Blogs about Maps
- MapLab from Bloomberg CityLabCityLab’s biweekly newsletter about maps that reveal and shape urban spaces.
- Strange MapsFrank Jacobs loves maps, but finds most atlases too predictable. He collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones—and has been writing the Strange Maps blog since 2006, first on WordPress and now for Big Think.
Selected Internet resource(s)
- ColorBrewer 2.0: Color Advice for MapsThis site helps you figure out what color scheme best illustrates your data.
- Guerrilla CartographyGuerrilla Cartography is a loose band of cartographers, researchers, and designers intent on widely promoting the cartographic arts and facilitating an expansion of the art, methods, and thematic scope of cartography, through collaborative projects and disruptive publishing.
- Mapping the NationThis is a companion site to the book, Mapping the Nation, which explores a tremendously creative era in American cartography.
- Measuring & Mapping from The SmithsonianWhere, how far, and how much? People have invented an astonishing array of devices to answer seemingly simple questions like these.
- Osher Map Library (University of Southern Maine)
The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education is the only separately established rare map library in northern New England. The Smith and Osher collections comprise fine examples of original maps, atlases, geographies, and globes spanning the years from 1475 to the present. - Shaded ReliefThe goal of this site is to assist practicing cartographers with the presentation of shaded relief and related raster art on maps.
Other library resource(s)
Cartography from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199874002The earliest maps date back perhaps 14,000 years, yet the academic discipline and its written literature are very much a creation of the 20th century. While the practice of cartography is well represented in the immense quantity of maps in collections and libraries worldwide, there are curiously few remaining ancient maps and almost no surviving “how-to” manuals, with the exception of Ptolemy’s Geography. The study of cartography as an academic discipline shares its origins with geography as a whole, with beginnings in Europe, and arriving in the United States as recently as the 1920s. ...- Community mapping from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199874002Community mapping is best characterized as a collaborative mapping exercise, in which local voices are articulated, as against standardized modes of mapping, which have historically frequently reflected more top-down or expert forms of knowledge. As such it is in theory participatory, inclusive, and appropriate to local needs, interests, and goals. In theory as well it should be accountable and transparent, ethical, and sensitive to sociocultural, political, and economic contexts. Frequently, of course, these laudable principles are not always realized. ...
- History of cartography from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199874002Until the 1980s, the study of the history of cartography was defined by two idealizations: (1) that maps are strictly factual statements and (2) that cartography is an innately progressive science that serves as a surrogate for Western civilization as a whole. Then, the recognition that maps are actually cultural texts made for specific functions transformed map history into an exciting, interdisciplinary field of study. ...
Selected bibliographies for cartography & cartographers
- Mapmakers of the sixteenth century and their maps: bio-bibliographies of the cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 byCall Number: Evans Map Room GA 198 .K37 1993ISBN: 9780932757050This bio-bibliography concentrates on the cartographers who contributed works to Ortellius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
The mapping of Africa: a cartobibliography of printed maps of the African continent to 1700 by
Call Number: Evans Map Room Z 6027.A2 B48 2007ISBN: 9789061944898The Mapping of Africa systematically categorizes and provides an overview of all printed maps showing the entire African continent published from 1508 to 1700. The author has undertaken a review of the literature, conducted an exhaustive investigation in many major libraries and private collections, analyzed these findings, and then compiled information on 174 distinctly separate maps of the African continent. ...
Maps and mapping of Africa: a resource guide by Call Number: Baker-Berry GA 1341 .M38 1997ISBN: 9781873836767Need a map on Africa or a specific African country? This guide will tell you if the map you're looking for exists.- New Hampshire maps to 1900: an annotated checklist byCall Number: Baker-Berry Z 6027.U5 C64ISBN: 9780874511666This book lists all the known maps for New Hampshire published before 1900. They are listed by towns and tell you where the maps should be. Caveat: always call the institution which houses the map you want to see to make sure they do have it.
- Tooley's dictionary of mapmakers byCall Number: Evans Map Room GA 198 .T661 1999An alphabetical listing of every known cartographer. Each entry contains a name, known dates of birth and death and a short list of their most significant cartographic works.
