortable about, if you can ever be comfortable with things falling from the sky with horrifying effect.

Definitely a map to file under the I wish I'd done that category.

The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)

2013-02-19 13:38

SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.

A lot of great conferences in the UK happen in London. But not all great conferences. For some, you have to travel a little further afield. Maybe to East Anglia. Or more specifically to Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. If you were in Norwich last week, you might have noticed that SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.

Image Credits: Denise Bradley, Eastern Daily Press.

So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo- technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE, Nokia’s maps group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council and Executive for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference, a committer to the Mapstraction open source maps API and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

This is the abridged version of this talk; the original is a whole lot bigger but I’ve been warned that there’s a speed limit for slides in this county so I’ve had to pare the talk down and I’ll try hard not to exceed the slides-per-minute rate.

There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and an upper case “S” at the end of the URL by the way ...

Before I go any further I need to thank this man, Steven Feldman. There’s a lot of maps history in this talk and while it’s easy to get hold of snapshots of how the web looks right now, it’s less easy to get hold of snapshots about how the web used to look. So I’m thoroughly indebted to Steven for allowing me to rummage through his collection of digital maps history.

As the name of this talk probably suggests, there’s a lot of maps in the slide to come. Some people have called previous talks I’ve done map porn. This is true and I make no apology for it.

This isn’t the earliest map but it’s one of the earliest that’s recognisable as a map; it’s of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.

Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're also art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.

Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.

But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the led, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.

Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.

So we have maps trying to tell the story of the world. Maps as art. Maps as power. Maps to get you around a city by train. But if you wanted to get around on foot or by car, up until just over 10 years ago, if you lived in a major metropolitan area you probably went around with a city street atlas, such as this one from London, with you.

I lugged one of these around for the best part of two decades, getting ever more battered and worn and filled with hand written navigation notes on how to get from A to B.

Then rather than carry around a local street atlas, people started instead to carry round a laser printed copy of the web map for where they wanted to go. Its this digital web map that I want to talk about

So fast forward to the early days of the internet, before the World Wide Web was formed, before people started to recognise URLs and web site addresses, before smartphones and tablets ...

Just like people questioned why you’d want to put a camera in a mobile phone, the early days of digital maps were met with incredulity by traditional map makers. Why on earth would you put a map onto a computer when you could carry a printed map out into the street with you. And while we take modern digital maps pretty much for granted, on our laptop and desktop, on our smartphone and on our tablets, they’ve actually been around a lot longer than most people realise ...

The story of the digital map starts over 30 years ago in the mid to late 1980’s. In 1984 a company called TeleAtlas formed in the Netherlands and the following year another company called Navtech formed in Silicon Valley. Both made rudimentary digital map data and TeleAtlas’s data would form part of ETAK, the first in-car navigation system.

In 1989 the rollout of the US controlled Global Positioning System starts. These days we know this as GPS.

Then, in 1991, at Cern in Switzerland a man called Tim Berners-Lee started to link a web of documents together and on this very NeXT cube (formed by Steve Jobs after he’d been ousted from Apple), the first webserver and web site was born and the World Wide Web officially started.

Mid 1993 and the final of the first set of GPS satellites were launched and the same month the first web server that served up maps went online; the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. These were static maps with none of the clicking, tapping, dragging, panning and zooming that we associate with online maps today.

In 1995, MultiMap launched. This is important. We tend to think of digital maps as being a purely Silicon Valley product thanks to Yahoo, Google and the like. But MultiMap was a pioneer and more importantly, it was a British pioneer.

MapBlast! was a web mapping service launched in the mid-1990s by Vicinity Corporation. It allowed website owners to incorporate maps in their own web pages, and was later syndicated across most major Web, wireless, handheld and interactive TV platforms including Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, ATT Interactive and Palm, among others. By 2000, MapBlast was the #2 mapping site on the Web

In 1996, MapQuest started; a subsidiary of R. O’Donelly that produced maps for the Blue Pages, the local information section at the front of US phone directories. MapQuest launched the first commercial web maps application. You could now put maps and other map related content on web sites. The maps came from Navteq and other sources, including MapQuest’s own. The Automobile Association of America were an early customer with a very primitive form of turn-by-turn navigation; you called the AAA, told them your route and they printed a map for your journey.

So we now have early digital maps. But they were small maps. Converting map vector data to raster images took time, the bigger the image the more time it took. Bandwidth over dial up modems also meant that putting a map in a browser was slow. So digital maps were small; they were quicker to produce and they downloaded quicker. They were also ugly maps; a stock cartography style and, in the UK, the dominance of OS map data didn’t make the maps appealing to the eye. Browsers were primitive compared with today and map functionality was very limited; no panning or zooming here. Even MultiMap used this way of producing digital maps though they did a much better job of it than most.

In 1997, MapXsite launched; the first dedicated web maps app for locating local stores and businesses, paving the way in the future for 100’s of Starbucks coffee store locator apps.

By February 1999, MapQuest had served up 76.2M maps and was the number 5 travel/tourism site on the web according to Media Metrix Inc. May 1999 and MapQuest goes public and raises $69M USD into the bargain. In July Microsoft sells its SideWalk property to TicketMaster and gets out of web mapping, starting the company’s on, off, on again affair with maps.

December 1999 and AOL buys MapQuest for $1.1Bn. That’s a £1,031M increase in less than 12 months. This is the start of the dot-com boom madness. Bear in mind that MapQuest were largely making money on B2B deals; their consumer web site was loosing money fast.

