Category: Maps

Matthew Cusick does collages with maps and texts. Above on the left is a detail of Red and Blue and on the right is a detail from Ether (which uses Bible and history book pages). He also alters book pages — see the collection called Defacements where, using pages from olld schoolbooks, he alters them “through a process of scraping and sanding to isolate the illustrations and remove all but a few words of text. The page numbers are also left intact so that the works can be reassembled into a unique codex.” About this work he says:

Defacements are obsessively crafted amalgamations of word and image in the tradition of altered books and concrete poetry. The re-contextualization of image, word, and number creates a new storyline that is often in the spirit of a prankster student who has marked up a textbook with irreverent and provocative commentary.

The Hand Drawn Map Association is “an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand.” The one to the left is by Richard Crappsley and called “From Home to Tube Station” (it’s a walk through London). The maps are great and the site has an RSS feed (and twitter) so you can get notices of new maps.

The nifty website map envelope lets you print and make a mailing envelope lined with a Google map…

Since moving to Santa Fe, I’ve used Google’s map feature a lot. But it hasn’t been particularly helpful for figuring out where to ride my bike… While there’s a “biking directions” switch, showing bike lanes as well as roads that are only open to pedestrians and bikes, it doesn’t show elevation. There are a lot of hills here in Santa Fe, very few bike lanes, and some roads have shoulders and some don’t. There are several bike groups that have weekly rides, and I’ve joined them a few times, which has helped me figure out where to ride on my own. I’ve also used my android phone to help me — there’s an app called MyTracks that uses GPS to plot my route as I’m pedaling. It tallies mileage and that all important elevation (of course after the fact, after I’ve sweated up some very steep hill). Although the other day it went haywire and decided I’d started my 1 hour ride from the middle of the ocean, east of Greenland, and ended up near Winnamucca, Nevada, with a very impressive max speed of 817mph (see map above).
After that ride, I found BikeRouteToaster. It let me easily draw a route and then estimates the time it would take me to bike it, shows the elevation profile of the route and best of all creates a “cue sheet” — listing streets, turns and mileage between turns. No info about shoulders and road conditions, I guess I’ll have to figure that out on my own.
I’ll continue to explore (and struggle with) ways of making maps and directions. But I also wanted to mention mapplers, a project to build an atlas of hand-drawn maps, and use the Google maps interface to navigate them. They only have one at the moment (Brisbane Australia), but check them out here.