(At the time you’re also wearing a t-shirt with a map of Wisconsin on a cow, obviously.)

There are also some (possibly stacked) bar charts nearby.

Over in the United States are some ordinary pie charts. Poor contrast among those colors, though!

Much of the rural U.S. is a big treemap, of course.

There must be a whole world of statistical graphics out there. Anybody have more examples?

The compass rose or north arrow on a map is an easy place for a cartographer to leave his or her artistic mark on a map, in the GIS era usually to laughable effect. Or for a more corporate production, it’s a good place to stick a logo. In the days when American road travel was a bit more of an exciting adventure than it is now, gas stations distributed some heavily-branded highway maps encouraging travel powered by their fuel. As I browsed through a few of these in my possession (acquired from items discarded by the Arthur Robinson Map Library over a couple of years), this lovely north arrow from a c. 1937 Sinclair road map of Ohio stood out as particularly amusing.

I don’t think this was ever Sinclair Oil’s actual logo—rather, it’s long been the still-familiar green apatosaurus—but the company has associated itself with dinosaur imagery in general. The map, by the way, was made by Rand McNally.

This site has said “We’re launching soon” for two harvests now. I still don’t know what it is, but it’s kind of cool.

My earlier post mentioned Mark Andrew Webber and his linocut maps, but since then he’s worked on a large and amazing map of Paris, which you’ve probably seen by now. More like awesomecut.

One of my favorite maps from the poster session at this years NACIS conference was Mouths Wide Open by Mike Boruta of Ohio University, mapping Athens, Ohio with things overheard around town as well as his own thoughts. With his permission, here is a larger section of the map. Mike, it must be noted, was the winner of the NACIS student poster competition for a different map, The Million Dollar Highway.

Hand-lettering is not typography of course, but we can be liberal here. Layla Curtis has several drawings of maps that consist, essentially, of labels. I think they are traced. On her site, look for them under Work->Drawings.

Portsmouth Vernacular by Jodie Silsby is a fabulous map of Portsmouth (UK) with the streets written as local slang phrases. Maps + typography + language? Yes, please!

Here’s a series of maps at Very Small Array showing the US with each state filled in by the most common location mentioned in craigslist “missed connections” posts.

Finally, this is as much as I am willing to show of an unfinished project right now, but here’s a tiny preview of a map I have slowly been working on for a while. For now you’ll just have to take my word that everything besides white space in the image below is made up of type.

A while ago Vanshnookenraggen (a.k.a. Andrew Lynch) heroically pored over materials in the Massachusetts State Transportation Library and posted a bunch of images of old Boston transit maps to a Flickr set. (He’s got the future covered too with FutureMBTA, an excellent round-up of conceivable transit expansions in the Boston area, complete with system maps.) The most eye-catching of the historical maps is the one shown in part above: a map of the transit system, in what was determined to be 1954, drawn in something of a bird’s-eye perspective. Go to the Flickr image page and view it at its full extent and size. It’s worth looking even if you don’t care a whit about Boston and its transit system, which is fine because Boston doesn’t care about you either.

The map is of course interesting for historical reasons, showing the system as it existed fifty-five years ago before various expansions, severe realignments, station name changes, and new nomenclature and graphic standards. But any old map will show those things. This one is of a style that is unique among any subway maps I’ve encountered.

Pictorial bird’s-eye view maps have been around for a long time, most prominently as illustrations of cities and towns in the Renaissance era in Europe and the 19th century in North America. The Library of Congress has a phenomenal collection of the latter online, which, if you’re anything like me, is liable to consume you for hours and hours as you marvel at old depictions of the places you know today. I know a lot less about the history of these maps than I would like to, but some of the more accurately drawn ones must have represented an astounding amount of legwork on the ground.

Those maps, I gather, were valued for their artistic worth and as some sort of advertising of cities and towns. Given that history, infrastructure seems like an unusual subject for bird’s-eye views. A few minutes of Googling only turned up two transportation-themed bird’s-eye views from 1909 and 1906, both at the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, where they’re listed among other Bird’s Eye Views of Maine. Scroll about two-thirds of the way down on that page for the transportation maps. Conveniently for this post, one of them includes Boston.

They are rather low-resolution scans, but at a glance the maps don’t appear to be designed wholly around the concept of a transportation map, but rather look more like traditional bird’s-eye views with transportation routes as an added theme. Note that the one posted above also contains insets from the vertical perspective, which presumably give a clearer picture of the network. Again my uneducated guess is that these bird’s-eye view maps were in some sense advertisements, making the systems look attractive to the trolley or railroad customers who might use them.

Back to the subway map. This map comes well after the era of popularity for city bird’s-eye views. Unlike the trolley and railroad maps above, and certainly unlike the whole-city maps, this one is clearly intended to be a map of the transit system only. I am curious what its exact purpose was. (And if anybody knows anybody who knows where some enthusiast has dedicated a web site to the history of Boston subway maps and graphics, hook me up with a link!) In my opinion this map is decent but not stellar as a usable system map, as it makes sacrifices on the two major (usually conflicting) points on which transit maps now seem to be judged: its geographic accuracy is not perfect and lacks enough detail to be of much use anyway, and its topology is discernible but hardly clear. It does sport an MTA (precursor to the modern MBTA) logo, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was designed as the everyday system map. Its style reminds me of illustrated visitor maps of cities or tourist sites, which are usable but are meant as much for their image as for their use on—or here sometimes under—the ground. That said, the map does indicate parking lots and ignores most non-transit details, so it must have been intended for at least some practical use.

Useful or not, the map is a faded page of awesome. I especially get a kick out of the fact that the details of all the station and track layouts are illustrated. It’s more than I need to know—or not enough more, if that makes sense—as a rider, but I’m learning things from it that I haven’t yet from any wordy text. (“So that’s where that descending track goes at Boylston!”)

