The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

in Health, History, Maps | March 12th, 2020

All of us have tried to come to grips with the coro­n­avirus in dif­fer­ent ways. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured online cours­es to get you con­ver­sant in the sci­ence around the pan­dem­ic, but read­ers of this site will also have sought out the most per­ti­nent works of his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture. That goes espe­cial­ly for those in need of read­ing mate­r­i­al while in states of quar­an­tine or lock­down (self-imposed or oth­er­wise), and any list of rec­om­mend­ed books must include Daniel Defoe’s A Jour­nal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ The Plague. (I recent­ly wrote about the expe­ri­ence of read­ing that last in Korea, where I live, for the Los Ange­les Review of Books.) Both fic­tion­al­ize local out­breaks of the bubon­ic plague, but how far and wide did that hor­rif­ic and much-mythol­o­gized dis­ease actu­al­ly spread?

You can see exact­ly how far and wide in the ani­mat­ed his­tor­i­cal map above, cre­at­ed by a Youtu­ber called Emper­or­Tiger­star. It main­ly cov­ers the peri­od of 431 BC to 1353 AD, dur­ing most of which the plague looks to have occurred in Europe, the Mid­dle East, and Africa with some reg­u­lar­i­ty. Up until the 1330s, the out­breaks stay small enough that you may have to view the map in fullscreen mode to ensure that you even see them.

But even the most casu­al stu­dents of his­to­ry know what hap­pened next: the best-known occur­rence of the Black Death, whose peak last­ed from 1347 to 1351 and which claimed some­where between 75 to 200 mil­lion lives (includ­ing rough­ly half of Europe’s entire pop­u­la­tion). Ren­dered, suit­ably, in black, the plague’s spread comes even­tu­al­ly to look on the map like a sea of ink splashed vio­lent­ly across mul­ti­ple con­ti­nents.

The plague hard­ly died with the 1350s, a fact this map acknowl­edges. It would, writes Emper­or­Tiger­star, “take years to go away, and even then there would be local out­breaks in indi­vid­ual cities for cen­turies.” These Black Death after­shocks, “big in their own right,” include the Great Plague of Milan in the 1630s, the Great Plague of Seville in the 1640s, and the Great Plague of Lon­don in the 1660s — the sub­ject of Defoe’s nov­el. When Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, the Alger­ian city of Oran in which he set its sto­ry had expe­ri­enced its last out­break of the dis­ease just three years before (at least the fifth such expe­ri­ence in its his­to­ry). Though har­row­ing sto­ries are even now com­ing out of places like mod­ern-day Milan, the coro­n­avirus has yet to match the grue­some dead­li­ness of the plagues fea­tured in either of these books. But unless we under­stand how epi­demics afflict­ed human­i­ty in the past, we can hard­ly han­dle them prop­er­ly in the present.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Wide­spread Epi­dem­ic Far Worse Than Ebo­la at Well Over 50 Per­cent” (2015)

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

The Strange Danc­ing Plague of 1518: When Hun­dreds of Peo­ple in France Could Not Stop Danc­ing for Months

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Artist Tricks Google Maps Into Creating a Virtual Traffic Jam, Using a Little Red Wagon & 99 Smartphones

in Google, Life, Maps, Technology, Travel | February 7th, 2020

Some­times the mirac­u­lous time-sav­ing con­ve­niences we’ve come to depend on can have the oppo­site effect, as artist Simon Wick­ert recent­ly demon­strat­ed, ambling about the streets of Berlin at a Huck Finn-ish pace, tow­ing a squeaky-wheeled red wag­on loaded with 99 sec­ond­hand smart­phones.

Each phone had a SIM card, and all were run­ning the Google Maps app.

The result?

A near-instan­ta­neous “vir­tu­al traf­fic jam” on Google Maps, even though bicy­clists seem to vast­ly out­num­ber motorists along Wick­ert’s route.

As a Google spokesper­son told 9to5 Google’s Ben Schoon short­ly after news of Wickert’s stunt began to spread:

Traf­fic data in Google Maps is refreshed con­tin­u­ous­ly thanks to infor­ma­tion from a vari­ety of sources, includ­ing aggre­gat­ed anonymized data from peo­ple who have loca­tion ser­vices turned on and con­tri­bu­tions from the Google Maps com­mu­ni­ty.

In oth­er words, had you checked your phone before head­ing out to the Baumhaus an der Mauer (Tree­house on the Wall), the Urban Art Clash Gallery, OMA’s Café, or some oth­er spot close to Wickert’s lit­tle red wagon’s trail of terror—like Google’s Berlin office—you might have thought twice about your intend­ed path, or even going at all, see­ing bridges and streets change from a free and easy green to an osten­si­bly grid­locked red.

