The Brattleboro Words Project

Last year I was in Brattleboro, Vermont and saw an interesting map on display. It is part of the Brattleboro Words Project. The project “connects community members to the Brattleboro area’s unique history, the art of audio storytelling - and each other” through audio pieces, maps and a GPS app that leads listeners on an audio journey of local people and places.

There are two maps; a city (above) and regional map. They can be downloaded here. Indigenous Abenaki names are given equal weight on the map. Examples include the town name, Wantastegok and the river Kwenitekw. Here is a picture zoomed into downtown to appreciate the handmade details.

The regional map features portraits featuring notable people with local ties such as Rudyard Kipling, Saul Bellow and Daisy Turner.

Here is the Brattleboro area.

The process of creating these murals and maps is very interesting. It started with 10 clay landscape mural tiles, about 12 lbs each, 16"x16". They were hand carved by Natalie Blake Studios lead designer Cynthia Parker-Houghton. She was nice enough to share some details of the creation process:

“I took the information for the rivers off a Google Map, which I then re-oriented and then distorted distorted to give a birds eye view. So it was as if seen from the top of Mount Wantasticuit on the NewHampshire side of the Connecticut River gazing out West over Brattleboro and the surrounding region.

"I had this map printed out large at a print shop and then used it as a template to lay out the clay forms to represent the topography of the mountains. After this I draped square slabs of clay over the forms. These slabs then dried for a few days and then could be lifted to remove the clay mountain forms and also the paper templates. I believe I had a second set of paper templates printed which were slightly smaller to adjust for the clay shrinkage. I used this second paper template to mark out the rivers. I did this by drawing over the river lines with a pen which pressed through the paper to leave marks on the clay.

"Once the marks were made I removed the paper template and carved the details of the map. I carved away the iron oxide slip that had been painted over the entire surface. Wherever I carved it revealed the white clay. After we bisque fired the tiles, we used an industrial sprayer to apply the transparent glaze colors over the black and white image. We then fired it for a second time to a high temperature.”

Here are the tiles seen hanging at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center.

The map was created from photographs of the mural with text added digitally.

Here is a video if you want to dig more into the details of the creation process.

Brattleboro Words is a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities. They will be revamping the map for 2026 when the whole Trail will be featured on the new Amtrak station outside track facing side of building. 

The project also has a podcast - https://brattleboro-words-trail-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ (available free all formats Apple, Spotify etc...)

https://brattleborowords.org

 

 

The Invasion of Ukraine

Ukraine was invaded by Russia three years ago. Since the new president of the United States is in full surrender to Putin mode and wants to blame Ukraine for starting the war, I am posting this map, from February 27, 2022. It is to remind anyone that needs reminding of who started this war.

via AP - source: VOA News

This one shows what Russia has gained (in red) in three years of war. Much of that area will likely be ceded to Russia if a “peace” deal is made without Ukraine.

via Institute for the Study of War

 

Mapping Prejudice

Mapping Prejudice is a project by a team of scholars and activists at the University of Minnesota. The project maps racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. 

The mapping page has an animation that show the growth of these covenants in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area from 4 in 1910 to over 32,000 in 1963.

Or you can see all of them with their details. The green color does not stand out great again the gray background though.

There are also some static maps showing racial covenants in the area. This one does a good job of showing how they cluster around the Minneapolis city boundaries.

This is an ongoing process and you can volunteer to help find racial covenants in deeds and participate in community mapping sessions.

 

 

Let America be America Again

When white people like me write about Black History Month, it can seem quite performative. However, in an era when our “leaders” are trying to erase black history, it is important for all of us to keep it visible. This poem map was inspired by a Langston Hughes poem called “Let America be America Again”, the full text of it can be found here.

 Map help from Project Linework

Luko's World

Last week we lost our dog, Luko (a shortened version of an overly long-winded name he came with.) Lots of people will tell you they have the best dog but he was truly one of a kind. Completely sweet and a delight to all who have known him.

A few years ago I made a colored pencil map of his world. I didn’t think it was very good at the time so I never posted it here. It also was a bit problematic because I used a very light pencil so even after contrast and brightness adjustments, it’s a bit hard to read. The photos were added after the fact and placed close to where they were taken. North is not up on this map, uphill is up. This is dedicated to his memory. Enjoy.

 

 

Old World Language Families

This isn’t a map, though there are small maps embedded, but an awesome graphic using the tree metaphor to detail the spread of languages.

