Getmapping

This might be our favourite map of London!

The Plan to Map Illegal Fishing From Space

"Illicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.

Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as they chase down prey and trawl the seabed. These tools are so effective that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested, and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their sustainable limits, according to the FAO. For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.”

Mapping the loudest/quietest places in the United States

”[…] Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels—a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say. That’s orders of magnitude quieter than most cities  where noise levels average 50 to 60 decibels […]”

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An Illustrated Cross Section of Hong Kong’s Infamous Kowloon Walled City

"The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was built gradually—building on top of building—over time. Without a single architect, the ungoverned and most densely populated district became a haven for drugs, crime and prostitution until it was demolished in 1993. Photo documentation of the site exists but for the most part much of the inner-workings of the city remained a mystery."

Ptolemy’s World Map

"With its rich colours and its distinctive elegant roman type, the 1482 Ulm Ptolemy was one of the finest and most ambitious printing projects of the fifteenth century: a masterpiece of the printers’ art, with its bold, decorative maps. The world map was signed at its head as the work of Johannes Schnitzer de Armsheim, who may have cut all the maps, and the colophon specifically credits the contribution of Donnus Nicolaus (“Opus donni Nicolai Germani secundum Ptolomeum finit”).

Animation about the development of the inner city of Berlin from 1940 to 2010.

1940 | 1953 | 1989 | 2001 | 2001

This Interactive Map Shows The World’s Ecosystems In Freakish Detail

“The U.S. Geological Survey and Esri have created a zoomable map that lets you explore all of the world’s ecological land units down to an astounding 820 foot (250 meter) resolution. Check it out and tell us about your “ecological land unit.”

Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien

"The maps J.R.R. Tolkien drew to accompany his tales are their own form of story, sketching out the boundaries of his imagined worlds. But could our own, real cities be just as dramatic a fantasy setting? The answer is yes."

Cartographic Assemblages

Maps help us find our way in the world (or make us even more lost), but the concept of a map can also be applied when trying to organize together memories, identity, narrative and materiality.

Artist Lindsey Dunnagan explores the mapping of memories and identity in her series Mapping the Intangible, while in Mapping New Worlds, the artist focuses on manipulating topography, hinting at familiar places, but distorted in a way that the familiar becomes alien.

The materiality of Dunnagan’s work in Mapping the Intangible is significant because the watercolour is mixed with salt, allowing unexpected patterns to form, as if creating city limits, but also transform over time as the salt dries and flakes off. The artist focuses on locations that are familiar and important to her memories and identity, yet unrecognizable to the viewer because the maps juxtapose on one another, creating “false connections”, rather serving, as the artist states, “as an atlas of memory that informs identity”. The same kind of atlas, albeit abstract, can be found in Mapping New Worlds but rather than focusing just on identity and memory, the pieces in this series focus on “concepts of city development, communication, and abstracted” landscape. Familiar images such as cities and roads are obstructed by rivers or clouds, creating an almost mythological narrative of the geography.

Similar to Dunnagan’s work, is that of Scott W. Bradford’s, but rather than mapping out specific locations which focus on geography, Bradford pieces together various elements which map out a narrative through materiality. The artist states that he links “the materiality of the surface to the drawing itself, either metaphorically or in terms of the narrative” in order to emphasize that it is constructed; his maps are fiction. In both his series’ Blueshift and Journey to Nowhere, stories are being told.

Each piece maps out its own narrative, but when the series is presented as a whole, the works become a collection of stories, mapping out an overall narrative of materiality.

Mapping 92 Years of Bigfoot Sightings

“On the hunt for Bigfoot?  Josh Stevens, a PhD candidate in Geography at Penn State, has stumbled across a treasure trove of Bigfoot sightings.  Stevens discovered that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has catalogued Bigfoot/Sasquatch sightings in the United States and Canada stretching back to 1921.

The database hosted by BFRO contains thousands of geocoded and timestamped logs describing sightings of the mythical beast.  Stevens consolidated a total of 3,313 sightings from 1921 to 2013.  He then mapped and graphed out the sightings to look for patterns.”