As long as Wick­ert kept mov­ing, he was able to con­tin­ue fool­ing the algo­rithm into think­ing 99 humans were all using their phone’s Maps app for nav­i­ga­tion­al pur­pos­es in a small, con­gest­ed area.

Obvi­ous­ly, a cou­ple of bus­es could eas­i­ly be respon­si­ble for car­ry­ing 99 smart­phones in active use, but it’s unlike­ly those phones own­ers would be con­sult­ing the map app in the pas­sen­ger seats, when they could be scrolling through Insta­gram or play­ing Can­dy Crush.

Wick­ert also dis­cov­ered that his vir­tu­al traf­fic jam dis­ap­peared when­ev­er a car passed his wag­onload.

The spokesper­son who engaged with Schoon put a good-natured face on Google’s response to Wickert’s hack, say­ing, “We’ve launched the abil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish between cars and motor­cy­cles in sev­er­al coun­tries includ­ing India, Indone­sia and Egypt, though we haven’t quite cracked trav­el­ing by wag­on. We appre­ci­ate see­ing cre­ative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work bet­ter over time.”

Mean­while, the artist’s puck­ish stunt, which he describes as a “per­for­mance and instal­la­tion,” seems anchored by sin­cere philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions, as evi­denced by the inclu­sion on his web­site of the below excerpt from “The Pow­er of Vir­tu­al Maps,” urban researcher Moritz Ahlert’s recent essay in the Ham­burg­er Jour­nal für Kul­tur­an­thro­polo­gie, :

The advent of Google’s Geo Tools began in 2005 with Maps and Earth, fol­lowed by Street View in 2007. They have since become enor­mous­ly more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced. Google’s vir­tu­al maps have lit­tle in com­mon with clas­si­cal ana­log maps. The most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence is that Google’s maps are inter­ac­tive  – scrol­lable, search­able and zoomable. Google’s map ser­vice has fun­da­men­tal­ly changed our under­stand­ing of what a map is, how we inter­act with maps, their tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, and how they look aes­thet­i­cal­ly.

In this fash­ion, Google Maps makes vir­tu­al changes to the real city. Appli­ca­tions such as Airbnb and Car­shar­ing have an immense impact on cities: on their hous­ing mar­ket and mobil­i­ty cul­ture, for instance. There is also a major impact on how we find a roman­tic part­ner, thanks to dat­ing plat­forms such as Tin­der, and on our self-quan­ti­fy­ing behav­ior, thanks to the nike jog­ging app. Or map-based food deliv­ery apps like deliv­eroo or foodo­ra. All of these apps func­tion via inter­faces with Google Maps and cre­ate new forms of dig­i­tal cap­i­tal­ism and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion. With­out these maps, car shar­ing sys­tems, new taxi apps, bike rental sys­tems and online trans­port agency ser­vices such as Uber would be unthink­able. An addi­tion­al map­ping mar­ket is pro­vid­ed by self-dri­ving cars; again, Google has already estab­lished a posi­tion for itself.

With its Geo Tools, Google has cre­at­ed a plat­form that allows users and busi­ness­es to inter­act with maps in a nov­el way. This means that ques­tions relat­ing to pow­er in the dis­course of car­tog­ra­phy have to be refor­mu­lat­ed. But what is the rela­tion­ship between the art of enabling and tech­niques of super­vi­sion, con­trol and reg­u­la­tion in Google’s maps? Do these maps func­tion as dis­pos­i­tive nets that deter­mine the behav­ior, opin­ions and images of liv­ing beings, exer­cis­ing pow­er and con­trol­ling knowl­edge? Maps, which them­selves are the prod­uct of a com­bi­na­tion of states of knowl­edge and states of pow­er, have an inscribed pow­er dis­pos­i­tive. Google’s sim­u­la­tion-based map and world mod­els deter­mine the actu­al­i­ty and per­cep­tion of phys­i­cal spaces and the devel­op­ment of action mod­els.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Plan­e­tary Per­spec­tive: Tril­lions of Pic­tures of the Earth Avail­able Through Google Earth Engine

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Ancient Rome in 3D on Google Earth

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City this March for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | November 14th, 2019

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one. argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing.. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The First High-Resolution Map of America’s Food Supply Chain: How It All Really Gets from Farm to Table

in Food & Drink, Maps | November 14th, 2019

The phrase “farm to table” has enjoyed vogue sta­tus in Amer­i­can din­ing long enough to be fac­ing dis­place­ment by an even trendi­er suc­ces­sor, “farm to fork.” These labels reflect a new aware­ness — or an aspi­ra­tion to aware­ness — of where, exact­ly, the food Amer­i­cans eat comes from. A vast and fer­tile land, the Unit­ed States pro­duces a great deal of its own food, but giv­en the dis­tance of most of its pop­u­la­tion cen­ters from most of its agri­cul­tur­al cen­ters, it also has to move near­ly as great a deal of food over long domes­tic dis­tances. Here we have the very first high-res­o­lu­tion map of that food sup­ply chain, cre­at­ed by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois study­ing “food flows between coun­ties in the Unit­ed States.”