The size of the foliage represents the approximate population of speakers of each language. The graphic contains Indo-European and Finno-Ugric families so while it contains much of the world’s population, it does not include African, East Asian, Middle Eastern or indigenous languages. The author, Minna Sundberg is Finnish so there is extra attention given at the bottom of the map to the Finno-Ugric tree (detailed below) and North Germanic branch of the Indo-European tree.

-via Mappenstance

 

Latitude Twins

This map, on Reddit shows major North American cities replaced by European or Middle Eastern ones with the same approximate latitude.

It illustrates the interesting climate fact that because of the Gulf Stream, Europe is much warmer further north. Thus Chicago is equivalent to Rome and Toronto to Florence. One problem with this map is that the projection chosen confuses the issue. It makes Paris (Thunder Bay) look like it’s on the same latitude as Ljubljana (Quebec City) when in fact Paris and Thunder Bay are much further north.

 

Kuwait City’s counterpart on the Gulf (of Mexico, not Persia) just got a ton of snow!

Another problem with these comparisons is that many of the North American cities have very small or less well known Eastern Hemisphere counterparts (there’s a million people in Mersin, Turkey). Thus there are many complaints in the comments about why people’s home cities are left off the map. Also, there are some mistakes such as Tel Aviv showing up north of Haifa, way up there in Dallas. There may be others but I haven’t completely analyzed this map. One final complaint; the East Coast cities should either be labeled in black or the unnecessary bathymetry should be removed to make them more legible. Tirana, Cairo and Dubai really disappear into the whiteness of the continental shelf.

 

Los Angeles Wildfire Extent

The extent of the forest fires in and around Los Angeles is horrific and may become even worse in the next few days. The New York Times has some very detailed maps showing the extent of destruction. Here is a close up of Altadena from the Hurst Fire.

via New York Times - images reformatted to better fit this page

This one shows the Palisades Fire. I’ve broken it into eastern and western sections with a slight overlap to make it more readable, however the best way to see it is on their site, though there may be a paywall.

via New York Times

Here is a Los Angeles Times map showing the current extent of the major fires. There are other small ones including one in Ventura County. The red areas are mandatory evacuation zones, yellow is the evacuation warning zones.

Here is a detail of the Palisades fire better showing the fire perimeter and zone boundaries. The 1 and 27 are route numbers, not specific points of interest.

via Los Angeles Times

 

A Really Greater New York

New York City just introduced congestion pricing in an attempt to eliminate gridlock. There have been many other plans over the years to alter the city to improve traffic flow, also to create housing and solve environmental problems. One of the most ambitious plans was this one, "A Really Greater New York"  detailed in a 1916 issue of Popular Science Monthly.

This plan came from Dr. T. Kennard Thomson, a consulting engineer on skyscraper foundations and expert on pneumatic caissons (watertight structures for building underwater). He expressed a high level of confidence that the new real estate created would pay for the project’s enormous costs.

It involved creating many new lands including extending the tip of Manhattan and a new island off Sandy Hook, New Jersey that would connect by tunnel to Staten Island and then to Manhattan. The plan proposed rerouting the East and Harlem Rivers, while filling in the old East River, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. “New York and Brooklyn would be as much one big city as are the East Side and the West Side.” A new East River would be dug across Queens connecting Jamaica Bay with Flushing Bay. The Harlem River would also be moved and straightened to reduce ship congestion.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard was proposed to be relocated to Newark Bay with a new river cutting across Bayonne, New Jersey to link the yard to the Hudson and East Rivers. This would simplify ship access, reduce congestion and help create a “maritime Pittsburgh”. One of the more thoughtful aspects of the plans is to build subway lines, sewers and electrical conduits before the new lands are filled in so it will “never be necessary to tear up the streets to get at these necessary arteries of city life.” “The tax assessments alone will make a fortune!“

Though this plan was never implemented, the expansion of the tip of Manhattan has been suggested many times since, including in this New York Times article from 2022.

 

Fastest Growing and Shrinking Cities

 This map shows the fastest growing and shrinking cities in the United States and Canada using 2023 data.

The map appears on Visual Capitalist and the data is only for the city populations, it does not reflect the overall metropolitan areas. The top seven population gainers are all in Canada, while all of the population losers are in the United States. 

The article does mention that if the metro areas were included, Toronto and other Canadian cities would still top the list but there is little other discussion. I suspect there is a bit of a cultural difference in the desirability of city vs suburb between the two countries and that looking at the metropolitan areas as a whole would balance out the numbers to an extent. Another factor for this specific time period (July, 2022 - July, 2023) could be that there was a temporary rise in crime in United States cities which has since abated.