Category: cartography

Things have gotten boring with work, grad school and the baby, so I’ve decided to do a couple maps for Ooligan Press, PSU’s publisher. I’ll be creating some maps about Fort Clatsop and Lewis & Clark’s stay for a book about Fort Clatsop. Should be fun and will provide me with an opportunity to get some work published.

Tuesday’s lecture in my map design class covered printing/press issues. While much of the lecture was for historical reference only, I was surprised how much I already knew because of my college summer job working for Shields Printing. The printing process, quality control, on-job injuries, smack-talk about which WCW wrester was best and 115F temperatures all turned up in this last lecture. Plus, some of the darkroom techniques I learned in high school came in handy when looking at how final prints are set up. A classmate used the word syncronicity to describe the weird combinations of things she was noticing that afternoon and I thought it was very syncronicitous that she through out that word.

During tonight’s review lecture on the exploratory uses of GIS and mapping, the instructor referred to the “diarrhea maps” in London. He corrected himself right away, having meant John Snow’s maps of cholera in London, but I couldn’t help but think of Jackson Pollock and what diarrhea maps might look like.

Over christmas my mother gave me some maps/charts that my Grandma had. They’re charts of the Pacific ocean with currents and political boundaries printed on some sort of fabric. This site suggests that the maps are printed on rayon, though others say silk. Apparently the idea came out of MI9, a sub-unit of British Intelligence as a means to provide compact, foldable maps that could be used for troops to escape capture and return safely. I’m not sure what the exact intent of these maps was, or what my great-uncle used them for, but they’re pretty damn cool.

The two I got (well, three – but two are duplicates) are an Army-Air Force series of Japan and the South China Sea (No. C-52) and a Naval Air Combat Intelligence-Hydrographic Office map of the Western Pacific with two sides for different currents during different seasons (NACI-HO No. S-12). The idea for the maps is pretty dark but really quite functional and they have definitely stood up well over time. I wonder how one goes about printing on silk with an ink-jet?

This one has the Bikini Atoll on it, which is one of those places you really hope you didn’t find yourself during WWII. Imagine looking for landmarks and seeing a mushroom cloud. That’d really inspire you to keep trying to find your way back to civilization.

We’re trying to think of something cool to do with the maps but it’s hard to decide because both sides have something. I’d feel guilty about making some boxers out of it, and well, scarfs just aren’t my thing.

I spotted a link to Wayfaring from Urban Cartography. Looks like a lot of fun, but I think I’m mostly enamored with the page design itself. Lovely.

Also, Google Maps & Trimet launched a Transit project that seems less intuitive and functional than Trimet’s own route finder. The benefit is a visual map, I guess. I found the interface didn’t work when scrolling up and down.

Next? I hear there’s a MacOSX version of Google Earth coming. Woohoo!