kottke.org posts about maps
The Ghost Map is a book about:
- a bacterium
- the human body
- a geographical map
- a man
- a working friendship
- a household
- a city government
- a neighborhood
- a waste management system1
- an epidemic
- a city
- human civilization
You hooked yet? Well, you should be. As the narrative unfolds around the 1854 London cholera epidemic, author Steven Johnson weaves all of these social, geographical, and biological structures/webs/networks into a scientific parable for the contemporary world. The book is at its best when it zooms among these different scales in a Powers of Ten-like fashion (something Johnson calls The Long Zoom), demonstrating the interplay between them: the way the geography of a neighborhood affected the spread of a virus, how ideas spreading within a social context are like an epidemic, or the comparison between the organism of the city and the geography of a bacterial colony within the human colon. None of this is surprising if you’ve read anything about emergence, complexity, or social scale invariance, but Johnson effectively demonstrates how tightly coupled the development of (as well as our understanding of) viral epidemics and large cities were across all of these scales.
The other main theme I saw in the book is how inherently messy science is. Unlike many biographies, The Ghost Map doesn’t try to tie everything up into a nice little package to make a better story. The cholera epidemic and its resolution was sloppy; there was no aha! moment where everyone involved understood what was going on and knew what had to be done. But the scientific method applied by John Snow to the situation was solid and as more evidence became available over the years, his theory of and solution to cholera epidemics were revealed as actual fact. Johnson reminds us that that’s how science works most of the time; science is a process, not a set of facts and theories. During the recent debate in the US over evolution and intelligent design, I felt a reluctance on the part of scientists to admit to this messiness because it would give an opening to their detractors: “haha, so you admit you don’t know what’s going on at all!” Which is unfortunate, because science is powerful in its nuance and rough edges (in some ways, science is what happens at the margins) in helping us understand ourselves and the world we live in.
[1] Had Mark Kurlansky written this book, it would have been called “Shit: How Human Effluence Changed the World”. ↩
It’s that time of year again in the Northern Hemisphere: the leaves are changing. Here’s a map of the peak foliage times for the US. The Northeast had better get a cold snap soon or the leaves will be as lackluster as last year.
The National Park Service has made some of their map symbols and patterns (lava/reef, sand, swamp, and tree) freely available for download in PDF and Illustrator formats. (via peterme)
Exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library in NYC: Places & Spaces, Mapping Science (thru Aug 31). An online exhibition is also available or browse all the maps.
Income distributions for various US cities for the purpose of testing the “donut” hypothesis, “the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the ‘revitalized’ downtown, and the poor stuck in between.” The hypothesis is valid for older cities, but in newer ones, “one finds ‘wedges’ of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery”. (via moon river)
The Mannahatta Project is constructing maps of what Manhattan was like in 1609, before its “discovery” by Henry Hudson. “The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted.” See also The Viele Map of Manhattan.
Michael Frumin tried to get some NYC subway data from the New York City Transit Authority through Freedom Of Information Legislation for a project he wanted to do, but they denied his requests. “Given a database of anonymized Metrocard ‘swipes’ over some small period of time, Frumin imagined that a multitude of explorations could be embarked upon. Below is a concept sketch for one specific project idea — a visualization, for each station in the system, of the range of locations in the city that people travel to from that area.” Nice Minard-esque prototype map.
Sarah Trigg’s work combines geographic maps with biological forms. “The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells.” More here. (via moon river)
The Viele Map of Manhattan was made in 1865 and shows the original boundaries and waterways of the city. Here’s a thumbnail view (with prints for sale) and the David Rumsey Map Collection has a zoomable version that you can explore. (thx, meg)
Update: Took me forever this morning, but I cobbled together a high-res version of the Viele map from the PITA Java applet on the Rumsey site. Warning: the image is quite large (9859 x 3115, 8.6 Mb) so it might crash your browser if you attempt to look at it…better to save it to a local drive and open it up in an image viewer.
Update: Here’s a simple zoomable/scrollable version (a la Google Maps) of the high-res image that I whipped up with Zoomify. Thanks to Aaron for the suggestion.
So many New Yorkers retire to Florida, it makes sense to see what Manhattan looks like next to Miami. See also my Manhattan Elsewhere project, a map mashup featuring the island of Manhattan visiting Chicago, Boston, San Franciso, etc.
My friend Maciej found this map of NYC divided into sections that contain the same populations as other American cities. The page containing the image says it’s from an unknown “City of New York publication”. Anyone know where it’s from or where to get a better copy? Email me.
A few months ago, I found a map online (which I cannot for the life of me relocate and I’m keen to find it again…any ideas? it’s from Bill Rankin’s The Errant Isle of Manhattan…see update below) of Manhattan pasted next to Chicago, as if the island had taken up permanent residence in Lake Michigan. Recently I decided to explore the unique aspect of Manhattan’s scale with a series of similar maps of places I’ve been to or lived in: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Barron, WI (my hometown). Manhattan Elsewhere is the result.
Depending on your vantage point, Manhattan seems either very big or very small. On complete map of the New York City area, Manhattan is dwarfed in size by the other four boroughs and surrounding megopolis. But for someone on the ground in Manhattan, the population density, the height of the buildings, the endless number of things to do, and the fact that many people don’t often leave their neighborhoods, much less the island, for weeks/months on end makes it seem a very large place indeed. This divergence sense of scales can cause quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for residents and visitors alike.
For the top image, I used the Google Maps representations of Manhattan and Chicago to create a composite map. In the bottom image, I used Google Earth’s 3-D views to create a approximate view of Manhattan from Chicago. In all cases, Manhattan is to scale with the other cities. Click through for larger images and other cities.
Update: The map on which Manhattan Elsewhere is based was done by Bill Rankin, who runs the excellent Radical Cartography site, and is part of The Errant Isle of Manhattan project. He also did maps for Boston, SF, Door County, WI, Philly, and Los Angeles (look at how gigantic LA is!), which I completely forgot about. He also made more of an effort than I did to connect the roads. (thx, zach)
In March of 2004, an artist named Tofu began constructing a map comprised only of the hometowns of American men and women killed in Iraq (map detail). “One of the disturbing by products of this work are the maps of various states with many rectangular pieces missing where I cut out towns.” (via moon river)
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