Group items tagged

"From maps of disease and the weather to the earliest maps of the national population, this was a period when the very concept of a map was reinvented. By the early twentieth century, maps had become common tools of analysis, communication, and visual representation in an increasingly complex nation. Today we live in a world that is saturated with maps and graphic knowledge. The maps on this site reveal how this involved a fundamentally new way of thinking."

"No map can be a perfect representation of reality; every map is an interpretation, which may be why writers are so drawn to them. Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view."

""Maps don't just show the world - they change the world," says the geographer Mark Graham. "They affect how we interact with the world and understand the world. In doing so, they shape the world itself." Residents couldn't prove it, exactly, but they believed the Google Maps error was both a symptom and cause of their displacement. "They took our name from us and no one knew about it," Hemphill-Nichols says. "Once you take our identity, you plan to take everything else.""

"The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that 64,747 licensed gun dealers (defined here as gun shops, pawnbrokers, or individual sellers) existed in the U.S. as of December 2015. But that raw number alone might not mean much to you. So a new mapping project by data viz company 1point21 Interactive tries to contextualize this number by comparing it to something all Americans know exists in abundance: Starbucks. "Looking at the Federal Firearms License data, the first question I asked myself was, 'Is that a lot-it sounds like a lot?'" Brian Beltz, who helped put the project together, tells CityLab. "That's why we chose to compare it to something that everyone knows and has a reputation of being on every corner." "

"A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say."

"When a team of scientists in Finland asked people to map out where they felt different emotions on their bodies, it found that the results were surprisingly consistent, even across cultures."

"The lowest rate of schizophrenia prescriptions was in East Dorset. However, explaining the pattern across England is complicated and the research team says the maps pose a lot of questions. They were developed using anonymous prescription records that are collected from doctors' surgeries in England. They record only prescriptions given out by GPs - not the number of patients treated - so hospital treatment is missed in the analysis."

"European etymology maps of various commons words"

note: useful video included

"Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "