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Mapping the New World from France: Savages, Vegetables, Animals, Pelts

July 20, 2013, 10:09 am
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We often have trouble recognizing cartographers in their maps.  Yet traces of Samuel de Champlain’s life and New World encounters recur in the several maps of New France he designed in the two decades between 1612 to 1632–not encrypted but … Continue reading →
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Maps in the Air

July 25, 2013, 3:08 pm
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Edward St.-Aubyn offers a moving description of the existential torture in-flight maps inflict on his hero.  St.-Aubyn captures indeterminate relation we all feel as passengers suspended before the sheer toponymic abundance displayed on monitors during air travel, which offer handy metaphors … Continue reading →
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Mapping What We Now Weigh

July 28, 2013, 7:35 pm
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There is little comfort to be taken in the recent announcement that the United States has been overtaken as the world’s nation with the greatest number of obesely overweight citizens by Mexico.   The statistical surpassing of the large number … Continue reading →
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Data/Metadata

August 1, 2013, 8:23 am
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There is something disorientation about imagining a network designed to vacuum up information from the highways and byways that is been routed in 150 states, spying on pipelines in  at some 700 servers located into a “massive distributed Linux cluster.” … Continue reading →
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Attempts to Map Music

August 3, 2013, 12:00 pm
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Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Velvet Underground defined a metaphoric space for Rock music to occupy from the nineteen-sixties.  It’s no surprise then, that the London underground map–that icon of Englishness that the engineer and draftsman Harry Beck designed in 1931–was adapted … Continue reading →
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The World Map between Workshop and Laboratory

August 10, 2013, 11:59 am
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It’s not easy to detect how workshops transmitted protocols of mapping or the content of maps before authoritative practices for recording geographic knowledge  Partly because of the difficulty to describe the transmission of knowledge in manuscript maps, and partly because … Continue reading →
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Reading the Histomap

August 13, 2013, 7:49 pm
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Not to be confused with the “historeme,” the ‘smallest unit of historiographic fact’ or narrative event in its singularity, the Histomap Rand McNally first printed in 1931 offers readers an assembly of singularities in color streams that, when fully unfolded, expands … Continue reading →
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The State of Emergency in Cairo’s Streets

August 16, 2013, 11:11 pm
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With an overwhelming display of strength usually reserved for clearing Palestinian settlers from villages in the Sinai or Gaza, Egyptian police forces descended at 7 a.m. on the sit-in at Nasr Villages’s Raba’a al Adawiya Square, near to the Raba’a … Continue reading →
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Mapping Migrant Deaths along National Divides

August 21, 2013, 9:35 am
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Maps of collective mortality show not only the distributions of illnesses over geography, but embody the vectors of transmission by which we can understand a given disease, even before its bacillus could be seen.  But maps of collective death raise … Continue reading →
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On Viewing the Flattened Past

August 24, 2013, 12:30 pm
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Immediate access to images, maps, and other information makes us wax nostalgic for postal delivery on a 24-hour clock, and stamped snail mail six days of the week.  Even the labor of licking and affixing a stamp seems antiquated now. … Continue reading →
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The New Face of Fire Maps and the Mapping of Fires

August 26, 2013, 3:13 pm
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images To speak of “footprints of actively burning fires” in Yosemite Park not only misleads, but does disservice to the impending danger of the wildfire’s rapid spread.  The fires that have consumed Yosemite Park’s “rim” are of course … Continue reading →
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Targeting Sites of Attack in Syria

August 29, 2013, 3:24 pm
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In the course of over two years civil war raged across Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad stock-piled chemical weapons as a last line of security in multiple sites.   The UN and President Barack Obama’s administration have regularly made use of … Continue reading →
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Mapping Commute Routes across California in Pneumatic Tubes

September 4, 2013, 3:36 pm
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Before Captain James T. Kirk ordered Agent Sulu to place the engines of the USS Enterprise on warp speed  to go boldly to regions of the universe no man had gone before, Isaac Asimov described Gaal Dornick waiting nervously for a Jump through … Continue reading →
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Mapping an Invasive Species? Eucalyptus in Berkeley, CA

September 12, 2013, 3:20 pm
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The mapping of invasive species on land or sea provides one of the clearest ways of visualizing our shifting ecosphere:  in mapping of the threat of invasive marine species to coastal ecosystems, Michelle Slosberg developed her marine map of the … Continue reading →
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Mapping New Worlds on Eggshells: Adventures in the Artifice of Renaissance Map-Making

September 16, 2013, 8:52 am
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We have learned to pause as Google Maps draw boundary lines on our screen-bound maps, as streets take forms bounded by in clearcut lines across uniformly flatly-colored static blocks, data streams conjure material forms from blurs that delineate highways, city … Continue reading →
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Savoir Your Terroir

September 23, 2013, 1:19 pm
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When northern California-based architectural theorist and oenophile David Gissen decided to map his adventures in wine-tasting, he cleverly shifted the metaphorical rooting of a wine’s terroir in a bucolic agrarian setting of the vineyard:  in place of evoking (and romanticizing) bucolic fields … Continue reading →
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Mapping the Expanse of our Health Care Debacle

October 4, 2013, 2:24 pm
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There have been compelling suggestions that racial categories and racism are rearing their ugly heads in the debate over healthcare.  It’s telling that Atul Gawande has likened the attempts of conservatives to persuade folks not to sign up for health … Continue reading →
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Metadata-Driven Maps: Mismapping Social Networks and Unseen Populations

October 13, 2013, 9:00 am
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Tracking cellphones is not strictly speaking a practice of mapping, so much as one of surveillance or data collection.   Yet as our we have become increasingly data-hungry, the increased dependence of our National Security Agency on cyber-surveillance amassing big data that we … Continue reading →
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Mapping Populations in the Open Seas

October 16, 2013, 3:06 pm
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Eric Carle commemorated the tragic story of the 1992 loss at sea of some 28,8oo rubber ducks from a container ship in DayGlo colors in “Ten Rubber Ducks Overboard.”   But rather than encountering multiple marine creatures in their adventures, the … Continue reading →
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More Better Mapping of Oakland’s Populations

October 24, 2013, 2:26 pm
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Maps have long been described or conceived as windows–analogous in ways to pictorial perspective–that invite viewers to look into a space in new ways.  But both word maps as the above, made of the names of Oakland’s almost 150 different … Continue reading →
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