February 2000 and Vicinity goes public, raising $120M and peaking at a market cap of $2BN before dropping by 25%. Vicinity were trading as 160 times their revenue and losing over $1M a month at the time.

Up until 2000 there was two sorts of GPS signal – a degraded civilian one and and an accurate military one. This difference stopped in May 2000. As a result GPS starts to become widespread in civilian devices, leading to the explosion of personal satnav devices and the presence of GPS in our smartphones

This isn’t really web maps but it’s interesting as a taste of things to come. MultiMap launches a WAP service using TeleAtlas street level maps with travel directions, aerial imagery and London Underground maps. Suddenly everyone’s talking about mobile but due to a lack of mobile data bandwidth, a lack of applications and a lack of battery life, mobile won’t take off for another 7 or 8 years.

By March 2000, dot com madness is in full swing. The value of map data was completely distorted by the licensors; compare and contrast with the ridiculous prices paid for 3G licenses in the UK. Most of the original maps start-ups will go out of business as a result of the dot com boom turning into the dot bomb crash.

April 2002 and Microsoft is back in the mapping game with MapPoint.

October 2002 and Microsoft buys Vicinity, which already had $80M in the bank from its IPO for $96M. A great deal for Microsoft, or pouring money down the drain?

By 2003 MultiMap had served up over 1Bn maps!

Not many people realise that Yahoo were the first people to launch slippy maps, where you can click and drag to pan and zoom the map, and integration with search. One of the original engineers behind Vicinity jumped ship to help Yahoo! launch their maps; I worked with him whilst I was at Yahoo! and he’s still there.

By 2004 things are changing and starting to morph into what we now recognise as today’s web map landscape and players. Google launches Local, searching local business listings and displaying the results on a map. Sounds familiar? It’s worth noting that in 2003-2005 Google used MapQuest for their maps.

Towards the end of 2004 and maps are the most popular online activity according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. Email and online chat was number 2.

The same month, a man called Steve Coast presented ideas for a publicly editable map of the world ... OpenStreetMap ... at EuroFOO after being inspired by the success of Wikipedia and a growing frustration with the license around proprietary data in general, but in the UK in particular.

October 2004. Google acquires Where 2 technologies, getting a tile server that was capable of serving up map tiles to a desktop client, with early use of AJAX. At the same time, the cost of data storage falls to < $0.50 a GB (today’s prices are closer to $0.07 a GB) ... suddenly storing all of that map data becomes cheaper and easier.

The same month, Google also acquires Keyhole and 9 months later Google Earth launches.

Despite being phenomenally popular, web maps were limited by complexity, cost and lack of interaction. Developing a web map app was complex, needing expensive maps and knowledge of how to manipulate geographic and spatial data sets. Surely there was an easier way to use maps on the web? Then, in 2005, there was.

February 2005 and Google Maps launches; apparently maps can be fun and useful. Firstly in the US, then in Japan, Canada and the UK.

2 months later and the first maps mashup emerges; a ride sharing app, built internally at Google using an undocumented API.

This undocumented API didn’t remain private for long and by June people were discovering it and producing their own mashups, such as Housing Maps and the Chicago Crime Map.

Google’s technology is being used in a way they didn’t foresee. Google are paying licensing fees for maps data and the unofficial mashups are getting this for free. What should Google do? Slam the door in the faces of this new and rapidly developing way of using maps?

Instead, John Hanke (ex of Keyhole) formally released the Google Maps API. It made sense. Google needed the internet to grow; more web content to index; more space to place ads on; more brand recognition. What would this free maps API do to the other businesses in this sector? I don’t think they took it too seriously ... at least to start with.

Google’s Maps API was followed in quick succession by similar offerings from Yahoo! and from Microsoft.

And as maps APIs explode across the web, the Open Source communities start to take notice too.

In 2005, O’Reilly publish Web Mapping Illustrated and the first Where 2.0 conference soon follows. 20% of web users are now using online maps.

In May 2006 a group of OSM mappers took a trip to the Isle of Wight. This is what the OSM map looked like when they arrived. And this is what it looked like 2 days later; completely mapped.

June 2006 and the Enterprise and Google start to court each other and 24% of web users worldwide are using web maps; that figure increases to 45% in the UK and 40% in the US

By 2006, web mapping and location technologies are starting to attract the media and with Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 in full swing, the GeoWeb emerges as a term.

In November the OS demos OpenSpace, even if it did take a year to release.

In December people start talking about Neogeography

a socially networked mapping platform which makes it easy to find, create, share, and publish maps and places Di-Ann Eisnor

Neogeography means new geography and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. Where historically a professional cartographer might use ArcGIS, talk of Mercator versus Mollweide projections, and resolve land area disputes, a neogeographer uses a mapping API like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML, and geotags his photos to make a map of his summer vacation. Essentially, Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of place. Lastly, Neogeography is fun Andrew Turner

At the start of 2007, Google launches StreetView to an at best indifferent public and at worst to cries of invasion of privacy. Initially using Immersive Media data, soon Google are driving the streets, but with cameras that aren’t only looking from side to side but also up and down.

The following month Google adds draggable routing to their maps. Originally using Telcontar but replaced with Google’s own technology a year later. As Google’s Ed Parsons notes “routing algorithms aren’t rocket science; by scaling them are”. Notice the continuing pattern here. Google buys technology and then builds on top of it. Other web maps vendors are left trailing by this move.

By July there’s sufficient OSM users to hold the first annual State Of The Map conference.

