Visualizing slavery from 1860

From the NYT comes a great article about an early map from the US Coast Survey (creators of those lovely coastal charts from the late 19th century that adorn many of my walls) that shows slavery in the southern US, based on the 1860 census. The map used novel cartographic techniques for the day and was a masterful piece of public outreach: it was important in convincing the Union public that the civil war was about slavery, and not just state's rights. Map here.

From the article: 

The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.

The map uses what was then a new technique in statistical cartography: Each county not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slavery across the region (legend at left). The counties along the Mississippi River and in coastal South Carolina are almost black, while Kentucky and the Appalachians are nearly white.

Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days using LiDAR!

From Science News in the NYTimesNYTimes covers lidar! The husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase used lidar sensors to penetrate the jungle cover to get 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands. See article.

Lovely geologic quads of SF Bay - 1914

The San Francisco folio, including Tamalpais, San Francisco, Concord, San Mateo, and Haywards quadrangles, California is available as scanned pages (and maps) from the Texas A&M library project.  This folio is part of the Geologic Atlas of the United States, a set of 227 folios published by the U.S. Geological Survey between 1894 and 1945. Each folio includes both topographic and geologic maps for each quad represented in that folio, as well as description of the basic and economic geology of the area. This is Folio 193, published in 1914. This edition has the charming and berkeley-relevant reference: "Geology by Andrew C. Lawson, assisted at various times by students of the University of California." You go Bears.

 Pre- Richmond-San Rafael bridge view of Pt. San Pablo and Richmond

This is the bay bridge plan... Goat Island is Treasure Is., there was a narrow gauge railway from Oakland for shipments to SF and beyond.The repository interface with integrated Yahoo! Maps was developed by the Digital Initiatives -- Research & Technology group within the TAMU Libraries using the Manakin interface framework on top of the DSpace digital repository software.

Geologic Atlas of the United States by Texas A & M University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

casablanca: the google earth prototype

I am so glad someone wrote this up! I was watching Casablanca (1942!) again awhile back, and just loved the intro scene of the earth, europe, and the route from Paris to Casablanca. This blog ((E)Space&Fiction: spatial machinery of fiction) (cool name, right?) makes the case that it was the first proto google earth, and analyzes the technical specifics that presaged Keyhole, etc. Specifically:

• the combination of the spinning globe with a zoom effect on a specific point: Paris;
• the use of a “jump” effect similar to Google Earth to move from one place (Paris) to another (Casablanca); and
• the perspective changes from the vertical view to an oblique perspective of the streets of Casablanca, similar to current street views.

california map society website

The California Map Society has just launched a cool new website.  I am a member, I like these guys and their message. They say it well:

We are passionate about all phases of cartography in its broadest sense. We are fascinated by the potential of remote sensing, GIS, and the tools for today’s digital mapmaking. Yet we love the art and history embodied in antique maps. Understanding man’s continuing change in perception of his environment and world is part of the fun of viewing old maps. And we never fail to delight in the curious forms that maps have taken over the centuries.

Check out the website here.

Orthorectifying for the Masses

In a bit of Tom Sawyer-inspired app making, the New York Public Library has created an online application for rectifying their collection of digital maps of New York City. "Finding control points is so much fun! It is truly an honor to allow you, our special internet browser, to assist us in collecting them." The NYPL Map Rectifier allows you to export the rectified maps as KMLs. They've also added a separate section for maps of Haiti to assist in earthquake relief. 

The map that changed the world goes digital

Ancient volcanic rock under EdinburghFor those of you who devoured Simon Winchester's "The Map that Changed the World" about geologist William Smith's journey to create the first geologic map of England and Wales, the first geologic map in the world, this news will please you. (Smith published the 10' x 16' map in 1815. His pivotal insights were that each local outcrop of rock strata was a portion of a single universal sequence of strata and that these rock strata could be distinguished, followed for great distances, and their relative date ascertained by means of imbedded fossilized organisms. His work kick-started the science of geology, and contributed to the theory of evolution. Modified from Wikipedia.)

Now, as the BBC reports, the British Geological Survey's (BGS) has released their new OpenGeoscience portal, which allows the public to study all the UK's geology via a variety of webGIS formats (e.g. Google, and ArcServer). There is a viewer for bedrock geology and the overlying superficial deposits, and another for more geological layers — artificial ground, faults, mass movements, etc.

Worker at Pitlochry depot, Perthshire, processing Scottish mica.In a companion effort, the BGS is also releasing images from their historic image archive: 50,000 images are searchable and usable for non-commercial purposes. These images include lovely photography of some of Britain's icons of geology, but also includes image from 100 years ago of miners, explorers, and early 20th century industry.

Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved

New Interface for the Manhatta Project. Check it.

We talked about this before here; and the Manhatta project has a nice new interface for exploring the 1609 map of the island of Manhatta(n), block by block, through time.  I love this project! The combination of mashup, history, design and art are breathtaking.  (And our own Tim Bean worked on reconstructing the early topography! - see his comment below.) Go Fullscreen on your 30"-monitor. I dare you.

“The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future…. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

- from Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

A downside to sharing historical maps

From the SF Chron: When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, but they show the locations of former low-caste communities. The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place. Some surveys have shown that such neighborhoods have lower property values than surrounding areas, and residents have been the target of racial taunts and graffiti. But the modern locations of the old villages are largely unknown to the general public, until these maps were overlain on current street maps.

Repro ancient boats

I've been a sucker for these stories of people re-building sailing and exploring craft based on 1,000-year old plans ever since my parents gave me  Kon-Tiki to read as an impressionable youth. Maybe it is why I love such riduculous Hollywood tripe like the 13th Warrior.

Now comes this news item: A replica 16th Century junk has sunk off Taiwan, one day short of completing an epic voyage to the US and back (see article). One day short of finishing! And you know why? They were, in BBC lingo, "rammed in two" by a freighter (there is a photograph). The 54ft-long (16.5m) Princess Taiping, powered only by cotton sails on three masts, was designed according to ancient specifications. Like the original Kon-Tiki, the raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. (Amazingly, there is a you tube video). Both expeditions set out to prove that folks other than the usual suspects could have made it here and back earlier than we thought.

There was another, similar, high-profile event with the building and sailing of the "Sea Stallion" Viking ship, which made the journey from Denmark to Ireland in 2007, fully blogged. The entries started with hopeful titles like "Building a Viking warship" and "the ship is launched", and quickly turned shorter and grimmer, with "a rough first night" and "hypothermia strikes" and "hampered by the weather" and "false hope"... suggesting 1) that Vikings were, perhaps not surprisingly, very hardy, and 2) reasons why they didn't have time to leave detailed on-voyage journals.

Still, I guess this stuff appeals to the same part of me that loves old maps, and that is the purported link to the blog.