maps | Chris Aldrich

What is your creative dream for the web?

Often the IndieWeb is re-creating functionality from traditional media or the social spaces to our own sites. Who is going to innovate and turn the tide in the other direction?

Where is the avant guarde? Who is going to be the next Stan Brakhage, George Antheil, Luis Buñuel, or Walter Murch of the web?

How can we push corporate social media back onto their heels?

I can’t wait for someone to create the next social media craze because it’s something they’re creatively posting on their own website as a media format that social silos don’t allow.

Who is experimenting with quirky multimedia posts on their websites? Who’s going to have the next meme generator/Tik Tok/SnapChat stories/inventive new functionality first? I’m imagining something in the vein of Marty’s Kapowski, Aaron’s emoji avatars, or Jeremy’s Indy maps, but I’m sure we could go crazier and push the envelope even further.

Bonus points if it’s done in the form of a micropub client! 🙂

Read Firefighters Rescue People From Rooftop of Burning West LA High-Rise Building (NBC Los Angeles)

Firefighters are battling flames Wednesday at a West Los Angeles high-rise building.

This article is the first time I’ve seen a Waze-based map embedded into a web page. It’s a particularly interesting use case since the fire described is along one of the busiest thoroughfares in West Los Angeles during rush hour, so having real-time traffic surrounding it can be quite useful to telling the real-time story from a local news perspective.

I can imagine that these would also be helpful on event posts or sites like Meetup.com where people are interested in traffic patterns and/or parking surrounding a particular destination.

👓 The Woodard projection | Jon Udell

Read The Woodard projection by

Jon Udell (Jon Udell)

In a memorable episode of The West Wing, visitors from the Cartographers for Social Justice upend CJ’s and Josh’s worldviews.

Cartographer: “The Peters projection.”

CJ: “What the hell is that?”

Cartographer: “It’s where you’ve been living this whole time.”

I’m having the same reaction to Colin Woodard’s 2011 book American Nations. He sees North America as three federations of nations. The federation we call the United States comprises nations he calls Yankeedom, New Netherland, The Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, The Deep South, El Norte, The Far West, and The Left Coast.

Here’s his definition of a nation:

A nation is a group of people who share — or believe they share — a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.”

I love the concept of this thesis! Ordering a copy of the book for myself.

I’ve lived in Greater Appalachia, The Deep South, Yankeedom, The Midlands, and the Left Coast and I’ve always unconsciously known many of these borders within culture. It’s often been difficult to describe the subtle cultural shifts and divides between many of these places to others. I can’t wait to read a book that delves into all of it depth.

👓 Google Maps’s Moat | Justin O’Beirne

Read Google Maps’s Moat by Justin O’Beirne (Justin O’Beirne)

How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?

🔖 Mapping Uncertainty on the Oregon Trail

Bookmarked Mapping Uncertainty on the Oregon Trail by Anelise H. Shrout

In the early 1840s the American West, though claimed by the United States, was considered by many white Americans to be untamed, wild, and possibly rife with unknown wealth. This was a West that existed largely in the American imagination. In fact, the area west of the Missouri was home to complex Native societies, was divided into political structures, and was intimately known, if not formally mapped. These two competing Wests - that imagined by many Americans and that inhabited by Souix, Pawnee, Snake and Nez Pierce tribes - were mapped both geographically and textually by John C. Frémont between 1842 and 1843. Frémont set out from St. Louis in the summer of 1842, and began to chronicle his journey west, in the wake of "emigrants" who were moving to the Oregon Territory - a route known as the "Oregon Trail." Frémont's first expedition covered the land between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains during the summer and fall of 1842. In the summer of 1843 he set out to write an account of the second half of the Oregon Trail, from the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River in Oregon. The maps contained here are drawn from the Library of Congress's collection "Topographical map of the road from Missouri to Oregon, commencing at the mouth of the Kansas in the Missouri River and ending at the mouth of the Walla-Wallah in the Columbia." They were created using Frémont's journal, and cover his first and second expeditions. I have annotated the maps with accounts of the resting places, flora, fauna, and people Frémont's and his party encountered on their journey west.

You’ve played the game Oregon Trail via DOS (as a child), online, or via app but have you traced the actual trail taken by John C. Frémont between 1842 and 1843? Now you can with this daily interactive map with journal.

Thanks Anelise Shrout!

Authagraph by Hajime Narukawa [ 鳴川肇 ] | TEDxSeeds 2011

Watched The AuthaGraph Map from TEDxSeeds 2011 | YouTube

An endless world map: Viewing the world through "Authagraph"

"Mr. Narukawa is the inventor of Authagraph, a world map designed to fit the world into a rectangle while almost perfectly maintaining the continents' relative size. It is mathematically impossible to precisely project the earth's sphere onto a rectangle. As such, previous methods would succeed in either taking on a rectangular shape or being true to the size ratio and shape of each continent, but never in both. Authagraph is groundbreaking in that it takes on both of those qualities, making it applicable to various themes such as sea routes, geology, meteorology and world history in ways never thought possible.

Instead of abstracting the globe into a cylinder, then a plane, as the more common Mercator projection map does, the AuthaGraph turns the Earth into a tetrahedron, which then unfolds in any number of ways. The map can then be tessellated similar to the way that we can traverse the planet–without ever coming to an end.

Rather than having just one focal point—the North Atlantic in Mercator’s case—nearly any place around the Earth can be at the center. The effect also means that the relative sizes of countries and their locations are much more representative than prior maps.

Those who remember the Gall-Peters Projection map featured on The West Wing will see that this is a step better.

For more details, see also Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World: See the AuthaGraph | Open Culture

Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World: See the AuthaGraph | Open Culture

Read Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World: See the AuthaGraph Open Culture (openculture.com)