The Pennsylvania Underground Railroad

To honor black history month, I went digging for maps. While the Underground Railroad is only a piece of that history, it has some of the most interesting map content. I came across this nice map of Underground Railroad sites around Kennett Square in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Quakers from the area were active in the abolitionist movement. The map is from the Kennett Square Underground Railroad Center.

A large print of the map is available here. Below is a detail:

I also found this schematic of the area from the website of Singing Wid a Sword in Ma Han  - a musical docudrama of the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania playing in New York City.

For a complete picture of the Railroad's breadth, here is a map from Slavery in America.

Map of the Week - Reverse Colonialism

Here is a "cool" map that recently appeared on Strange Maps. It was produced by cinematographer and multimedia artist Inuk Silis Høegh for a project called "Melting Barricades," part of the  Rethinking Nordic Colonialism exhibit. The map pictures Denmark being colonized by Greenland, not just by the people but also by climate and topography.

Greenlandic names are imposed on places with the native Danish names in parentheses. The country name and title of the map is Qallunaat Nunaat (Danmark) and its largest city is Nunap Utsussua (København.) The coastline has become jagged from glacial erosion and the frozen interior named after native Greenlanders. The author also appears to have named a strait after himself, the Høegh Havet. 

There are a lot of details that escape me because I don't speak either of the languages and don't know my Illuqarfiks from my Nunaqarfiks. Some understandable (to English speakers) place names include "Chilly Friday" and "Air Greenland Fjord." 


Høegh also made a video called Attack-atigiit showing the Greenlandic occupation of Denmark. The language barrier prevents me from all the clever details but the general picture is clear. Below are some stills. The first one shows quizzical Danes studying the above map. At least I think that's the idea.

                                                   
In this one Greenland is shown on a world map as a Mercator Giant, planting its flags around the world.

Find Yourself a City to Live In

Sunshine Superboy posted this map on his awesome Black Maps blog. I'd say more but the map speaks for itself. Click to make it readable Link to original post.

Map of the Week-What's in a Surname?

The latest issue of National Geographic includes this interesting map showing the most common last names (according to phone directories) by state.

The map is color coded by origin of surname with the most common blues indicating the United Kingdom (England, Scotland and Wales.) By clicking the map above you can zoom to a more readable level of detail. Here is the north to northeast part of the country.

Way up in Maine there are some French (via Canada) names. New England has some Irish names, New York and New Jersey have Spanish and a touch of German in Pennsylvania. Out in the Upper Midwest the brown Scandinavian and orange Germanic names are much more common.

Now for a short critique: By only using the most common names, a level of diversity is missed. For example, Asian names appear almost exclusively in California and Hawaii. The lack of state boundaries makes some distinctions difficult although the map looks cleaner without them. The by state format also has the effect of pushing the New York metro area Hispanic names out into the central part of the state where they are probably less common. Finally, a cartogram would have been more appropriate for this presentation, especially given the need to fit an equal number of names into each state. This format required most of New England to be considered as one state. A cartogram would have helped solve that and some of the other problems.

Map of the Week - The Sudan Referendum

This week the southern part of Sudan is voting on whether to secede from the north after two decades of civil war. Like many other formerly colonized nations, the boundaries imposed by outsiders have little to do with physical or cultural geography. This BBC article includes a series of maps that do a good job of illustrating the north/south divide in Sudan.
Geographically, the country is divided between desert in the north and vegetation in the south as seen from this NASA image. The white line is the proposed boundary.

The ethnic and religious divides are also pretty apparent.

Comparing education, infant mortality, water and sanitation shows that north is doing much better than the south. On the maps below showing education levels (green) and sanitation and fresh water (blue), the darker areas are more advanced.

Of course oil is a big issue, with many of the oil fields being in the border region and the pipelines carrying the oil to the north for transport. The oil producing border area of Abyei, shaded below, is expected to hold a separate referendum in whether to join the south or not.

More maps and descriptions be be found on the BBC site. For an even more detailed map of Sudan's oil resources see this previous Map of the Week.

Results of the secession referendum are expected in February and it is likely to pass, On July 9th 2011 there may be a new nation and we will all need new maps. Maybe I'll get a new country flag on my sidebar.

Map of the Week - Worldwide Number Ones

David McCandless is a London based author and designer. His Information is Beautiful site put up this map showing a selected superlative for most of the world's countries. The stats are from various sources including the CIA World Factbook, the UN and Wikipedia. Click the map for a readable version.

Chart of the Week-Mind the Gap!

Hans Rosling is a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He creates animated charts in an attempt to counter myths about the "developing world." Very basic shapes and colors make the patterns clear. Here is an example of his work, a chart showing child mortality vs. income for the countries of the world. The dots are sized by population and colored by region. Note the compass rose too.


However it gets more interesting to see these charts in action as they appear in his gapminder web site - the name inspired by London's Underground. While the chart above shows much of Asia and Africa lagging behind, the animations show the "developing world" catching up and improving at a quicker rate than much of the West did. Here is are some frames of a 200 year time sequence showing life expectancy vs. income. Click the frames to get the web page. You can also choose countries to highlight and hover over a point to get the country name.









