Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

This is precious! The original.

How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell by Kashmir Hill.

From the post:

An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.
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If you use “IP mapping,” you owe it to yourself and your customers to give Kahsmir’s story a close and careful read.

Nope, no spoilers, you have to read the story to appreciate how reasonable and good faith decisions can over time result in very bad unintended consequences.

Enjoy!

PS: What sort of implied threat is a broken toilet? Just curious, thought you might know.

All The Pubs In Britain & Ireland & Nothing Else by Ramiro Gómez.

From the post:

The map above is elegant in its simplicity. It shows Great Britain and Ireland drawn from pubs. Each blue dot represents a single pub using data extracted from OpenStreetMap with the Matplotlib Basemap Toolkit.

Interestingly, if the same map had been drawn using the number of pubs from 1980 it would have looked quite different.

In total, the map has 29,195 pub locations across both the UK and Ireland. However, the UK alone has lost 21,000 pubs since 1980 according to the Institute of Economic Affairs, with half of these occurring since 2006.

Therefore, a map from 1980 might have had nearly twice as many dots as the one above and possibly not all in the same places. Going back even further, there were a reported 99,000 pubs in the UK in 1905.

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See Ramiro’s post for the map but more importantly, book travel to the UK to help stem the loss of pubs!

How many of the 29,195 pubs in the UK have you visited?

The most contested real estate on Earth? (PDF)

I won’t try to reproduce a smaller version of this image because it would simply befoul rather remarkable work.

From the image (top right):

Muslims call it the Noble Sanctuary. Jews and Christians call it the Temple Mount. Built atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, this 36-acre site is the place where seminal events in Islam, Judaism and Christianity are said to have taken place, and it has been a flash point of conflict for millenniums. Many aspects of its meaning and history are still disputed by religious and political leaders, scholars, and even archaeologists. Several cycles of building and destruction have shaped what is on this hilltop today.

Great as far as it goes but the lower left bottom gives the impression that Hezekiah expanded the temple mount after Ahaz (his predecessor) plundered it. So legend holds but that leaves the reader with the false impression that the Jewish temple came to the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount first.

If you recall your Sunday School lessons, David conquers Jerusalem (Jebus), as told in 1 Chronicles 11:4-9.

Jerusalem was a sacred site long before David or the Israelites appear in the historical record. How long? Several thousand years at least but the type of excavation required to detail that part of the city’s history won’t happen any time soon.

Do enjoy the map, it is very impressive.

Magnificent Maps of New York by Kate Marshall.

From the post:

The British Library’s ongoing project to catalogue and digitise the King’s Topographical Collection, some 40,000 maps, prints and drawings collected by George III, has highlighted some extraordinary treasures. The improved and up-dated catalogue records are now accessible to all, anywhere in the world, via the Library’s catalogue, Explore, and offer a springboard for enhanced study.

Your donations to this and other projects enable us to digitise more of our collections, the results of which are invaluable. One such example of further research using material digitised with help from donors is the recently published book by Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, Revolution. Mapping the Road to American Independence, 1755-1783, which features a number of maps from the K.Top.
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The Explore link takes to the main interface for the British Library but Maps is a more direct route to the map collection materials.

Practically everyone has made school presentations about their country’s history. With resources such as the British Map collection becoming available online, it isn’t too much to expect student to supplement their reports with historical maps.

Enjoy!

Visit every place on this vintage US map for the most epic road trip ever by Phil Edwards.

Part of the joy of this map comes from being old enough to remember maps similar to this one.

Critics can scan the map for what isn’t represented as tourist draws.

Consider it to be a snapshot of the styles and interests.

Most notable absence? Cape Canaveral.

I suspect its absence reflects the lead time involved in the drafting and publishing of a map at the time.

Explorer 1 (1958) and the first American in space, Alan Shepard (1961), both preceded this map.

Enjoy!

This interactive map shows how ‘wrong’ other maps are by Adam Taylor.

From the post:

Given how popular the Mercator projection is, it’s wise to question how it makes us view the world. Many have noted, for example, how the distortion around the poles makes Africa look smaller than Greenland, when in reality Africa is about 14.5 times as big. In 2010, graphic artist Kai Krause made a map to illustrate just how big the African continent is. He found that he was able to fit the United States, India and much of Europe inside the outline of the African continent.

Inspired by Krause’s map, James Talmage, and Damon Maneice, two computer developers based out of Detroit, created an interactive graphic that really puts the distortion caused by the Mercator map into perspective. The tool, dubbed “The True Size” allows you to type in the name of any country and move the outline around to see how the scale of the country gets distorted the closer it gets to the poles.

Of course, one thing the map shows well is the sheer size of Africa. Here it is compared with the United States, China and India.

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This is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the physical size of countries, but it is also an illustration that no map is “wrong,” some display the information you seek better than others.

For another interesting take on world maps, see WorldMapper where you will find gems like:

GDP Wealth

Absolute Poverty

Or you can rank countries by their contributions to science:

Science Research

None of these maps is more “true” than the others.

Which one you choose depends on the cause you want to advance.

MapFig

Whether you are tracking the latest outrageous statements from the Repubicans for U.S. President Clown Car or have more serious mapping purposes in mind, you need to take a look at MapFig. There are plugins from WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Omeka, along with a host of useful features.

There is one feature in particular I want to call to your attention: “Create highly customized leaflet maps quickly and easily.”

I stumbled over that sentence because I have never encountered “leaflet” maps before. Street, terrain, weather, historical, geological, archaeological, astronomical, etc., but no “leaflet” maps. Do they mean a format size? As in a leaflet for distribution? Seems unlikely because it is delivered electronically.

FAQ was no help. No hits at all.

Of course, you are laughing at this point because you know that “Leaflet” (note the uppercase “L”) is a JavaScript library developed by Vladimir Agafonkin.

So a “leaflet map” is one created using the Leftlet Javascript Library.

Clearer to say “Create highly customized maps quickly and easily using the Leaflet JS library.”

Yes?

Enjoy!