The Atlas of Design, Volume 7

Note to readers on this platform: I also publish this blog on Substack. You may find that the pictures below show up a little better than here.

The Atlas of Design is a biannual production of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). It highlights some of the most beautifully informative maps, chosen by NACIS members to highlight thoughtful design and communication. I last reviewed one of these volumes back in (checks notes) 2015 (Volume 2) - time gets away from us all. One of my favorite features is the sample image table of contents.

Some of these maps and authors I’ve covered in the past while others may appear in future posts, therefore you won’t see every map I love below. For example I did a post about a much earlier version of Wild World by Anton Thomas before he had a name for it. It has evolved quite a bit since 2018. Here is a sample.

Speaking of tasty samples, here is a sweet idea; National Park Elevations presented like a candy sampler.

The project is called “A Delicious View of US National Parks” by Wendy Shijia Wang and R J Andrews.

I’ve long admired the gorgeous 3D mapping of Tom Patterson who created this panorama style view of Malaspina Glacier for the U.S. National Park Service. This map seeks to visually unify an area that is divided between the United States (Alaska) and Canada (Yukon).

This outdoor recreation map of Pennsylvania uses purple (a color I probably would not have considered) for rail trails and a more traditional green for hiking trails. The purple really stands out from the rest of the color palette to emphasize these trails.

Above is the area I grew up in while below is an area with a much lower human footprint. The purple lizards (“this could mean anything” from the legend) are a nice touch.

I’m quite fond of the Journey to the West map by Yue Zhang, Jinnuo Duan and Xi Tang of East China Normal University. The map shows the pilgrimage route from what is considered one of the great Chinese novels. The geography is a blend of real and fantasy. It begins with familiar shapes in the far east,

while getting further from reality as the journey moves westwards.

The map also distinguishes different types of movement (“flying, walking, escaping and so on,“) in different realms of mortals, ghosts and heaven.

Another map I’m very fond of is called “Centroamerica se mueve” (Central America Moves).

It is an empathetic map showing the movement of people as well as several species birds and animals. The orientation is shifted from north to emphasize the travel corridor through the area. The drawings of individuals remind us that these are people seeking a better life, not criminals trying to poison our blood and walking thousands of mile just to vote illegally (or get transgender surgeries) as dishonest politicians claim.

Finally, here is an otherwise beautifully laid out map with a questionably (to me) bold color scheme. This may be a matter of personal taste or cultural differences. The map is of a National Park in Malaysia. 

The map is dense with a ton of information including cave systems, landforms and my favorite touch; the bats coming out of the cave to the left. I find the yellow at the highest elevations to be distracting while the very dark low elevations make those areas hard to read. Otherwise this is a really well done map.

One suggestion for the authors is to have a line or two about what medium was used for each map. If hand drawn was it ink, watercolors, colored pencil or something else. If computer generated what type of software (drawing program, photoshop, GIS etc.) was used. I don’t think the exact software or technique needs to be revealed but a general idea of how the map was compiled and drawn would be very useful.

The endpapers show the contents of the previous six volumes. 

I will be returning to some of these maps for a future post.  You can order it here.

 

Your Climate in 60 Years

This fall's supercharged hurricanes are a reminder that despite the dishonest rhetoric coming from top Republican politicians, global warming is definitely not a hoax. The University of Maryland has a new mapping tool to show you where on earth your climate will most resemble in 60 years. 

So if you're in Chicago 60 years from now it will feel like you're near Tulsa.
 

Here are some images from an article in the Los Angeles Times. While most places follow a similar pattern (in the northern hemisphere heading a ways south), 

the unique geography of coastal California means if you live in Los Angeles, you don't have to travel far to experience your future.

Some places like Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire give you this scary message

The tool gives you the location and climate details of the analogous place. Here is an example from the southern hemisphere heading northwards.

Play around with it a bit, be scared and maybe even consider how you can lower your own carbon footprint. Or just wait for scientists and governments to come up with a magic solution. Good luck!

Make Your Own Ferraris Map

While researching the Ferraris Atlas of Belgium from my last post, I came across a Github page that lets you create your own Ferraris style map using QGIS. The author, Manuel Claeys Bouuaert did an excellent job creating a hand drawn looking style using modern technology. Warning: if you try this at home you will likely end up with many computer crashes and very slow data loads. Here was my first attempt.