If you have time and a decent internet connection, watch this video. He is entertaining and it may change the way you look at the world.

Japan's Google Earth Problem

Here's a story I missed while dedicating an entire month to bicycling:
The Japanese government and some equal rights groups are upset with Google for placing links to these gorgeous 18th and 19th Century woodblock maps of Tokyo (Edo) in Google Earth.*




Why? Because they show the locations of Buraku villages. The Burakumin are a minority group who were “outcasts” under old Japanese caste system, dating from the early feudal shogun era. This system identified the Burakumin as “untouchable” due to their employment in death related or "impure" professions such as gravediggers, undertakers, executioners and leather workers. They lived in secluded hamlets or ghettos.
These prejudices survive and some fear that this information will promote discrimination in previously forgotten Buraku areas. Google has responded by having references to Buraku villages removed, however they may be reinstated as "historical documents."
For an excellent summary see this entry from the Geographicus Antique Map Blog.


*Google Earth has a feature where you can link to maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection. The Japanese maps are from a collaboration between Rumsey and the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Map of the Week-Cotton Pickin' Democrats!

Yes these images have made the rounds of many other map blogs and yes I was supposedly done with Election 2008 but this is interesting. In my November 5th post I alluded to the county patterns and the possible race factor among others. Now we have courtesy of Allen Gathman from Southeast Missouri State University (Go Redhawks!) an explanation. He compared an 1860 map of cotton production to the pattern of southern counties that voted for Obama on this page. The Strangemaps blog took this a step further and actually overlaid the two maps. Each dot from the 1860 map represents 2000 bales of cotton.



There is the obvious racial component as the cotton belt counties have a higher concentration of African Americans. However, the Vigorous North blog takes this even another step beyond to show how the shallow ocean waters of the Cretaceous Period influenced the soil types and thus the suitability for cotton and thus the racial settlement patterns and thus the election results in the cotton belt counties.

Map of the Week addendum

Here is a nice Election 2008 cartogram that goes by county. I found it on this site. There's a more red/blue version but I like the purple gradations - it makes us seem less divided for what that's worth.
Unfortunately it's missing two states.
Watch out! The San Francisco Bay area is trying to escape!


And here's the same map geographically.

Map of the Week-Dissecting the States

We've probably all seen some version of this map by now:

What's interesting is when you drill down into the states and get the county patterns. The New York Times maps allow you to do this. Aside from the usual urban-rural dichotomy much of the patterns can be explained by ethnicity, race and income. I could speculate about these states but I'd rather just enjoy them as is.

Map of the Week-Corporal Punishment

Human Rights Watch is focused on trying to end corporal punishment in the United States. It is already banned in most states but still prevalent in many. See any pattern in this map?

Map of the Week 121-Colbert Maps Pennsylvania

It's an exciting week at Comedy Central as the Colbert Report is in Philadelphia for next week's Pennsylvania primary. The most striking feature of his Philadelphia set is a ridiculous map of Pennsylvania. Below is a video where he explains the map and Ben Franklin demonstrates early GIS map zooming capabilities (slow load warning)


By the way if youse want to better understand the Philly accent click here - the pictures will really help!
You'll also some good cheesesteak info on those pages.

Map of the Week 107-Mexico City 1550

The Map of Mexico 1550 Project was designed by Lily Diaz, a professor at Media Lab Helsinki. The map is reputed to have been authored by Alonso de Santa Cruz, royal cosmographer to emperor Charles V of Spain. It resides at the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. She took a series of overlapping, stereo images of the map and pieced them together as one digital image. Then a series of historical points of interest were laid on top with descriptions, photos and web links. As you zoom in on regions of the map these squares will get larger and pop up information as you hover over them. The author's description of the map is below:

"Painted on two sheets of parchment joined together at the center, the map shows the city surrounded by water and with canals between its buildings. The clearly drawn roads over the mountains to other parts of the country permit us to retrace the routes taken by the Spanish conquerors. The map also provides abundant information about the ethnography and the flora and fauna of the region during the early colonial days"

Map of the Week #104-The West Virginia Slaw Mapping Project

For those of you wondering where to go in West Virginia for a good coleslaw topped hot dog here is your map! The Slaw Mapping Project shows the diversity of the state's slaw preferences from the central areas where of course you get the slaw to those red, outlying counties where they may give you strange looks and ask "you mean coleslaw?" For even more info check out the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog.


Of course I couldn't resist this anatomy photo - it's almost like a map!

Map of the Week #95 - The Inglehart Values Map

The Inglehart Values Map visualizes the strong correlation of values in different cultures. Countries are described using two dimensions; secular-rational vs. traditional values and self-expression vs survival values. Countries that are geographically or culturally close cluster in different areas on the chart. A more detailed description is available by clicking below.

MOTW #54

Pop vs. Soda - what do you think? The image below links to several interactive maps and a whole research study about who calls soft drinks which generic names in various regions of the country. Like the famous "mayonnaise line" there are distinctive lines between pop, soda and coke regions. Also note the odd outlying regions around St Louis and Milwaukee.