(This is pretty much cross-posted from the Axis Maps blog.)

Just a quick promotional note in case I still have a remaining shred of dignity: a couple of weeks ago the fellas and I at Axis Maps launched a new store with two new typographic city maps. The Washington, DC map depicts most of the District with some surrounding areas, and the New York City map shows the whole of Manhattan as well as sections of adjacent boroughs and New Jersey cities. We’ve set up our own operation now and are stocked with offset prints, having graduated from Zazzle.

For a brief period there was also a limited edition letterpress print of San Francisco. It sold out in a few hours, much to our delight, but we’re currently thinking about future letterpress runs of this and other cities.

So in summary: now available are new typographic maps of New York and Washington, and all the rest (San Francisco, Chicago color and black & white, and Boston).

His latest project is a series of maps of river systems done in a Beck-ish transit map style, a highly appropriate and even somewhat useful design for what are, after all, linear networks. He began with the whole Mississippi River system and is expanding into smaller regional maps, having completed Michigan, Southern New England, and Northern California so far. The results are attractive and for sale to satisfy our bare walls.

Meanwhile, Daniel has also started a map design blog, where among other things you can read about the design details and process behind these cartogram-like river maps.

One last link: now that his Twitter map is out there, he’s actually been persuaded to join Twitter (@pinakographos), if you need another map person to follow (and you know you do).

Here are most (but not all) of the map-based travel posters from the Flickr set. Click them to visit their respective photo pages, where you can see them in larger sizes.

Bonus: produce crate labels!

Incidentally, as the true map geeks out there surely know, BPL also has an excellent map collection, with many maps viewable online through their own site as well as Flickr.

Apart from the subject matter, there are several interesting things about the controls and functionality, but what caught my attention most was the temporal legend, shown in a bit more detail below.

It shows the number of incidents for every day (colored squares), week (first column of bars), and month (second column of bars) of the year, as well as composite totals for each day of the week (at the bottom). So much data in a single, relatively simple display!

It’s not merely a chart, of course. It’s fully interactive, allowing the user to probe for number values and click on any part of it to make the map display data for a particular day, week, or month. You can also play the animation across any of the units. Playing through a composite week is an example of temporal re-expression (about two-thirds of the way down the page in that link), a powerful way of viewing temporal data in composite slices instead of normal linear time.

The legend here is an adaptation of the “Reruns” view from former GeoVISTA researcher Chris Weaver’s Improvise software, in this case designed specifically for a year of daily data. In a more open visualization environment, it would allow for user-defined views of cyclical time.

I don’t know exactly how revolutionary this kind of control is in high-end visualization, but it’s really nice to see it accomplished so clearly in a more accessible interactive web map meant for public consumption.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve started another blogging venture. You may have noticed a fair number of Boston-themed posts here over the past year or two. I’ve become very interested in the unique geography of this place and maps thereof. In part to remove the local-interest clutter from this blog, the topic seemed like it could sustain its own site. With the partnership of UW-Madison Geography PhD candidate Tim Wallace (Boston-area native), I have established the mappish, graphic-ish, geography-ish site Bostonography.

Bostonography. Enjoy or ignore it as you please! Actual content coming soon. Bear with us as figure out the best way to trick out the default WordPress theme. (Not that it isn’t a nice theme!)

Are you a student who has made an interactive or animated map ? Do you like fame and money? If yes, consider submitting your map to the 2010 NACIS Student Web Mapping Competition. The winner of each category (interactive and animated) walks away with a cool $500 prize. The winning maps will be presented in a couple of weeks at the NACIS annual meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, and usually are featured on the NACIS web site until the next year. I had the honor of winning this prize a few years ago, but like a fool I blew all the money on sandwiches for my friends.

These were supposed to be due about a week ago, but the deadline has now been extended to October 1. (That is official, although the website may not reflect the update.) So students, hurry and send in your best! It’s a good place to have your work recognized, and we all like to look at cool maps. Check the NACIS site for details on who and what is eligible and how to submit your entry.

NACIS (the North American Cartographic Information Society) is a professional/academic association of cartographers, and it comes highly recommended as a community of people whose careers and studies are dedicated to maps. If you might call yourself a cartographer, consider joining NACIS and attending the annual meeting sometime.

While preparing data for another spare time local interest map (forthcoming), I ran across a tiny bit of information (“Horsford’s Norse exploration theory”) that ended up captivating me for the weekend. It is the story of Norumbega, at various points a regional name applied to New England, a legendary city of riches, and thanks to a baking powder magnate, an 11th-century Viking city established by Leif Erikson in the modern-day Boston area.

Now, having been aware of this for no more than two days, and knowing little about historical cartography, I won’t claim any expertise or even to have all my facts straight, but let me summarize as best as I can.