I chose a village in northwestern Belgium based on a combination of city size and ability to navigate through the giant countrywide data set before the computer crashed. One recommendation is if you're going to download a whole country's worth of data, even a small one, you should find a small area and export it to much smaller files. An even better solution is to go directly to OpenStreetMap, zoom in on a very small area and export your own files. 

Another limitation here is that the street patterns are not the same as they were in 1777, with most places having grown significantly. Here is another town in Belgium, my QGIS version compared to the original atlas pages which can be browsed on Belgium's Royal Library.

The street pattern of Poeke has clearly expanded and the name's spelling has changed from French to Flemish but much if the town is still recognizable on the (second) 1777 map. You can also compare the windmill symbols near the top left of each map.

After I made the Poperinge map, I started looking for more interesting places, in other words places with more variety of land uses, buildings and ones that have windmills and watermills. Ruiselede has some nice patterns and two windmills.

I decided to see how this style would translate to the United States. I started with my childhood suburban home of Levittown, Pennsylvania. 

I forgot to take into account that the original project was set up using a Belgium-specific projection. This caused north to be rotated a good 50 degrees or so to the upper right. In Belgium north is at the top but after crossing the ocean the earth's curvature has rotated it this much. By the time I realized this my QGIS project was no longer opening without crashing. This is what eventually seems to happen to all of these projects so I was not able to "fix" north without starting over again. There is plenty of sprawl here but the style still makes the area look a bit quaint.

Next, I went to nearby Newtown, a place we used to go for country drives. In my youth it was a lovely country town, founded by William Penn with some nice old architecture and good ice cream. The town center is still nice but it is now surrounded by a four lane bypass expressway and bland modern housing.

I felt like Newton's street pattern might look a little more like 16th Century Belgium.

Finally, in the interest of finding a U.S. place that is more recognizable and meaningful to others, here is the western part of the National Mall in Washington, DC, including the White House, Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. I had a problem drawing the water in the QGIS project so I airbrushed some blue where it seemed appropriate.

I should have used more of a green patterned fill  as in the atlas image below but once again the project crashed before I had a chance to fix that.

The Ferraris Atlas of Belgium

While I was at the British Library in May, I spent much time admiring and puzzling over this atlas.

The Ferraris maps of the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium) were created by Count (and cartographer) Joseph de Ferraris in the 1770's. He was commissioned by Austrian empress Maria Theresa to create detailed maps of the country, at the time ruled by the Austrian Habsburg empire. The maps were made at a very detailed 1:11,520 scale (1 inch = 960 feet) and were hand colored. 

The coloring is quite vivid and exquisite as you can see just from the cover. Here is an example showing the fortified town of Damme, north of Bruges.

The terrain representation on these maps is also interesting.

The legend is also well worth a study to see how many different types of land and usage were characterized. The original maps did not have a legend-this one was made for the book edition.

Copies of these maps were taken by the French and were used by both sides in the Waterloo campaign of the Napoleonic Wars. Three copies of these maps remain, the one in Belgium was transferred from Austria as part of their reparations for World War I. 

There is some intrigue about why some in-holdings from Holland are shown here as belonging to Austria (Belgium). That region of the Netherlands (Limburg) was heavily fought over and claimed by both countries and neighboring colonial powers. Here is an example of a few around Fauquemont (Valkenburg aan de Geul) in the southeastern corner of the Netherlands.

All 275 sheets of the atlas have been scanned and are available at the National Library of Belgium online. You can browse each sheet here. I will be discussing this atlas a bit more in a future post.

Soprano Land

 The Sopranos is having a bit of a moment with the recent HBO documentary about David Chase. Illustrator Robert Sikoryak made a nice map to orient fans to the New Jersey landscape of the show.

You can click above to see a larger version. I've only watched bits of the show so I can't comment too much on the plot elements. I can say that having traveled through this area many times, the intro really captures the North Jersey feel with landmarks like the Wilson's Carpet lumberjack statue under the Pulaski Skyway, Satriale's Pork Store,

and the "Drive Safely" gas tank, not shown on the map.

The legend is helpful for determining types or murder as well as other important activities like Ziti dumping and unmentionable sniffing.