By 2007, there’s 50,000 Google Maps mashups. Google Maps has 71.5M users per month; Google Earth 22.7M users per month

In 2007 Nokia acquires NAVTEQ and launches Ovi Maps

The same year, Microsoft is firmly back in the web maps game and acquires MultiMap.

In 2008 Google wants to save on the costs that its web mapping activities incur. The main cost saver is the licensing fees that Google pays TeleAtlas. Remember those StreetView cameras that were pointing up and down? Google is making their own map?

Just look at this for a year’s releases to Google Maps, difficult for the other players to keep up! 21 announcements in 1 year! 1. On January 22, 2008, Google expanded the Local Onebox from 3 business listings to 10 2. On February 20, 2008, Google Maps allowed searches to be refined by User Rating & neighbourhoods. 3. On March 18, 2008, Google allowed end users to edit business listings and add new places. 4. On March 19, 2008, Google added unlimited category options in the Local Business Center. 5. On April 2, 2008, Google added contour lines to the Terrain view. 6. In April 2008, a button to view recent Saved Locations was added to the right of the search field. 7. In May 2008, a "More" button was added alongside the "Map", "Satellite", and "Terrain" buttons, permitting access to geographically-related photos on Panoramio and articles on Wikipedia 8. On May 15, 2008, Google Maps was ported to Flash and ActionScript 3 as a foundation for richer internet applications. 9. On July 15, 2008, walking directions were added. 10. On August 4, 2008, Street View launched in Japan and Australia. 11. On August 15, 2008, the user interface was redesigned. 12. On August 29, 2008, Google signed a deal under which GeoEye would supply them with imagery from a satellite and introduced the Map Maker tool for creation of map data. 13. On September 9, 2008, a reverse business lookup feature was added. 14. On September 23, 2008, information for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority was added.

And finally in 2009 and in the US at least, Google ways goodbye to TeleAtlas.

Jul 2010 and MapQuest starts using open source and open data through OpenStreetMap. There’s several drivers here. One is cost. Another is a trial to see how good crowd sourced maps really are. Microsoft follows suite, announcing use of OSM data and OSM’s founder, Steve Coast, joins Microsoft.

By the end of 2010, 350,000 web sites are using Google’s Maps API

In 2011, Nokia’s Ovi maps rebrand to Nokia Maps

Nokia starts to build on the strength of the mapping services gained by acquiring NAVTEQ and partners with Yahoo!, replacing their native maps with Nokia’s own

And then something happened that really brought the ubiquity of digital maps, on your phone or tablet, to the mainstream media’s attention. All of a sudden tech industry commentators, who should really know better and who had been proclaiming that making maps wasn’t that hard, changed their tune and proclaimed that making usable digital maps was actually hard after all.

Up to and including version 5, Apple’s iOS had a maps app. It may have been called just “Maps” but it used Google’s mapping technologies on the back end. It was, and up to the end of version 5, remained one of the most popular and often used apps that came on a new iPhone or iPad. But in September 2012 when Apple released iOS 6, the maps app, still called “Maps” was replaced by the much heralded Apple native offering and millions of anguished iOS used cried out ...

... as they got directed onto the middle of an airport runway

... as bridges just vanished

... and as Las Vegas apparently melted under the heat of the midday Nevada sun

Originally Google was seen by Apple as a partner but for a variety of reasons, including the growth of Google’s Android phone OS, Apple decided to replace Google’s maps with their own. Apple makes an embarrassing public apology and recommends rival mapping platforms including those by Nokia, Microsoft and MapQuest as alternative while they make Apple Maps better.

In November 2012, Yahoo! finally shuts down their maps API, after partnering with Nokia and NAVTEQ to provide their mapping services. Despite being one of the digital maps pioneers, Yahoo! is out of the maps game.

Capitalising on the problems surrounding Apple’s maps, Google releases a native iOS app and quickly gains 10M downloads in 48 hours as iOS users sigh with relief.

Just as with Yahoo!, Microsoft and Bing pretty much exit the mapping game as Nokia takes over their mapping services

And Nokia maps rebrands as HERE maps in San Francisco

So that’s the story of the ubiquitous digital map up until the present day. I’ve missed out a lot of other significant developments and milestones in this story but this is the abridged version. But where does the digital map go from here?

The explosion of maps, location based services and digital cartography has been made possible by several factors ... the ever falling price of data storage. In 1980 a 26 MB disk drive cost $5,000, that’s $193,000 per GB. By 1990, the cost per GB had fallen to $9,000 per GB. In 2000 that cost was down to around $15 per GB and in 2009 a 1 TB drive cost just $75, working out at $0.07 per GB. Over the last 30 years, space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months (increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months).

At the same time, CPUs have got faster as Moore’s Law continues to be true and the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Digital maps take up a lot of data and a lot of computing power to render and this has got progressively easier with each passing year.

Of course, the best digital maps in the world are severely reduced in effectiveness if the only way people can access them is via a dial up modem, so hand in hand with cheap storage and faster processors, the availability of broadband internet connections and 3G and now 4G mobile data networks have allowed digital maps to become ever more widespread and easier and faster to access.

Although a lot of the original pioneers have led the playing field, either sinking as part of the dot bomb crash or outsourcing to other maps providers, such as Yahoo! and Microsoft have done

And although there’s been massive consolidation and concentration in the map market, with Nokia buying NAVTEQ, TomTom buying TeleAtlas, Google making their own maps and OSM generally disrupting everyone

There’s been an explosion of interest in digital maps and the way in which these maps are used over the last few years

And we’ve gained a whole new set of terms in the English language into the bargain.

