mapping

While Google Print and the Open Content Alliance have recently been the subject of big headlines about their plans to digitize old books, the David Rumsey Map Collection already has 12,600 historic maps online:

“The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens and manuscript maps.”

One can search, view, and juxtapose maps on the Web, as well as download high resolution images in MrSID format. The images are posted under a Creative Commons license. Read more from Rumsey on oreilly.net.

Click-and-drag, or click on a state or icon to zoom in. Click on the water, or use the right-click menu to zoom out.

Based on the poster produced by the NYC Independent Media Center.

Built using DIY Map, with a little help from google-latlong.

Mentioned here last year, the Green Map project is an international network of autonomous, collective design projects, promoting local action and environmental resources around the world. They just celebrated their ten year anniversary.

Via email:

March 25, 2005 marks the 10th anniversary of Green Map System, a network of locally-led projects building healthier, more sustainable communities by charting the natural and cultural environment. In a decade, the global Green Map movement has spread to 45 countries, sparking public involvement and encouraging fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. In nearly 300 diverse cities, towns and rural locales, we’re charting the good life, celebrating community and engaging the future.

Collectively, Green Mapmakers have published 201 Green Maps — 60 are online and 3 million copies are in use, serving as guides to ecological living. Click GreenMap.org for an update on each map - these are beautiful portraits of place that ignite hope and caring for our beloved hometown environments.

Linking all projects are the Green Map Icons — the world’s only universal symbol set for maps — and a flexible framework for mapmaking. Practical, effective Green Mapmaking tools and resources are being created all the time, based on local experience. Our recent milestones include:

• Green Map Atlas
  In 2004 Green Map System produced its first collection of mapmaking stories. Illustrating the origins, methods and local impacts of 10 projects in Asia and North America, the Green Map Atlas is a multimedia anthology — order the book or CD-ROM, or download it at GreenAtlas.org. Written for the public, it was conceived to catalyze action for community sustainability around the world — 100,000 English/Japanese readers have downloaded it already!
  
  
• Lift-off in Taiwan
  Taiwan’s Society of Wilderness has practiced Green Mapmaking since 2000, leading successful workshops across the country. Published in March 2005, their “Energetic Green Map Movement” book features 135 pages of in-depth methodology and colorfully illustrated vignettes on Taiwanese and international Green Maps (including sections of the Green Map Atlas), in Chinese.
  
  
• Japan’s Networked Accomplishments
  Some of the most inclusive Green Map projects are in Japan. Capturing this creative energy and fostering new developments, the GreenMap Japan network has just published a 40 page “Green Map Activity Guide” (English edition expected in August). Their national summer homework challenge in 2004 yielded expressive outcomes, dozens of which can be seen at GreenMap.jp (English Intro).
  
  
• EXPO 2005 — Nature’s Wisdom
  Today, 52 communities in Japan have projects underway. More than 16 of these are creating a citizens’ participation project for Aichi EXPO 2005, under the umbrella of GreenMap Aichi/Chubu Recycle. Opening today, EXPO’s Aichi Prefecture Pavilion features the debut of 30 diverse, local Green Maps. EXPO continues for 6 months, with international Green Maps featured in August. Find out more here. The impacts of this mega event will continue to be charted through 2010 by GreenMap Aichi!
  
  
• Crossing the Divide
  It’s not only in affluent regions that Green Mapmaking is thriving. Indonesia has 8 far-flung projects underway which have published 10 popular maps to date, and Jakarta’s story in the Green Map Atlas has been downloaded 20,000 times. Our 2004 Chinese Initiative has yielded the first 2 mainland projects underway in Beijing and Hangzhou. In the West, Mapa Verde Cuba is thriving as an education and social resource in 12 provinces across the island, plus they are collaborating on the tri-lingual Mapa Verde Americas Community Green Mapping Booklet, due out later this year. From Uruguay to Uganda, Netherlands to New Zealand, Green Mapmakers have honed their communication skills with this community media vehicle.
  
  
• And at Home
  Our New York global headquarters is a catalyst for new projects, a resource and outreach center, archive and connecting point; we also “seed” local youth projects and create new editions of NYC’s original Green Apple Map. Currently, we’re piloting a new mapping concept with our 5th city-wide edition, which will focus on Energy and aim to build the buzz for efficiency and renewables. Beyond the maps, we embrace the challenge of working globally every day with a wonderful, creative alliance dedicated to building sustainable communities.
  
  
• Our 10th Anniversary Year
  Celebrate this important milestone with us! Our 10th anniversary year starts today, so congratulate your local Mapmakers or send your thoughts (and support!) directly to Green Map System. A non-profit 501c3 organization since 2000, Green Map System welcomes your tax-deductible donation online or by mail (PO Box 249, New York, NY USA 10002-0249). Visit our online Store for Green Maps, Atlases, T-shirts and more. With your help, we will develop a new online system that will improve public access to Green Maps and foster collaboration throughout the movement. Your support will also help us build capacity globally and locally, as we prepare to gracefully expand our eco-cultural service for the next 10 years!