Tony and Carmela's house is shown with its close proximity to the woods where Mickey Palmice was shot and to the Fountains of Wayne, famous for inspiring a band's name.

There's lots more to see on the map and other excellent illustrations on Sikoryak's web site.

The Auschwitz Exhibition

This past weekend I saw a traveling exhibition in Boston about the Auschwitz concentration camp. It contains over 700 objects from shoes to gas masks to implements of torture and experimentation. The exhibit was co-produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and has been in several other locations but is only up for a few more days in Boston. There is no information about where it might be next. You can read more about it on their site. 

The exhibit's tag line "Not long ago. Not far away." is a great reminder that those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. In today's political climate where Holocaust deniers and Nazi admirers are given significant air time in the media, candidates for the highest offices use their rhetoric and they are winning elections in Germany, it is more important than ever that these stories and artifacts are presented to refute the denials. You came here for maps? This exhibit delivers plenty of them, more than I can easily show in one post. Here are some of the more significant examples.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, a Polish town that began as a typical fenced medieval settlement. It became important as a railway junction and also for it's location on the border (at various times) of nations, provinces and occupied areas. This map highlights the railways lines and shades in the locations of the camps as well as the rubber factory that used slave labor from the camps.

The camp originally housed mostly Poles who did not completely cooperate with their occupiers but in time it became a death camp for Jews, Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, and political prisoners. Here is a map of the Auschwitz camp and the expanded Birkenau camp to the west of it. 

via Yad Vashem

I took a picture of it but I'm using a copy from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, because it is much more clear than what I was able to capture. 

The camps grew into a major network.

Jews were rounded up throughout German occupied and allied countries and deported to Auschwitz as this huge wall map shows.

In 1945 as the Russian army started closing in on the area, the surviving prisoners were subjected to even more brutality as they were forcibly marched, on foot and then in rail cars in the middle of winter to other camps deeper in Germany. This was in part to try to continue hiding Nazi atrocities from the rest of the world.

There are quite a few other maps including a world ethnographic map from 1897 exemplifying the racial attitudes of the time, a map of Madagascar, where it was proposed that Jews be deported and this map from 1936 of concentration camps and prisons, published by exiles seeking to dissuade international athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics that year.

The exhibition runs through this weekend at the Castle at Park Plaza in Boston 

Here are some useful links for more information:

The exhibition's web site

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Yad Vashem

A Blue Map of China

This past weekend I finally got to the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library to see their exhibit, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China on one of its final days. Yes, I should have visited months ago when I could have encouraged readers to see it but though they have taken it down, you can still look at the digital exhibit. The main focus of the exhibit is two large map prints done in Prussian blue; one terrestrial and one celestial. Here is my photo of the geographic map as it was displayed.

Apologies for the yellowing effect that seems to happen on my phone. The lines and text are white. This map titled "Complete map of the geography of the everlasting, unified Great Qing Dynasty" was printed by making a positive image rubbing on a woodblock. Prussian blue, an iron based compound, was developed in Berlin but the Chinese learned to make it from local materials. 

Here is a description from the online exhibit: "Several geophysical attributes help to orient the viewer. The two vivid white lines trace out the Yellow River (north) and the Yangzi River (south). Just north of the Yellow River is a stippled band of white dots that marks the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts. Wave patterns indicate oceans, including the Atlantic (top left) and Pacific (occupying much of the second panel from right). There are two prominent human-made structures. The Great Wall, with its distinctive crenellated wall pattern, runs between the Yellow River and the Gobi Desert. The Willow Palisade, which emerges close to where the Great Wall meets the sea, is shown with cross-hatched lines."

Here is a detail from the map.

The full map can be seen here. Place names are "encoded toponyms"- what this really means is that the place names are placed inside of shapes representing their administrative order. Here is a legend from the Leventhal Center web site,

and here is an older map where the shapes are placed next to the text instead.

I could talk about the star chart but that could be another entire post and I don't really have the knowledge to say much about it. Here is a sample.

via Leventhal Map Center

One final picture: the Leventhal Center usually has a map placed on the floor at their entrance. The one for this exhibit outlines some of the features for better comprehension. The lighting and size made it hard to get a complete picture but here is a sample.

You can read more and see many more maps and earlier versions of these on their online exhibit.