The cover for Boston magazine’s annual Best of Boston issue is the Boston subway (“T”) map twisted to spell “the Best of Boston 2009,” with each line representing a category of the awards, and some of the stations labeled as subcategories, while still resembling the approximate geography of the subway system and the form of the official MBTA map. The “map” was done by designer Alex Camlin. See his portfolio entry, where he notes that this is actually modified a bit from the design he submitted. The Best Of article keeps up the theme, using a design incorporating elements of a fare ticket.

Inside the magazine, it is noted that Washingtonian magazine also used a subway map for the cover of its “best of” issue this summer (unfortunately hitting newsstands the same week as the deadly collision in June). This one maintains an unaltered form of the official Metro map. I can’t seem to find any larger images than the one below, so I don’t know what the labels say. Are they also award categories?

Anyway, awesome. Just sayin’.

Having been on a subway map kick for a while, and having yesterday fallen victim to an odd smoothie craving, it seemed right to snap this picture and post it here. This is the window of Boston Tea Stop in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s wordplay, see? You know you love it. (For those who don’t know, the transit system in Boston is commonly known as the “T” and is signified by the letter T in a circle, much like in “Tea” above.)

There’s not much to say about this, but it’s always nice to see interesting uses of maps. Here they’ve arranged their flavors on a map of most of Boston’s rapid transit lines. There appears to be some attempt to adhere to the color designations of the actual subway lines: for example, strawberry is at the end of the Red Line, green apple is at the end of one of the Green Line branches, and orange is at the end of (naturally) the Orange Line. But otherwise there doesn’t seem to be any meaning to the arrangement of flavors or topology, which makes this only a kind of cool map rather than a totally awesome map.

I chose passion fruit, by the way, which is the real-life equivalent of the State station on the Orange (and Blue) Line. I’ve yet to use that station to see if it is as tasty and contains as many balls of tapioca.

Lynch made use of many sketches and diagrams in the margins of the book. These are small, about an inch or less, and appear beside the section of text with which they are associated. They don’t break up the text, and the text doesn’t even include any references to them; they’re just right there next to the words you’re reading. Above, for example, are the paragraphs defining paths, edges, districts, and nodes, which along with landmarks (next page) are Lynch’s elements of the city image. Next to each paragraph is a little illustration of the concept described within. I really like this idea. Naturally, most interesting to me are the occasions where the margin diagrams are actually maps of real places.

Boston

Jersey City

Tiny, non-intrusive supplemental maps bring to mind the Tufte-championed sparklines, hence the post title. (I don’t care if “spark map” refers to something else; I make my own rules around here.) Most maps, unless they are linear and horizontal, are substantially more difficult to insert directly into text than is the archetypical sparkline, of course, but I think the spirit is at least similar. As a sparkline provides at a glance a reasonably clear picture of numerical data, so can a small map provide context and clarify otherwise confusing or vague text. For example, in the image below Lynch mentions Boston Common’s “peculiar shape, difficult to remember: a five-sided, right-angled figure.” Peculiar and difficult? What better way to give that sentence meaning than to include a little sketch map right beside the text, toward which your eyes will be moving anyway?

(By the way, he was talking about the shape being confusing to residents. If there is one American city whose description can be aided by small supplemental maps, it’s Boston. Then again, you’d think that in a city where a “square” bears no resemblance to that shape, the residents would have developed an understanding of irregular polygons with more than four sides.)

The interactive interweb equivalent, it would seem, might be some map—Google or what have you—embedded in a small pop-up revealed on mouse over of the text. I’m sure I’ve seen something like this, but handy examples escape me at the moment. This suggestion, however, can surely be much less effective than the old-fashioned marginalia approach, because any automated map is likely to contain too much detail for the purpose and because the effort of interaction can easily break the narrative just as well as a big image that breaks up the text. Other interactive suggestions and examples are welcome, but as far as I’m concerned these little maps in the margins are as good an idea on the web as they are in books.

It’s a globe! That dispenses booze! It’s perfect storage for carto-fuel for those late-night side projects. I wish we’d had this in the office back in grad school; we’d at least have looked a little stylish while imbibing all the liquor we kept there (either that or looked way more like alcoholics).

That’s the logo of DARBI (the Davis Square Area Resident-Business Initiative), representing Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. I moved to neighboring Cambridge several months ago and have become very aware that surface thoroughfares in Boston and environs are not long, continuous paths but rather connections between various neighborhood centers, whose central intersections often have a “Square” name. Most commonly, however, these “Squares” are nothing like that shape but instead are (as I am wont to describe it) clusterf***s of multitudes of one-way streets converging in a single spot. By car it is easy around here to travel between squares, but through them is another story entirely.

Davis Square (map) is no exception. But what is an exception is the attempt to assist motorists with this sign on approach to the intersection:

It’s a nice, simple map to help you quickly make sense of your five choices at the intersection. That map itself is something of an icon*, but the DARBI logo takes it a step further, stripping the map of its identifiers of map-ness.** That’s when a map logo achieves perfection in my eyes. It’s like a secret wink to cartographers; you’ve got to be one to realize that you’re actually looking at a map. Not true, I know, but sometimes you look for ways to make your line of work seem special.

* Via Boston Coasters one can purchase a number of items featuring that image (which is from B Beaucher Studios, to give credit). By the way, I highly recommend the Boston Coasters/Ward Maps store near Harvard Square (or online) for lots of stuff with cool maps and images of that ilk as well as old maps.

** And turning it into a friendly creature whose smile assures you that even if you get hopelessly lost attempting to navigate the square, it’s okay, because hey, you’re in wonderful Davis Square now, and by the way, next time you should probably just take the T.