Click on a country to zoom. Click and drag to zoom into an region. Click on the ocean to zoom out. Click on a dot to visit that city’s Web site.

Source: http://www.indymedia.org, http://contact.indymedia.org/timezone.php.

Another Flash test with point display (and more apologies to the RSS readers.)

Download it yourself and add your own data.

As of January 5, 2005. Source: The United Nations.

Testing out a Flash piece (with apologies to all the RSS readers). Click on a country to zoom. Click and drag to zoom into an region. Click on the ocean to zoom out.

More about CEDAW.

More about the Flash bit and how to incorporate your own data.

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”

Yesterday sat in on an a lecture on theories of the nation and nationalism. The nation is an imagined community, geography a matter of representations, and both of these are fraught with assumptions.

But looking at all the electoral maps and cartograms of the last election one can see the reverse is true as well. The Map Room has cataloged links to several maps: 1, 2, 3, 4.

I’ve read several accounts for the patterns on the map. One can examine north vs. south, heartland vs. fringe, urban vs. rural, plotting various demographics along the way.

Even if one assumes that a few million votes were stolen, a more general insight is unspoken — perhaps because it is a given? Despite increasing consolidated and homogenous media and increasingly pervasive Internet access, ideology exists spatially.

Several grassroots groups are publishing maps of the New York City to guide visitors and residents who want to participate in the protests and events around the Republican National Convention next week.

From a co-editor of, Peace Signs, a big book of anti-Bush, anti-war posters, comes The People’s Guide to the RNC

Cited in The New York Times on August 9, 2004:

“Included is information of the sort that could be of use to any traveler: a street map of Manhattan south of 59th Street and addresses of restaurants, bookstores, libraries and places to rent bicycles.

Other elements are specific to the convention: hotels where various state delegations will be staying, sites of official convention events, and times and locations of planned demonstrations. There are also the words of the First Amendment, phone numbers for the New York Civil Liberties Union and information about bail bondsmen.

The three creators said they spent $6,000 of their own money to print the guides, but are distributing them free.

‘The main reason we made the guide is so that people have enough information to get in the way or out of the way,’ Mr. Chan said.

On Thursday, he and his friends began distributing 25,000 copies to bookstores, community groups, churches and other places.”

You can order or download the map here.

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The 2004 RNC Protesters Map is more up-to-date, and features a large list of protest, art, and RNC related events, convergence spaces, and trainings. Icons on the map indicate hotels, police stations, navigation landmarks, parks (both active and passive), and the march route and rallying points. Updated on August 20, the map can be download here (792 Kb PDF).

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First published in March 2003, the Map of War Profiteers in New York City showed the beneficiaries in our midst, plotting the locations of government and military agencies, corporations, media profiting from the war. At the meeting of the M27 Coalition, the map helped locate the discussion determining a place for the March 27, 2003 action. Rockefeller Center ultimately was chosen for its proximity to several points on the map.

Unlike the other two color multi-page maps, the War Profiteers map has a distinctly low-tech, underground, DIY aesthetic. It is designed to be reproduced in black-and-white on the front and back of an 11"x17" piece of paper. The icons are composed of cut paper, arranged on a found map. The map was available at progressive bookstores around town, and was distributed at organizing meetings for various protest events.

Graphic designer Wendy Brawer produced her first Green Map in 1991. The Green Apple Map of New York City charted 143 ecologically and culturally significant sites: community gardens, parks, greenmarkets, eco-centers, green businesses and buildings, transportation options, and toxic hot spots. It was well received and quickly inspired a second edition. Wendy writes:

“This Map encourages people to explore and understand out city — helping expand our community of environmental stewards who understand the interconnections between the natural and built environments. It can help build a network of links among people of different ages and backgrounds by highlighting places that are important to our common future. It promotes and fosters replication of successful projects. Moreover, it challenges the assumption that this intensely urban setting has little redeeming ecological value.”

Activists and designers in other cities, particularly colleagues in the o2 Global Network, were eager to make their own Green Maps.

Green Map Systems was born in 1995 and became a U.S. registered not-for-profit organization in 2000.

Wendy and her team produced a shared set of icons, and a Mapmakers’ Agreement which sets some parameters and includes small royalty based on the proceeds — 1% to 3% depending on if the project is all volunteers or has paid staff, and 1% of printed maps. Some “scholarships” are available where needed.

After that, the projects are fairly autonomous. Each Green Map is locally organized and designed, and independently produced. The maps may highlight parks and green spaces, bike paths, gay and lesbian resources, notes on wheelchair accessibility, recycling centers, or sites of energy production and consumption.

