A Stranger Quest, the documentary about David Rumsey by Andrea Gatopolous, is now available to the public online, having made its debut last year at the Torino Film Festival (previously) and made the rounds of the film festival circuit. In it, Rumsey, who turned 80 this year, ruminates about loss and mortality, filtered through various lenses: the loss of a friend, the legacy created by a lifetime of map collecting. And let me tell you, it’s a trip. It’s not so much about maps (though the Urbano Monte reconstruction makes several appearances), or map collecting, as it is about a particular map collector; and it approaches its subject edgewise. With long silences, and long scenes shot from enough distance that they make the viewer feel like they’re eavesdropping on private conversations rather than watching a documentary, to say nothing of extended sojourns in Second Life, it’s far from what I would have expected, but I cannot deny the overwhelming art of it.
Reimagining Rural Cartographies
Reimagining Rural Cartographies is a series from independent rural news outlet Barn Raiser that “features written and photo essays that create or examine nontraditional and living maps of the Midwest. How does the path a cougar took to roam into the heart of Chicago help us understand how urban, suburban and rural landscapes are changing? What really happens in the forest at the center of a recent Landback movement? How does the USPS serve as a rural lifeline, connecting neighbors and faraway places, despite service cuts?” Three articles so far.
47 Borders Reviewed
“Someone needs to tell him that the lines on maps are not supposed to be this entertaining.” Drew Gallagher reviews Jonn Elledge’s Brief History of the World in 47 Borders in the Washington Independent Review of Books. “Throughout, Elledge’s writing is equal parts insightful and amusing, and his myriad footnotes contain some of the funniest writing.” (Published too late to make this month’s book roundup.)
A Map of Map Institutions
Andrew Middleton, the owner of the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI (previously), has put together a map of map stores and non-commercial map institutions (archives, libraries, etc.). Comment on Bluesky to suggest other places.
Earlier this month, Andrew posted about the state of the map store, wherein he lays out what makes up his business and where he’d like to go from here. (Mind you, that was before this post and this post went all sorts of viral.)
Did Street View Just Help Solve a Murder Investigation in Spain?
A Street View car passing through the tiny Spanish village of Tajueco captured images of what sure looked like a man loading (or unloading) a wrapped body from the trunk of a car. The images helped authorities solve an outstanding missing person case: remains were discovered earlier this month, and two people have been arrested. News coverage: BBC, El País, New York Times, The Times. Given that it had been 15 years since the last time a Street View car passed through Tajueco, which has maybe 50 inhabitants, doing a shoulder-check for camera-equipped cars was likely not in the forefront of the perpetrators’ minds. (Current screenshot above: the man has since been blurred for obvious reasons.) [Gizmodo, PetaPixel, The Verge]
Book Roundup: December 2024
A lack of time and energy have conspired to prevent me from serving up a gift guide this year, but I can point you to a few links related to books that have come out this year.
First up, I have in my hands a review copy of the seventh volume of the Atlas of Design. It is the usual collection of marvellous cartography from familiar and unfamiliar mapmakers, some of which quite unexpected, and I hope to have more to say about it shortly. It made its debut at the NACIS annual meeting in October and is available to purchase from this page. See my review of the sixth volume.
Matthew Edney’s list of map history books published or seen in 2024 is now live; he’s been posting such a list each year since 2017 (previously).
40 Maps, 47 Borders, 50 Transit Maps
Alaistair Bonnett’s latest, 40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World came out in September from Ivy Press. Geographical magazine published an interview with him in October. I’ve reviewed two of Bonnett’s books here before—Off the Map (Unruly Places) and The Age of Islands (Elsewhere)—which were more about geographical curiosities than maps per se. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
To promote A History of the World in 47 Borders (Wildfire, April)—published in the U.S. as A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (The Experiment, October)—Jonn Elledge has posted a list of the 47 facts about the 47 borders that are the focus of the book’s 47 chapters. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Mark Ovenden’s latest, Iconic Transit Maps (Prestel, 2024) is a look at transit map design via fifty examples around the world. Cameron Booth reviews it on his Transit Maps blog. Way back in 2008, I reviewed the first edition of his Transit Maps of the World. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Related: Map Books of 2024.