It’s never been easier to put a map onto a mobile device or onto a web site and companies such as MapBox are capitalising on this by letting you not only make your own maps but also letting you create your own style of maps

I started this talk with the notion that early maps were art and I think we’ve come full circle, with companies like San Francisco’s Stamen producing maps that are not only effective but are also, to my mind at least visually gorgeous and qualify as art.

The growth, variety and use of the ubiquitous digital map shows no sign of stopping; I think the state of the map, to steal OpenStreetMap’s conference name, is one with a very bright future indeed.

Finally, here’s that short URL again ...

... and thanks for listening

There's More Underneath London Than Just Trains

2013-02-18 15:59

at least seven posts on this topic already posted.

Granted, there's the Northern Line on the map; but this is more for a sense of geographical perspective than anything else.

Oh yes, look. Gary's written yet another post about a map of the London Tube system that he likes. Yawn. Time to move on. But wait ... this may look like a map of the London Underground but it's not.

Now I may have been guilty of wearing my heart on my sleeve slightly too much where variations on a theme of the London Underground map have been concerned; there's at least seven posts on this topic already posted.

Granted, there's the Northern Line on the map; but this is more for a sense of geographical perspective than anything else.

The blue lines aren't branches of the Piccadilly Line. They're the rivers that have been long lost and yet still run under the streets of London; the Fleet, the Effra, the Westbourne and Stamford Brook. Historical point of note; the Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, although the path of the line followed the course of the (also buried) Tyburn rather than the Fleet, but was renamed the Jubilee to coincide with the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Likewise, the orange lines aren't the Overground, they're sewers, nor is the red line the Central Line, it's the Post Office railway or Mail Rail.

So it may look like a map of the Tube, but it's anything but. It's all the work of Richard Fairhurst, who's made a few maps in his time; they're well worth a look.

A Country Size Jigsaw; Mapping How Big Africa Really Is

2013-02-14 14:16

Greenland Problem where, despite Greenland having a size of 0.2 million square miles and Africa having a size of 11.6 million square miles, Africa and Greenland appear roughly the same size on most of today's maps.

So we know that Africa is big; 11.6 million square miles of big. But that sort of bigness is difficult to get our heads around. As Douglas Adams once said

Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big', time ... just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.

By the time we leave school, most of us have a elementary knowledge of our planet's geography. We know where the continents are and we know that they're big. I touched on this in a previous post about the Greenland Problem where, despite Greenland having a size of 0.2 million square miles and Africa having a size of 11.6 million square miles, Africa and Greenland appear roughly the same size on most of today's maps.

So we know that Africa is big; 11.6 million square miles of big. But that sort of bigness is difficult to get our heads around. As Douglas Adams once said

Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big', time ... just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.

And in the case of Africa, big means that, if you were playing jigsaw puzzles with other countries, you can fit the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, most of Eastern Europe, India, China and Japan into Africa and still have some space left over.

It's that sort of big. This map infographic from Kai Krause (yes, that Kai Krause) shows this sort of level of big-ness in a way that 11.6 million square miles just can't convey. There's more information on this map, together with an alternate version over at The Economist.

The Internet Seems To Like The Combination Of Maps And Innuendo

2013-02-11 14:37

maps.geotastic.org/rude/ around lunchtime on the 6th. of February; since then, several things have happened.

Firstly, Eric Rodenbeck, the CEO of Stamen Design, whose map tiles I used on the Rude Map, dropped me an email to say he liked it. I'm a massive fan of the cartography that Stamen produces and this would, alone, be enough to make the making of the map worthwhile.

But then, the URL of the site started proliferating over Twitter ... including Jonathan Crowe, author of the late and utterly lamented Map Room blog.

Oh people of the interwebs; you are indeed a wondrous thing. If you build something and put it up on the internet, you've no expectation that anyone will see it, let alone look at it. But it appears that the combination of innuendo and some vaguely sounding rude place names (actually with some very rude place names) seems to be something that the citizens of the internet actually like.

The map hit the internet at maps.geotastic.org/rude/ around lunchtime on the 6th. of February; since then, several things have happened.

Firstly, Eric Rodenbeck, the CEO of Stamen Design, whose map tiles I used on the Rude Map, dropped me an email to say he liked it. I'm a massive fan of the cartography that Stamen produces and this would, alone, be enough to make the making of the map worthwhile.

But then, the URL of the site started proliferating over Twitter ... including Jonathan Crowe, author of the late and utterly lamented Map Room blog.

Then the map started to get written about. Firstly by The Independent, then by Laughing Squid, Blame It On The Voices, Reddit and io9.

And it keeps on getting mentions on Twitter, on Google+ and other social networks. According to the server logs, the map's been viewed a staggering (to me at least) 53,000 times; this definitely classes as a first for me. So with tongue firmly in cheek and innuendo firmly in mind, it seems that if you build it, they will come can be the case sometimes.

All of which, makes me wonder ... what should I build a map of next?

Lodged Donor Nun Run; The Anagram Map Of The London Underground

2013-02-07 10:55

It's amazing what you get when you make anagrams out of each and every station on the Tube network.

If you think you know the map of the London Underground network think again. You probably think the Metropolitan Line runs between Amersham and Aldgate; but on this map it doesnt. Instead, it runs between Ram Shame and Data Gel. The southwest termini for the District Line are Richmond and Wimbledon. Maybe not. According to this map, Inch Dorm and Bowel Mind are the end of the line. It's good to know I used to live near Foldaway Rhumba rather than Fulham Broadway, that Nokia's central London office is just by Apt Nodding and I feel sorry for someone who lives near Lancaster Gate, sorry, I mean Castrate Angel.