“Printed and digital Green Maps identify, promote and link eco and social resources. Each merges the ancient art of map making and new media in creating a fresh perspective that helps hometown residents discover great ways to get involved with the urban environment, and guides tourists (especially virtual ones) to special places and successful greening initiatives they can experience, and then replicate back home.

The maps are generated with a wide range of techniques, from GIS to Illustrator, to simple drawings by hand.

As of this writing, there are now there are now 241 Green Map projects, including 45 by youth. 151 different Green Maps have been completed in 39 countries. The maps are listed here.

Map makers can also develop local variations on global set of Green Map Icons (a shrine icon for Japan, a Capoira icon for Brazil.) After a global discussion on the Green Map email list, several of these have been incorporated into the global set. The set of 125 icons and 50 youth icons have been released as digital fonts for easy placement.

Launched on February 29, 2004, the Green Map Atlas highlights the ten map making projects in Asia and North America. With the goal of promoting sustainability and greener living worldwide, the Green Map Atlas showcases the work of diverse Mapmakers in Tokyo, Toronto, Jakarta, Pune (India), Kyoto, Hiroshima and Hakodate (Japan), Robeson County, NC, Milwaukee, and New York City.

Six out of eight of Manhattan’s diesel bus depots are located in northern Manhattan. Two of the city’s largest sewage treatment plants are there, too — powered by huge diesel engines running 24 hours a day. The area is flanked by highways and two major bridges over which trucks (also running on diesel) deliver goods into city into Manhattan. And the two outdoor train yards and elevated rail lines serve diesel locomotives daily.

In addition to diesel exhaust, northern Manhattan contains brownfield sites, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings posing chemical and social hazards.

On April 19, 2003, the New York Times reported on a study that found that 25.5 percent of children in Harlem have asthma — “one of the highest rates ever documented for an American neighborhood.”

Residents of northern Manhattan are predominantly black and Latino.

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West Harlem Environmental Action is:

“a non-profit, grassroots organization working to improve environmental quality and to secure environmental justice in predominately African-American and Latino communities.

Since 1988, WE ACT has worked with citizen groups, youth, community residents, environmentalists, local/state/federal governments, and educational & medical institutions.

Based in Northern Manhattan, WE ACT advances its mission through research, public education, advocacy, mobilization, litigation, legislative affairs & sustainable economic development.”

One of their programs is a mapping initiative using GIS to map health trends, particularly child asthma hospital admissions, air quality, and polluting facilities, as well as waterfront development and access issues.

“The first step toward environmental justice must be an awareness of the hazards. WEACT has an ongoing commitment to enhance community awareness of environmental hazards in northern Manhattan. The maps and ‘tour of hazards’ presented here are an incremental step toward the fulfillment of WEACT’s mission. They are the result of a joint project between WEACT and students from the City and Regional Planning Department at Cornell University. Cornell students created this web page based on interviews with area residents about environmental hazards in their neighborhoods.”

“On January 30, 1999, eight students, part of an Environmental Justice and GIS Workshop class with the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, met with WE ACT staff and several community leaders to ‘address the dire lack of useful environmental justice information accessible to communities in New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico.’ At the time, the nascent GIS system setup in the WE ACT office was a mere four months old, and their collaboration helped to shape its growth to where it stands today!”

Their Toxic Tour links points on the map to photos documenting toxic sites and their proximity to homes and schools.

In March, I blogged about MoveOn’s use of interactive maps to illustrate participation in their campaign events. The maps are a great way to visualize the scale of the event and provide feedback to the participants and the media.

In Stamen Design’s latest project for MoveOn, the map of feedback has itself become the means of participation.

On June 28, over 55,000 people in 4,600 house parties participated in an online conversation with Michael Moore about his film Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore spoke over a live, RealAudio feed while users asked questions via the map interface. User questions and responses to questions were displayed on the map in real time.

From Stamen’s press release:

“Stamen developed a live, map-based, interactive Q&A session that allows thousands of people to communicate visually via a moderated discussion. Visitors logging on can ‘see’ themselves and their submitted questions on the map, along with those of other MoveOn community members. Michael Moore, along with MoveOn directors Eli Pariser and Adam Ruben, will respond to active polls and answer questions from the online audience. The effect is both compelling and empowering. ‘If you can see yourself on the map, so much the better, because you can identify yourself as part of a large group of Americans all working towards the same thing,’ says Michal Migurski, Stamen’s Technical Lead. ‘You can get an immediate visual picture of just how widespread MoveOn’s membership is, and immediately connect with that community.’”

A archived version of the Flash file is in the works, but in the meantime, check out the screenshots in this chronology of the event.

The event also marked the launch of local voter registration and organizing drives around the country.

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Update: The map was used again for the July 18 house parties and screenings of Outfoxed. Here are some screenshots from that event.