In the 16th Century, not long after the European “discovery” of the Americas, Norumbega (with varied spellings and an uncertain etymology) began to appear on maps as the name for roughly what is now New England. It would come to refer to a region, a river, and a city, variously. As a city, it was apparently from the beginning legend—a place that was said to exist (no doubt along with other cities) but which had not been located. More than that, it came to be a downright mythical place, a city of endless riches—something like a northern El Dorado. The story of David Ingram, a shipwrecked English sailor who trekked all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to New England, made the rounds:

He saw kings decorated with rubies six inches long; and they were borne on chairs of silver and crystal, adorned with precious stones. He saw pearls as common as pebbles, and the natives were laden down by their ornaments of gold and silver. The city of Bega was three-quarters of a mile long and had many streets wider than those of London. Some houses had massive pillars of crystal and silver

Somehow Norumbega became associated more specifically with the Penobscot River in present-day Maine, with the city being around where Bangor is now. Samuel de Champlain explored the area in 1605, apparently looking for the city, but found no evidence of civilization. It seems that this quieted the myths of Norumbega’s fabulous wealth. But the name didn’t disappear and will still be encountered today in that area.

Many maps show the Norumbega region, and I can’t hope to do justice to that cartographic history, but Cornelius Wytfliet’s 1597 map, shown in detail at the top of this post and in full below (see a zoomable high-res version here) is a good example, and its Norumbega does bear some resemblance to the Penobscot River and Bangor.

Let’s fast-forward about 270 years to the dealings of high society in Boston, for the twist that makes Norumbega different from typical cartographic legend. In the 1870s a committee formed to back the erection of a statue of Leif Erikson, the famous Norse explorer. Proposing this was the renowned Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, with support from some others like the prominent American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although proof would not be uncovered for another ninety years in Newfoundland, by this time the theory of Viking discovery of North America was somewhat popular. Furthermore some people had a notion that this Viking settlement had occurred in New England, i.e., that Vinland was or included New England. Gloria Polizzotti Greis of the Needham (Massachusetts) Historical Society explains why the idea of Norse discovery had traction with the Protestant elite of Boston:

So, Boston’s elite in their well-heeled gathering places, began to identify themselves with, of all people, Leif Eriksson. Why? Because of Christopher Columbus.

Columbus personified the growing political and social power of Boston’s Catholic immigrants. Even though the Irish and Italians maintained distinct communities themselves, to the old-line Protestant establishment they represented a significant threat to the status quo.

[...]

For the Protestant elite of Boston then, Leif Eriksson was the anti-Columbus. They saw him as fair and Nordic, where Columbus was Italian; Columbus brought (as they thought) superstition and slavery to the New World, Leif brought progress and commerce; if the possibility had existed in his day, Leif was the kind of man who would certainly have been, well – Protestant, like them.

Anyway, as time wore on, and as backers like Longfellow died, there emerged a Leif Erikson champion in Eben Horsford, a chemist and Science professor at Harvard. Horsford was best known for his formulation of baking powder but was also a strong proponent of the New England-as-Vinland theory in his spare time. Beyond that, he was convinced that the legendary Norumbega was actually Vinland. Using his baking powder fortune, he devoted much effort to uncovering evidence.

By 1890 or so, after a bit of digging near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Horsford claimed to have found the site of Leif Erikson’s house at Gerry’s Landing on the Charles River near what is now Mt. Auburn Hospital (which is the last known site of my appendix, by the way). There he placed a plaque that remains today. Then he proclaimed that he had discovered a Viking settlement and the famous Norumbega itself farther west on the Charles River. He had a stone tower built to commemorate his first discoveries at the confluence of the Charles and Stony Brook in Weston, across from the soon-to-be-established Norumbega Park in Newton; the city of Norumbega was, as my opening quotation says, downstream at modern Watertown.

Leif, it seems, had hit Cape Cod and then entered Massachusetts Bay, sailing into Boston Harbor and up the Charles. The disastrously difficult-to-read map below (some shading to distinguish land from water, please!), from A guide-book to Norumbega, shows Leif’s route as the dashed line. In the upper left are indicated some of Horsford’s Norumbega sites. This book, written in 1893 by Elizabeth Shepard, directs visitors to Horsford’s supposed archaeological sites (even providing some directions via streetcar) while placing them within the context of the Icelandic sagas that tell of Vinland.

Another map shows the landing site of the Norsemen in present-day Cambridge. See also its location on a modern map.

Professor Horsford himself had of course published his discoveries, first briefly in The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega and then with more detail in The Defences of Norumbega (among a number of works on the subject). Both of them include the Charles-as-Norumbega map below. I’m not entirely certain what the coastal shading indicates, but it seems to show the coastal area in Leif’s time. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Here’s a detail showing the sites—trenches, dams, etc.—along the Charles. Clicky for an expanded view. Three streets in western Cambridge—Norman, Norumbega, and Thingvalla Streets—commemorate Horsford’s theory and were laid out around the turn of the century at the Amphitheatre (one of the Norse sites) marked on this map just above the second W in Watertown.