- Vermont maps prior to 1900: an annotated cartobibliography byCall Number: Evans Map Room Special Z 6027 .V4 C6This book lists all the known maps for Vermont published before 1900. They are listed by towns and tell you where the maps should be. Caveat: always call the institution which houses the map you want to see to make sure they do have it.
Directories
World mapping today by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9783598115349Publication Date: 2nd ed.Maps and digitized map data provide information for a broad range of applications, from business and Government, to engineering and military, to research and leisure. The new edition of the highly respected World Mapping Today is an essential reference for librarians and anyone concerned with the production, acquisition, distribution or use of maps and other forms of spatial data. World Mapping Today recognizes the inherent difficulties in finding out about the availability of maps and other forms of spatial data. ...
Guide to U.S. map resources by Call Number: Evans Map Room Ref. GA 193.U5 C62 2006ISBN: 9780810852686This third edition offers users a detailed snapshot of and guide to hundreds of map collections and cartographic resources in libraries and repositories throughout the nation. Substantial changes have occurred within library map collections over the past decade and a half, and not surprisingly, the computer has been at the core of most of these innovations. Geographic information systems (GIS), the World Wide Web, email, Portable Document Format, data sets, the Internet and digitization have all played revolutionary roles in transforming libraries--and map collections in particular--over the past fifteen years. ...
Cartography and maps in fiction & literature
Archipelagoes: insular fictions from chivalric romance to the novel by Call Number: Baker-Berry PQ 6142 .P56 2011ISBN: 9780816666720Archipelagoes examines insularity as the space for adventure in the Spanish book of chivalry, much like the space of the forest in French chivalric romance. In this innovative work, Simone Pinet explores the emergence of insularity as a privileged place for the location of adventure in Spanish literature in tandem with the cartographic genre of the isolario.
A great reckoning by Call Number: Baker-Berry PR 9199.4 .P464 G74 2016ISBN: 9781250022134When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes. Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets.
The mapping of love and death: a Maisie Dobbs novel by Call Number: Baker-Berry PR 6123 .I575 M37 2010ISBN: 9780061727665In the latest mystery in the New York Times bestselling series, Maisie Dobbs must unravel a case of wartime love and death; an investigation that leads her to a long-hidden affair between a young cartographer and a mysterious nurse.
Maps of the imagination: the writer as cartographer by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 3331 .T87 2004ISBN: 9781595340054Maps of the Imagination takes us on a magic carpet ride over terrain both familiar and exotic. Using the map as a metaphor, fiction writer Peter Turchi considers writing as a combination of exploration and presentation, all the while serving as an erudite and charming guide. He compares the way a writer leads a reader though the imaginary world of a story, novel, or poem to the way a mapmaker charts the physical world. ...
World views: metageographies of modernist fiction by Call Number: Baker-Berry PR 888 .M63 H44 2011ISBN: 9780199796106Early in the twentieth century, many novelists and geographers were attempting a similar undertaking: to connect everyday human experience to the large, unseen structures that formed the planet itself. World Views shows how both modernist and postcolonial writers borrowed metaphors, concepts,and theories from geography to make sense of a rapidly globalizing world.
You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination by Call Number: Baker-Berry GA 105.3 .H346 2004ISBN: 9781568984308Mapmaking fulfills one of our most ancient and deepseated desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not just show continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. There are maps to popular culture, from Gulliver's Island to Gilligan's Island. There are speculative maps of the world before it was known, and maps to secret places known only to the mapmaker. Artists' maps show another kind of uncharted realm: the imagination. What all these maps have in common is their creators' willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of geography or convention. You Are Here is a wide-ranging collection of such superbly inventive maps. ...
An exhibit from NOAA
- Charting a more perfect union ... 1861-1865This is a Civil War collection of maps and charts from NOAA.
- Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the Southern States of the United StatesOne of the first maps to show census data, to use new shading techniques and an early chloropleth map. The data in this map was collected for the 1860 census.
Keeping up with Cartography/GIS journal literature
Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for Cartography or GIS? And do you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.
You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.
Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.