It's amazing what you get when you make anagrams out of each and every station on the Tube network.

Ooh That Sounds Rude; Mapping British Innuendo

2013-02-06 11:59

many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

No-one can really define what being British is, though many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

Maybe it's part of bring British, but an airport whose code is BUM is just ... funny.

As a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, this is never going to win any awards for originality or innovativeness. But the source of each of these vaguely rude sounding names was from Yahoo's WOE data set, before the data was released via the GeoPlanet API and (currently offline) GeoPlanet Data download. A list of real but amusing sounding place names, culled from GeoPlanet by one of the old Yahoo! Geo team, has been sitting in a file on one of my backup drives for too many years now. But given a geographic data set. Stamen's wonderful Toner map tiles and a JavaScript maps API, in this case Leaflet, the temptation to make a map out of it all was just too strong.

Yes it's a map, yes it's geographical innuendo and yes, it's very much part of the British sense of humour. If you're British, try not to snigger too much; if you're not British, just shake your head sadly and mutter "those crazy Brits".

I Was A Map Nerd As A Child

2013-02-04 14:22

maps seemed to mean as much to my Dad as they do to me.

Lumped in with my father's posessions were also some things from my childhood which my parents had kept, either for sentimental reasons or in the hope that one day, I might have children who might want some of my toys, books and games.

In October of 2012, whilst sorting through my father's personal effects, I was proud to find that I wasn't the first map nerd in the family and that maps seemed to mean as much to my Dad as they do to me.

Lumped in with my father's posessions were also some things from my childhood which my parents had kept, either for sentimental reasons or in the hope that one day, I might have children who might want some of my toys, books and games.

At the weekend, I had another clear out and came across some jigsaws I had when I was around 8 or so years old.

Maps jigsaws from the early 1970's of Australia, the US, India and the UK; maybe I was a map nerd even as a child and just didn't know it then.

Not A Map On The Internet But A Map Of The Internet

2013-02-02 18:17

We're all used to seeing maps on the internet, but what about how the internet gets to each and every one of us so that we can see those maps?

There's a map for almost every occasion and this map shows how the internet deals with those problematic moments when you run out of land to bury a cable in, with the added bonus that it's done in a rather nice retro style reminiscent of the glorious maps of the 16th. Century.

Image Credits: Telegeography.

Re-imagining The London Tube Map With Curves And Circles

2013-02-01 10:48

#mapgasm post. Actually another 2 maps, both of which are by Max Roberts and both of which have appeared on Annie Mole's Going Underground blog.

Continuing my fascination with the map of the London Underground, which I may have posted about before, Max has been wondering what the Tube Map would look like if it was all curved.

Or maybe, just maybe what it would be like if the Tube Map was circular, in the most literal of fashions.

I wonder what Harry Beck would think of these re-imaginings of his iconic map; I think he'd probably approve.

Photo Credits: Max Roberts and Annie Mole on Flickr.

Another day, another map and another #mapgasm post. Actually another 2 maps, both of which are by Max Roberts and both of which have appeared on Annie Mole's Going Underground blog.

Continuing my fascination with the map of the London Underground, which I may have posted about before, Max has been wondering what the Tube Map would look like if it was all curved.

Or maybe, just maybe what it would be like if the Tube Map was circular, in the most literal of fashions.

I wonder what Harry Beck would think of these re-imaginings of his iconic map; I think he'd probably approve.

Photo Credits: Max Roberts and Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Greenland Problem And Playing With Mercator's Map

2013-01-31 15:51

writing about map projections is a little bit like waiting for one of London's iconic red buses; you write one and immediately another one comes along. As I mentioned in my last post, rightly or wrongly, the most commonly used map projection is the Mercator projection. It's not without it's problems or detractors.

A Mercator map gets more distorted the further north or south of the Equator you move. This is often referred to as The Greenland Problem. Greenland has an area of roughly 0.8 million square miles. Africa on the other hand has an area of roughly 11.6 million square miles. So on the map Africa should be roughly ten times the size of Greenland. Right?

But on a Mercator map it doesn't appear so; both Greenland and Africa look to be approximately the same size; and don't even get me started on how Antarctica is now smeared across the bottom of the map.

It seems that writing about map projections is a little bit like waiting for one of London's iconic red buses; you write one and immediately another one comes along. As I mentioned in my last post, rightly or wrongly, the most commonly used map projection is the Mercator projection. It's not without it's problems or detractors.

A Mercator map gets more distorted the further north or south of the Equator you move. This is often referred to as The Greenland Problem. Greenland has an area of roughly 0.8 million square miles. Africa on the other hand has an area of roughly 11.6 million square miles. So on the map Africa should be roughly ten times the size of Greenland. Right?

But on a Mercator map it doesn't appear so; both Greenland and Africa look to be approximately the same size; and don't even get me started on how Antarctica is now smeared across the bottom of the map.

A really effective way to show this distortion in action is the Mercator Puzzle by Luke Mahe of the Google Maps Developer Relations Team. Drag and drop the red shapes, which represent countries, around the map; watch them shrink as you near the Equator and expand and distort as you move towards the poles.

It's a nice geographical puzzle and an equally nice way of showing Mercator in action; how many of the 15 countries did you manage to find their correct homes for? If you're really stuck, there's a solution here; but no peeking unless you really get stuck!

