kottke.org posts about maps
From Big Think and Pop Charts, A Literary Map of America that “highlights the real and imagined settings of hundreds of books”. Frank Jacobs takes a closer look at some of the imaginary places on the map, including Sleepy Hollow, Lake Wobegon, Brokeback Mountain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg and West Egg.
There are many ways to read this map: as a peculiar road map of the United States, a potted history of the same, a metatext of American literature, a guide to American literary genres and their centers of gravity, and more. I will get to at least some of them later, but for now, I want to examine the effect that scholars call broadly “imaginative geography,” more precisely “toponymic capture,” and more elegantly “authorial inscription.” It is the process by which a writer’s vision of a place becomes so dominant that it effectively overwrites that place’s prior identity in the public imagination.
We could say other parts of America have been “colonized” by other texts the same way King’s horror stories have influenced our perception of Maine. A gentler metaphor, from Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, is of cultural and literary memory as an “overlay.” It resides above physical geography like a transparency on an overhead projector, a slightly shifting but persistent presence.
In Landmarks, the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane develops the idea that a sufficiently powerful text doesn’t just describe a landscape, but alters the mind that subsequently encounters it. He uses the verb phrase “to see through” to define it: you see the Suffolk coast through W.G. Sebald, the Mississippi through Mark Twain, the South (as a particularly “Gothic” place) through Faulkner.
The map is available as a poster.
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback:
You’re mixing accent with correct pronunciation. It’s only WUH-stah if you have a non-rhotic accent. If a non-native dropped that instead of “WUH-ster” in conversation they’d sound like an asshat. Same with Lem-in-ster et al. You do this correctly when you write Concord as CON-kerd, where the local accent would have it sound like “CON-kid”…. We expect the accent on the first syllable, but not for the R to drop. Source: native new englander with a rhotic accent.
Growing up in the Midwest, we had plenty of our own place names like this: Madrid (MAD-rid) and What Cheer (WATCH-ear) in Iowa were two of my favorites.
As a baseball card collector in my teens, I was familiar with the Rhode Island city of Pawtucket from the minor league stats listings on the backs of the cards of Red Sox players (Pawtucket is the Sox’s AAA team). My friends and I pronounced it like it looked. It was only when I went to a Red Sox game like 15 years ago that I overheard a guy talking about some prospect coming up from Puh-TUCK-it (he made it sound like a single syllable somehow) that my eyes went wide and my brain exploded. That’s how you pronounce it?
The Drawn Maps are the borders of the countries, state, provinces, and other official territories collectively drawn by more than 300,000 people playing an online daily game called Borderline. There’s a world map as well as maps of the USA, Canada, Italy, and more. There are also timelapse versions of some of the maps.
From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to scale. I recorded a short video of how it looks on the site:
Each lighthouse has a unique light characteristic so that ships can tell them apart:
In any of these designs an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, sees a brighter light during short time intervals. These instants of bright light are arranged to create a light characteristic or pattern specific to a lighthouse. For example, the Scheveningen Lighthouse flashes are alternately 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. Some lights have sectors of a particular color (usually formed by colored panes in the lantern) to distinguish safe water areas from dangerous shoals. Modern lighthouses often have unique reflectors or racon transponders so the radar signature of the light is also unique.
See also A Blinking Map of the World’s Lighthouses. And mapped.earth has more cool visualizations of the Earth (rainfall, wind, lightning, pollution, etc.)
Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century.
The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis as two other cities whose population has dropped during that same time period. Detroit went from 1.85 million in 1950 to 639,000 in 2020 and St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 300,000 over the same time period:
St. Louis was once the country’s 4th largest city. Worlds Fair and Olympics in 1904. Two Major League Baseball teams. It didn’t boom as much as the Great Lakes cities in between the wars and it declined just as much after.
This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re looking at — I thought it was a sort of stretched geographical map at first. Get your own here.
The chart is based on Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769):
Priestley is best known for his co-discovery of oxygen.
The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC.
The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
It is meant to serve as a tool for abolitionist resistance grounded in a long view of the struggle, tactics, and goals.
The map is available as a PDF and as an interactive version. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?
The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:
The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.
See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.
And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*
This is a map published in 1927 by Paramount Studios showing the areas of California & Nevada that doubled as shooting locations for far-flung locales, including Siberia, Wales, the Nile, New England, the Red Sea, and the Alps.
This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum).
You can install the Python scripts on your computer or use this website (which seems quite slow). Also, I wonder if the height/width minimums can be changed to output bigger posters?
The gang at Present & Correct found a cache of pre-war tourist maps of Japan while rummaging around in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō used book district. They photographed them for a new self-published book called Paper Trails.
This is an animated 3D visualization of the growth of Paris from 300 BCE to the present day. It was made with Blender (no AI) by Christian Ivan, who notes that it’s a “simplification” and so might not be 100% accurate. To my eye, the broad strokes are all there. The subtle sound design helps with the overall effect as well.
In 1375, a Spanish mapmaker made a world map we now refer to as the Catalan Atlas. For its time, the atlas was remarkably accurate and comprehensive. This video explains how such a map was made in medieval times. From Open Culture:
The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time. Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world.
See also How Leonardo Constructed a Satellite-View Map in 1502 Without Ever Leaving the Ground and The Oldest World Map in the World.
Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram have created a data-driven animation for the MTA called A Data Love Letter to the Subway.
More from Lupi (who calls this an “absolute dream project”):
The project, “A Data Love Letter to the Subway,” visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Data like length, location, and transfers were abstracted into train behaviors and attributes. Imaginatively animating each train line’s age, length, and path, we wrote a poetic story that explores the trains’ interwoven encounters with commuters and one another.
Our “Love Letter” draws on the elemental nature of picture books to unpack the visual system of the subway with curiosity and wonder. Drawing from the MTA’s Open Data Program, with my team we translated train data into a narrative made of attributes and behaviors, providing a rich view of the interactions, roles, differences, and the connections made and sometimes missed within the subway ecosystem.
Maps, NYC, the subway, data visualization…I am not sure how much more in my wheelhouse a thing could be.
Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge.
The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems.
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