Online Exhibition Introduces Cincinnati Library’s Map Holdings
How many libraries host map collections that you might be unaware of? The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library’s online exhibition, Landscape and Layers, is an introduction to that library’s map holdings, which per the blog post include 19th- and early 20th-century maps of the city, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and early maps of Ohio.
Jobs Requiring Spatial Memory and Navigation Associated with Low Alzheimer’s Mortality Rates
A population-based study suggesting that people in jobs that require real-time spatial processing—taxi and ambulance drivers—have the lowest rate of Alzheimer’s-related death comes with a bunch of caveats and is reluctant to draw a direct correlation. Per Euronews, people good at spatial processing may be at lower risk regardless of whether they use that skill driving ambulances and taxis. Also:
Independent researchers pointed to a few of those factors, including the fact that the taxi and ambulance drivers in the study died on average around ages 64 to 67, while Alzheimer’s onset is typically after age 65.
Further, few of the drivers were women, who are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than men, and the analysis didn’t consider genetics or include scans that could show any changes to the brain as a result of their jobs.
So this is a long, long way from being able to say, for example, that driving a taxi prevents Alzheimer’s.
Previously: London Cabbies’ Unique Brains May Help Alzheimer’s Diagnosis.
OpenStreetMap Outage Resolved
An outage at their Amsterdam ISP knocked OpenStreetMap offline on Sunday; they’ve spent the past two days in read-only mode via their secondary server in Dublin but appear to be back up and running as of 8:45 AM EST today. Details at the OSM community forum.
Mapping Every River Reveals a Drop in Water Flow
“Scientists mapped the flow of water through every single river on the planet, every day over the past 35 years, using a combination of satellite data and computer modeling. What they found shocked them,” CNN reports. “Nearly half of the world’s largest downstream rivers—44%—saw a drop in the amount of water flowing through them each year, according to the research published Thursday in the journal Science.” On the other hand, smaller, upstream rivers saw an increase in flow.
The Art and Typography of Sanborn Maps
There are plenty of online resources about Sanborn maps (and other fire insurance maps); Brandon Silverman has built a website focusing on the art and typography found on Sanborn maps’ cover and title pages, with literally thousands of examples.
Previously: Fire Insurance Maps Online; A Guide to the Library of Congress’s Collection of Fire Insurance Maps.
Passenger Rail’s Decline in the U.S. and Canada
The decline in passenger rail service in the U.S. and Canada is charted by this interactive map, which uses a slider to compare Amtrak and Via Rail service in 1980 with what it is today. [Maps Mania]
2024 U.S. Presidential Election: Over- and Underperforming the 2020 Results
I haven’t seen many maps of the 2024 U.S. presidential election results, but then I haven’t been looking very hard for them either. Last week, CNN posted some charts and maps showing where the candidates under- or overperformed relative to the 2020 election. “Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that in the states where the campaign was the most hotly contested, more people voted in 2024, whereas in states where one side or the other seemed more likely to win, turnout generally dropped.”
Three Dead After Google Maps Routes Travellers Across Incomplete Bridge—That Wasn’t Closed
The headline accompanying this Economic Times (India) article is more than a bit misleading: ”Google Maps leads three men to death as car plunges from incomplete bridge into river.” Horrifying. The bridge across the Ramganga River in Uttar Pradesh was closed after a part of it had been washed away in a flood several months previously. But there’s a twist. Google Maps didn’t mark the bridge as closed, and did route the travellers across it, but the road hadn’t been blocked or marked closed on the ground either. This wasn’t a case of ignoring local signage and blindly following online maps: local signage failed too. Google isn’t a panopticon: someone would have had to tell Google Maps that the bridge was closed, and I have to wonder whether that happened. But a Google Maps error makes for a better headline, one that goes international, than a horrible local lapse. At any rate, an investigation is ongoing. [Jalopnik]
Alice Hudson, 1947-2024
Alice Hudson, who from 1981 to 2009 was chief of the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and as such responsible for one of the world’s significant map collections, died on 6 November 2024 from complications of kidney disease. She was 77. The New York Times published her obituary yesterday.