Picture Credits: Mercator Map Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Not Your Average User Contributed Map

2013-01-19 15:16

Today I contributed to a map. I did this yesterday as well. I even did this last week. In fact I've been doing this since the end of July 2009. As of right now I've done this 11,880 times. I'll probably end up contributing to this map again later on today and will almost definitely do it again tomorrow.

But this isn't your average user contributed or crowd sourced map. It's not one of the usual suspects; it's not OpenStreetMap, or Google MapMaker or Nokia MapCreator. It's none of these, but it's a map nonetheless and it looks like this.

Most of my contributions are in the centre of the map and towards the South West corner. I've also contributed to this map in other places and it looks like this.

Here most of my contributions are in the centre with a few towards the North West corner. Maybe the maps will make a little more sense if I turn on an underlying labelled layer.

This is the map of the last three months on Foursquare in London.

And this is the map of the last three months on Foursquare in Berlin.

Each dot is a check in and every time I've checked in, which is almost every day, I've contributed to this map. Now it's not a strictly geographic map in the normal sense of the word, but each check in is a geographically accurate (subject to the GPS lock that someone's smartphone has) affirmation that a place exists and that it's important to someone.

It's fascinating to see how the world looks when viewed by check ins alone, with the UK, Europe and North America's coastlines standing out like a night-time satellite image when there's no cloud cover.

It's definitely not your average user contributed map but it's a map I helped make in a small way and will continue to do so; though I know of one person who probably disagrees with me.

2013 - The Year Of The Tangible Map And Return Of The Map As Art

2013-01-01 10:54

Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).

Looking back at the conference talks I gave and the posts I wrote in 2012, two themes are evident.

The first theme is that while there's some utterly gorgeous digital maps being produced these days, such as Stamen's Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).

The second theme is that despite the abundance of maps that surround us these days, a digital map is almost by definition an intangible thing. It's a view port, hand crafted by a digital cartographer, on a mass of hidden, underlying spatial data. It's ephemeral. Switch off your phone, your tablet, your sat nav or your computer and the map ... vanishes. Until the next time you hit the "on" button, the electrons flow again and the map re-appears. But it's still intangible, despite the irony that a lot of maps these days are interacted with via a touch interface; we tap, poke, prod and swipe our maps, but they're not really there.

But maybe 2013 will be both the year of the tangible map and the year of the map as art. It might be if the closing days of 2012 are anything to go by.

On December 8th, 2012, David Overton's SplashMaps made their funding total on Kickstarter. A SplashMap is a real outdoor map, derived from (digital) open data, but rendered on a light and weatherproof fabric. It's a tangible map in the truest sense of the word; one you can fold up or even crumple up and stick in your pocket, safe in the knowledge that it won't fade away. There's no "off" switch for this map. As one of the SplashMap funders, I'll have a chance to get my hands on one in the literal sense of the word in a couple of months, once they hit production. So more about this map in a future post.

The other map that is both 100% tangible and 100% art is the awesomely talented Anna Butler's Grand Map Of London. A modern day map of the UK's capital city, digital in origin, lovingly hand drawn in the style of the 1800s and printed, yes, printed on canvas. It's a map worthy of the phrase "the map as art" and when I first saw one and handled one in late November of 2012 I wanted one, right there and then.

And then, on Saturday, December 29th 2012, Mark Iliffe and I met Anna for a coffee in the Espresso Bar of the British Library on London's Euston Road and out of the blue, Anna handed over a long cardboard tube containing my own, my very own, Grand Map Of London. People nearby looked on, slightly non-plussed as I crowed like a happy baby, promptly unrolled the map over the table and just looked and touched. The next half an hour or so pretty much vanished as I pored over and luxuriated in the map, lost in the details and revelling in the map under my hands. Truly this is a tangible map which is itself art.

I've often said, half in truth, half in jest, that I'd love a big, as big as I can get, map of London on my wall, probably one of Stamen's Watercolor maps. But Anna's Grand Map Of London will be getting a suitable frame and sitting on my wall, just as soon as my local framing shop opens after the New Year break.

Two maps to wrap up 2012. Both tangible, both digital in origin, both made for looking, touching and feeling. One clever, innovative and utterly practical and one a map you can keep coming back to and which reveals more artistic cleverness each time you look at it.

2013 is shaping up to be a "year of the map" in ways I'd never had hoped for at the start of 2012.

The Case Of Sandy Island; Mapping Error Or Copyright Trap?

2012-11-26 11:42

There's a phrase in Latin that goes errare humanum est which roughly translates as everyone makes mistakes. This is true of so many things and maps are no exception. However much we try to make today's maps as authentic, up to date and accurate as we can, the occasional mistake slips in; it's more a case of when rather than if.

But if you find a mistake in a map, is it really a mistake or it is a deliberate error, placed there as a copyright trap to provide evidence of the origin of a copied map? This is a vague area at best. Some map makers are up front about this.

Take the iconic Geographers' A-Z maps in the UK. Just off of Canynge Square in Bristol there's a small side street called Lye Close. Or is there? The map says there is but if you go to that location you'll just find an unbroken row of houses and Lye Close is nowhere to be found.

The Geographers' company has freely admitted that its maps contain trap streets and Lye Close looks to be one of them. The company mentioned about 100 trap streets in London alone in the BBC program Map Man, broadcast in October of 2005.

But other mapping mistakes are somewhat more mysterious.