The Leif Erikson statue was erected in 1887 and now stands (with a decidedly classical, non-barbaric appearance) as the westernmost of many statues lining Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Although the Vinland theory that Horsford advocated enjoyed some popular support at the time, his claims have been dismissed for the lack of convincing evidence, not that he didn’t try to provide any. Nevertheless, in some local names and landmarks is preserved the idea that not only was legendary Norumbega a real place, it was a inhabited by people who sailed across the Atlantic some one thousand years ago.

Sources and further reading

• My two block quotes and much of the overview here comes from Gloria Greis’s fascinating article on the subject. It is probably the best source for learning this whole story.
• Professor Horsford’s report, available on Google Books, provides the opening quotation in this post and some additional information, but I only skimmed it and the subsequent Defences of Norumbega, instead trusting secondary sources like the one above.
• Elizabeth Shepard’s A guide-book to Norumbega and Vineland: or, The archæological treasures along Charles River is a nice summary and interesting approach to Horsford’s sites, and is also a fairly concise recap of how these mesh with the Icelandic sagas.
• The maps from Shepard’s and Horsford’s books are presented here as photographs, as you can tell. Those from the latter are poorly reproduced (if at all) in the digitized version on Goolge Books, so in both cases I consulted local libraries and brought a camera. Very few of the pages in Shepard’s book remain bound in the copy at the Boston Public Library, but at least they were all still present!
• Horsford’s address at the statue’s unveiling is also on Google Books. I’m not sure if it mentions his “discoveries” on the Charles, as it predates the other works, but I didn’t easily find references to it. It’s also dreadfully long, and I’m glad I wasn’t there to hear him.
• A second-hand account of Horsford’s work, and some cartographic history of Norumbega (though sans images), is provided by Rasmus B. Anderson in a chapter the 1906 book The Norsemen in America.
• I did little more than fan the pages of an edited volume called American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, but it contains much more detailed history (cartographic and otherwise) of the region.
• Norumbega Reconsidered (PDF) is yet another work I didn’t really take time to read, but there is a section called “The Myths of Norumbega” that nicely summarizes the various things that Norumbega has meant.

The best way to get to know indiemapper is to head over to indiemapper.com, sign up, and try it for yourself. Nevertheless, in the interest of spreading the gospel of indiemapper, I present here a basic tour of its cartographic features.

Indiemapper is in part a reaction to the frustration, confusion, and difficulty we (as cartography students, teachers, and practitioners) have encountered in using GIS for thematic mapping. Our most important principle, which I hope is visible in the image above, is simple clarity—being easy to learn, easy to understand, and easy to use. Ben Sheesley and Mark Harrower have worked tirelessly to design an interface that fits that bill. Notice that the whole thing consists of only a half dozen or so components, the most complicated of which is the layers panel on the left side (which is a real feat of Flex/AS3 wizardry by Zach, I must add), and even that can be mastered with minimal effort.

GEOGRAPHIC DATA

We expect that most people want to map their own data, which can be uploaded from shapefiles, KML, and GPX files. To help you get started or to augment your own data, indiemapper is also stocked with reference data from Natural Earth vector and some pre-styled world reference base maps designed by Ben in indiemapper itself.

MAP PROJECTIONS

Map projections. Such pain they have caused me. But that’s a tale for another day. We ended up with fourteen projections that are a good selection of map projections suitable for most purposes. You have control over centering and standard parallels, and importantly the options are presented along with guidance and detailed information on what geometric properties each projection preserves and for what purposes the projection is appropriate.

MAP TYPES

Indiemapper has twelve basic types of thematic and reference map types, with more to come in the future. Here’s a quick rundown.

Reference points, lines, and areas. Any data source can have one or more layers depicting the base geography, and these can be combined to make some pretty nice reference maps, as you can see above in one of Ben’s base maps.

Choropleth. The bread and butter of thematic cartography. Indiemapper provides the excellent ColorBrewer color schemes and equal interval, quantile, and optimal breaks classification presets (or unclassed maps!).

Proportional symbols. These can be created for point features or on area feature centroids. They can either be unclassed (i.e. truly proportional), or classed, a.k.a. “range-graded” or “graduated.” Proportional symbol maps can get messy, but don’t worry, you can move the symbols around on the map so they don’t overlap.

Dot density. Our dot density maps simply place dots at random within polygons. Be careful with dot density maps—they’re not effective with all arrangements of enumeration units, and remember to always use an equal-area map projection!

