Shifting Place Names in Africa

This map from PisseGuri82 shows place names that are no longer in the same location as the current country.

According to this page they do not overlap "at all" though that is only true for the pre-colonial kingdoms. Some of these countries are remnants of previously larger kingdoms. For example, Guinea is named for the Gulf of Guinea which the modern day country does not border. Benin was a kingdom based in Nigeria with Benin City, Nigeria as its capital. Many of these names were either imposed by colonial powers or chosen when the countries became independent.

New Hobby Part 2

Here's a color pencil map of West Africa I recently did based on the Times Atlas of the World.

By the time I got to the easternmost countries, the accuracy started to come off the rails. Ghana is way too narrow and I had to bend Benin to make it meet the corner of Niger. Here is a hastily done annotated version.

While gaining context it loses some of charm of the original. I might try to hand annotate it at some point.

In my previous post on this subject, I stated that I haven't done any hand drawn maps since childhood. However, I recently was cleaning up and found this watercolor painting I did in a college class. It was drawn from an atlas. I did this so long ago I don't remember the source but I think it was National Geographic. There was a page about the tectonic forces that created Pennsylvania's ridge and valley system with this map showing Blue and Second Mountain cutting through the Susquehanna River valley north of Harrisburg.

ThingsMaps

Some people see geography everywhere. I once mapped a New Jersey-shaped sidewalk crack. French Cartographer Jules Grandin has a collection called #Thingsmaps that labels cartographic features seen in clouds,

doors,

coffee,

crosswalks,

 and salad greens - this one looks pre-arranged.

Even fantasy worlds-here's Westeros, from a gap in the trees.

Scroll thru the collection here

Crowdsourced Mapping Helps Fight Ebola

Ten years ago this month Google acquired a mapping company called Where 2 Technologies and began to create Google Maps. Despite the tremendous growth of Google Maps over the last 10 years, there are still areas that are poorly mapped. When Doctors Without Borders wanted maps of the areas in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia that are most affected by Ebola, they turned to OpenStreetMap, a worldwide, crowdsourced mapping project. A recent article from Fast Company Labs details how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has gotten volunteers to quickly map cities like Gueckedou in Guinea. This image compares the level of detail between the two mapping services.

OpenStreetMap is on the left, Google Maps on the right. The limitations of this blog page make this hard to see so I manipulated the images to compare them up and down.

Andrew Buck, A volunteer with HOT is quoted in the fastcolabs article as saying that Google's business model is selling advertising and “Starbucks isn't paying for Google to advertise over there so there's very little incentive for Google to improve its maps.”  

In fairness to Google, the OpenStreetMap for Gueckedou much less detailed than Google before the HOT team got mapping.

Since March the team has mapped over 8 million objects. The article has a nice animation showing the edits made in West Africa in the last six months. I was not able to it reproduce here but you can see it on their page.

OpenStreetMap has helped relief efforts by identifying unknown villages, sorting out similar village names, coordinating logistics and allowing relief workers to predict the paths used by infected persons and therefore areas that are more likely to be in need of aid.