In 2009 a phantom town called Argleton appeared on Google Maps. Argleton was in the middle of empty fields close to the M58 motorway in Lancashire. But if you go there now, it's nowhere to be seen. Mapping error or copyright trap? No-one has yet confessed to Argleton although you'd be forgiven for verging into conspiracy theory territory as Argleton is an anagram of Not Real G.

Then there's the case of Sandy Island, which apparently lives in the South Pacific, somewhere between Australia and New Caledonia. Go to Google Maps and Nokia Maps and there's definitely an island shaped blob in the ocean. Yet when scientists from the University of Sydney went to find Sandy Island they found unbroken ocean, over four and a half thousand feet deep.

Mapping error or copyright trap? I suspect the former in this case. There's a significant difference in putting a copyright trap into a map in a rural area or a small side street in a major city and putting an island on a map that just doesn't exist. A land based copyright trap probably won't cause harm, but an ocean based one could, especially given the reliance on marine charts that boats and ships have.

Trap streets and other copyright traps are the mapping equivalent of a Googlewhack. As soon as you know they're there they usually disappear and are replaced by something else that is as yet unpublicised.

Updated

Thanks to Steve Chilton, Elliot Hartley and Tom Hughes it looks like Sandy Island may well have been an error for over 100 years. The Auckland Museum has maps from 1908 which show Sandy Island.

Photo Credits: OpenStreetMap, The Daily Telegraph and The Auckland Museum.

The "Maps As Art" Debate

2012-11-01 07:53

it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

Graham kickstarted the discussion with a fear that the ultimate map, by today's standards, is merely more accurate old data in a new format. He's got a point. A lot of today's maps, particularly digital ones, do take existing data and put a subtly different slant on the way that it's visualised. He continued with "surely maps, in the broadest sense, need to add value to what is mapped rather than just copy or repeat it in inferior form".

Here's where the debate gets onto thin ice. The notion of what's inferior is a deeply subjective thing. Likewise, adding value is a much maligned phrase that can mean pretty much anything depending on your interpretation. My ultimate map, if such a thing even exists, will probably differ significantly from yours.

Steve countered with "maps represent the real word, it's not about being inferior; they can categorise, explain, illustrate and open up that world".

The map in question is one of those produced by artPause and Graham questioned whether any of these maps "present a new or better understanding, appreciation or awareness of our world".

I should probably nail my colours to the mast here.

A map can be art. I think I have to side with Steve on this point. Maps as art definitely illustrate our world and they definitely make us appreciate someone else's view of our world. Yes, they're produced from existing data, or at least the current data at the time they were made. But if you like maps, you'll probably like maps as art, even if you sometimes need to put your head to one side, squint a bit and mutter "it's clever, but is it art?".

Photo Credits: artPause and Kaptain Kobold on Etsy.

The London Tube Map Made (Too) Simple

2012-10-18 20:33

#mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

This is post number six in the ongoing #mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

So Hugh Grant is Notting Hill Gate. Dinosaurs is South Kensington. France is King's Cross St. Pancras and Wax Celebs is Baker Street. But the meaning of XXL eludes me. What is it at Waterloo or Southwark stations that justifies the Extra Extra Large tag?

A tip of the hat goes to Jonathan Raper for spotting this in Adam Lilley's Tweet-stream.

What Do You Call The Opposite Of Mapping?

2012-09-25 18:49

Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who was awarded the Turing Prize in 1972 is reported to have once said ...

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

With this in mind, if the process of taking geographical information and making this into a map is called mapping ... what do you call the opposite, the process where you take a map and deconstruct it back to what makes up the map in the first place.

Un-mapping? Anti-mapping? De-atlasing? Whatever you call it, you start out with a map and you end up with an oddly compelling form of art. Which is just what French artist Armelle Caron has been doing.

Start with the map. Let's take a map of Berlin. If you've spent any time in this city, the map will look pretty familiar. It's not the most granular or small scale of maps, but that doesn't matter. What happens next is most definitely art and is akin to magic.

You take the city apart. Block by block. Then you order the blocks and shapes. You categorise them, sort them, rank them and stack them. And you end up with the complete opposite of a map.

Berlin isn't the only city that Armelle has turned on its head. There's also Istanbul, New York and Paris to name but a few. Just take a look for yourself.

I've no idea what these opposite of maps should be called, but they're definitely art in my book.

Photo Credits: Armelle Caron.

The Map Of The World According To The London Underground

2012-09-14 12:59

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another map of the London Tube system. But wait ... something's not quite right.

Surely the Piccadilly Line ends at Uxbridge, Heathrow Airport and Cockfosters and not at Seattle, Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg? Doesn't the Northern Line run from Edgeware and High Barnet to Morden and not from Helsinki to Mumbai?

Maybe if the London Underground did take over the world, including 3 tunnels across the Atlantic Ocean, this is what the Tube Map might look like.

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

London Mapped By People's Surnames

2012-09-13 12:29

James Cheshire and Ollie O'Brien from London's UCL have produced a map of London which is certainly not your average map. The Thames is shown winding through the capital but what really grabs the attention is the fact that the rest of the map shows the population's surnames.

The rather geotastic James Cheshire and Ollie O'Brien from London's UCL have produced a map of London which is certainly not your average map. The Thames is shown winding through the capital but what really grabs the attention is the fact that the rest of the map shows the population's surnames.

As James says in his accompanying blog post ...