Cartogram. Here we get into pretty interesting territory. Zach built in his code for non-contiguous cartograms, and I’m not aware of any similarly easy implementation of cartograms in mapping software. Contiguous cartograms are a challenge we may take on some day, but you can make some pretty sweet (and easier to read, I’d say) maps with non-contiguous cartograms. As with proportional symbols, you can move the cartogram polygons around, and usually you’ll want to do so. Zach has gone experimental and allowed for classed cartograms here, too.

Map labels. Any cartographer will agree that labeling is a huge part of the work that goes into a map and that automated label placement is a beast that has only recently been tamed. Indiemapper gets you started with basic labeling using any attribute you choose, and then allows you to move and rotate labels as desired. You have access to all the fonts installed on your computer, as well as a selection of embedded free fonts. Ben, whose PhD is practically in map typography, has made some templates based on his TypeBrewer work, making it easy to select effective and harmonious styles.

Bivariate choropleth. This is kind of a big deal. As far as I know, indiemapper makes creating bivariate choropleth way easier than ever before. It offers several sequential and diverging color schemes, automatic or manual (or no) classification, and a scatterplot to view the relationship between attributes.

Bivariate proportional symbols. Thanks to the flexible architecture that Zach programmed, it is very easy for us to combine symbology types, so a bivariate proportional symbol map is as simple as combining a proportional symbols with a choropleth-like color scheme. Note that the styling panel essentially places the two individual style panels into two tabs.

Bivariate cartograms. Again, we just combine two existing symbologies. These colored cartograms are really the best use of cartograms, showing some attribute on a perfectly equalized base map. We’ve all seen them following elections.

Value-by-alpha. This is an Axis Maps original. It’s a bivariate technique that I kind of made up in reaction to election cartograms, that was presented in our alternative election map, and was more fully developed by Robert Roth, me, and Zach in a forthcoming paper in the Cartographic Journal. One attribute is displayed by color, and another standardizing attribute by transparency. Some day I’ll finally write a post describing our work on the value-by-alpha technique.

Proportional labels. You see this kind of map occasionally, where labels are scaled according to some attribute value, a bit like in a word cloud. It was easy to implement, so why not?

Colored proportional labels. That’s right, we have a trivariate map symbology! It says one thing, is scaled by another thing, and colored by a third.

MAP LAYOUT

The goal of using indiemapper is to generate some sort of output image such as this Cartography 101-style map of Michigan (as vector SVG or raster JPEG and PNG), so layout controls are always available. At the center of the stage is a page that contains what will be exported in the end, and which has some style options of its own. On top of the map are several layers in a “Layout Objects” group: legends, north arrow, and annotations. Legends are generated automatically when you create a thematic layer, and they can be toggled on or off. North arrow options are, I’m sad to say, lacking dozens of garish styles. The annotation layer allows you to manually enter text for titles, labels, or what have you.

EXPERT GUIDANCE

As with the map above, there is additional information behind “learn more” buttons all over the place in indiemapper. There’s more to learn about every map type and many other features. Mark Harrower, building on his experience teaching and studying cartography as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written an extensive set of these “learn more” articles that teach users about cartography topics while providing guidance on best practices and how to achieve them in indiemapper. Among other things, this is one reason we think that indiemapper can be a very useful tool for students and teachers.

MAP MANAGEMENT

Save your maps online (unlimited storage), roll back to previous versions so you don’t have to worry about accidentally destroying your work, share your maps with other indiemapper users if you want to collaborate, and attach comments to map versions. Dave Heyman has built a fantastic web site and database back end to indiemapper that allows all this and so much more. It’s easy to manage all your maps from the “My Indie” page. Mark has recorded a nice video tour of all these features.

GET YOUR FACE IN THERE

Indiemapper.com. Get in there! You’ll get a 30 day free trial, and then it’s $30/month ($20 if you’re a student) with no lengthier commitments. Or you can stick to a weaker free version like a loser. You’re not a loser, are you?

And so it was nice to run across this map of every building footprint in Montgomery County (Dayton), Ohio while idly browsing the “Maps” folder on my computer. I cranked it out from GIS data some six years ago. Give it a click for a large version.

Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it’s fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It’s not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. (By the way, this map only shows a sliver of Greene County—including my hometown of Beavercreek—where a good chunk of additional suburbia is located.) Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map.

If you’re familiar with the Dayton area, check out the patterns that probably confirm what you already know. See how to the north, settlement extends in spokes between the Mad, Stillwater, and Miami Rivers. Notice how immediately south of west Dayton, there’s hardly anything on the west side of the river. And look at the difference in suburban density on the west and east sides of Far Hills Avenue through Oakwood and Kettering.

If you’re not familiar with the Dayton area, the wonderful thing is that despite being nothing more than polygons, this map can probably teach you a bit about it.

[Update: it's gone now] typographymap.com 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. [Update: it's more than done now]