London is renowned for being a diverse city but this is barely reflected in the most prevalent surnames- only a few name origins can be discerned from the map. You have to look a little further down the surname rankings for this diversity to become apparent. The surnames shown on all 15 maps can be traced back to one of 38 origins; I have selected unique colours for 10 of the most popular. Surname origins were established using the Onomap classification tool. We are mapping the origins of the surnames, which are not necessarily the same as the origins of the people possessing them. Many people in London have adopted Anglicised surnames.

The Olympic Tube Map

2012-09-11 17:23

soft spot for maps of the London Underground network ever since I saw one on the back of an old London A-Z street map far too many years ago.

In case you hadn't noticed, London hosted the 2012 Olympic Games a few weeks ago so what could be more natural than a map of the Tube with famous Olympic athletes in the place of the more familiar and geographically correct station names. Maybe Chris Boardman instead of Swiss Cottage, Victoria Pendleton instead of St. John's Wood or Daley Thompson in place of Baker Street?

Hop over to the Transport for London web site and for between £3.99 and £49.00, the Olympic Legends Tube Map can be yours. I certainly want one. Huge amounts of kudos go to my darling wife for spotting this in the first place.

Not all maps are created equal. I've always had a soft spot for maps of the London Underground network ever since I saw one on the back of an old London A-Z street map far too many years ago.

In case you hadn't noticed, London hosted the 2012 Olympic Games a few weeks ago so what could be more natural than a map of the Tube with famous Olympic athletes in the place of the more familiar and geographically correct station names. Maybe Chris Boardman instead of Swiss Cottage, Victoria Pendleton instead of St. John's Wood or Daley Thompson in place of Baker Street?

Hop over to the Transport for London web site and for between £3.99 and £49.00, the Olympic Legends Tube Map can be yours. I certainly want one. Huge amounts of kudos go to my darling wife for spotting this in the first place.

The English Map Of Berlin

2012-09-11 07:11

series of posts which contain nothing more than maps that I like as I peruse the Interwebs.

First up is a map of Berlin. In English. So now I can say to myself so that's what Prenzlauer Berg, Tiergarten and Kreuzberg mean; in a literal translation so of way.

Map Credits: Willy Karma on Facebook, via Emmanuel Decitre.

Apropos of nothing in particular, this is the first of an occasional series of posts which contain nothing more than maps that I like as I peruse the Interwebs.

First up is a map of Berlin. In English. So now I can say to myself so that's what Prenzlauer Berg, Tiergarten and Kreuzberg mean; in a literal translation so of way.

Map Credits: Willy Karma on Facebook, via Emmanuel Decitre.

Gary Gale

Vagamente Maleducato; The Vaguely Rude Places Map Goes International

Cartography, The Musical

The London Underground Strike Map

All Of Today's Maps Are Wrong; We Live On A Giant Chicken

The Quest For The London Flood Map

Doctor Who And The Underground Map; Enough Is Enough

Making Maps The Hard Way - From Memory

King George III Was A Fellow Map Addict

Maps For When The Ice Caps Melt and When The Magnetic Poles Reverse

Introducing The Next Generation Of Portable Navigation Systems

The Curious Cartographical Case Of The Island Of California

Men Pointing At Maps? Hell, Yeah. But Where Are The Women?

The Tube Map To End All Tube Maps That's Made Of Tube Maps

Bad Cartography - Stansted, Essex (Airport) vs. Stansted, Kent (Not An Airport)

The Rise And Fall Of Empires. On A Map Of Course

Just Because You Can Put Things On A Map Doesn't Always Mean You Should Allow Anyone To Put Things On A Map

How To Order Your First Holiday Beer? With A Map Of Course

Mapping Posh London vs. Hipster London

150 Years Of The London Underground Map. In Lego.

Less A Map Of Vinland, More A Map Of Fakeland

Test Drive The New Google Maps Preview; With A Little Bit Of Cookie Hacking

Welcome To The United States; A Cold War Tourist Map For Soviet Visitors

Open Data Yields Tangible Results - And Tangible Maps

The Changing Map Of Europe's Boundaries

Marvellous Miniature Map

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

Organic Pigs Or Organic Pig Waste? Mapping The Pros And Cons Of Each US State

Mapping Heavy Metal With A Little Help From The CIA

Pigs On A Map

You May Have Helped Map The Internet Without Knowing It

Re-imagining Berlin's U-Bahn And S-Bahn System

Countries That Cry; Countries That Don't (100% Mercator Free)

The Great British Map; Or Great Britain vs. The United Kingdom vs. The British Isles

You Were Here; Mapping The Places I've Been To According To Foursquare

Literally A Map Of Riches

Gravity Sucks But It Sucks Variably (Also Available As A Map)

Mapping Meteor Strikes; There's A Lot More Than You'd Think

The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)

There's More Underneath London Than Just Trains

A Country Size Jigsaw; Mapping How Big Africa Really Is

The Internet Seems To Like The Combination Of Maps And Innuendo

Lodged Donor Nun Run; The Anagram Map Of The London Underground

Ooh That Sounds Rude; Mapping British Innuendo

I Was A Map Nerd As A Child

Not A Map On The Internet But A Map Of The Internet

Re-imagining The London Tube Map With Curves And Circles

The Greenland Problem And Playing With Mercator's Map

Not Your Average User Contributed Map

2013 - The Year Of The Tangible Map And Return Of The Map As Art

The Case Of Sandy Island; Mapping Error Or Copyright Trap?

The "Maps As Art" Debate

The London Tube Map Made (Too) Simple

What Do You Call The Opposite Of Mapping?

The Map Of The World According To The London Underground

London Mapped By People's Surnames

The Olympic Tube Map

The English Map Of Berlin