“Our map is a com­pre­hen­sive snap­shot of all food flows between coun­ties in the U.S. – grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles, ani­mal feed, and processed food items,” writes Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il and Envi­ron­men­tal Engi­neer­ing Megan Konar in an explana­to­ry post at The Con­ver­sa­tion. (The top ver­sion shows the total tons of food moved, and the bot­tom one is bro­ken down to the coun­ty scale.)

“All Amer­i­cans, from urban to rur­al are con­nect­ed through the food sys­tem. Con­sumers all rely on dis­tant pro­duc­ers; agri­cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing plants; food stor­age like grain silos and gro­cery stores; and food trans­porta­tion sys­tems.” The map visu­al­izes such jour­neys as that of a ship­ment of corn, which “starts at a farm in Illi­nois, trav­els to a grain ele­va­tor in Iowa before head­ing to a feed­lot in Kansas, and then trav­els in ani­mal prod­ucts being sent to gro­cery stores in Chica­go.”

Konar and her col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research arrives at a few sur­pris­ing con­clu­sions, such as that Los Ange­les coun­ty is both the largest ship­per and receiv­er of food in the U.S. Not only that, but almost all of the nine coun­ties “most cen­tral to the over­all struc­ture of the food sup­ply net­work” are in Cal­i­for­nia. This may sur­prise any­one who has laid eyes on the sub­lime­ly huge agri­cul­tur­al land­scapes of the Mid­west “Corn­belt.” But as Konar notes, “Our esti­mates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Corn­belt. So, in anoth­er year, the net­work may look dif­fer­ent.” And of the grain pro­duced in the Mid­west, much “is trans­port­ed to the Port of New Orleans for export. This pri­mar­i­ly occurs via the water­ways of the Ohio and Mis­sis­sip­pi Rivers.”

Konar also warns of trou­bling frail­ties: “The infra­struc­ture along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are crit­i­cal, but have not been over­hauled since their con­struc­tion in 1929,” and if they were to fail, “com­mod­i­ty trans­port and sup­ply chains would be com­plete­ly dis­rupt­ed.” The ana­lyt­i­cal minds at Hack­er News have been dis­cussing the impli­ca­tions of the research shown on this map, includ­ing whether the U.S. food sup­ply chain is real­ly, as one com­menter put it, “very brit­tle and con­tains many weak points.” The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Civ­il Engi­neers, as Konar tells Food & Wine, has giv­en the coun­try’s civ­il engi­neer­ing infra­struc­ture a grade of D+, which at least implies con­sid­er­able room for improve­ment. But against what from some angles look like long odds, food keeps get­ting from Amer­i­can farms to Amer­i­can tables — and Amer­i­can forks, Amer­i­can mouths, Amer­i­can stom­achs, and so on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Difference Between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England: A (Pre-Brexit) Video Explains

in History, Maps, Politics | November 6th, 2019

I once played in a New York pub band with an Eng­lish­man, a North­ern Irish­man, and a Scots­man. This is not the set­up for a joke. (We weren’t that bad!) But I had ques­tions. Were they all from dif­fer­ent coun­tries or dif­fer­ent parts of one coun­try called Britain, or Great Britain, or the grander-sound­ing Unit­ed King­dom?

British his­to­ry could be a con­tentious sub­ject in such com­pa­ny, and no won­der giv­en that the vio­lence of the Empire began at home, or with the neigh­bor­ing peo­ple who were absorbed—sometimes, part­ly, but not always—against their will into a larg­er enti­ty. So, what to call that ter­ri­to­ry of the crown which once claimed one fourth of the world as its own prop­er­ty?

CGP Grey, mak­er of the YouTube explain­er above, aims to clear things up in five min­utes, offer­ing his own spin on British impe­r­i­al his­to­ry along the way. The Unit­ed King­dom is a “coun­try of coun­tries that con­tains inside it four coequal and sov­er­eign nations,” Eng­land, Scot­land, Wales, and North­ern Ire­land. “You can call them all British,” says Grey, but “it’s gen­er­al­ly not rec­om­mend­ed as the four coun­tries gen­er­al­ly don’t like each oth­er.”

Like it or not, how­ev­er, they are all British cit­i­zens of “The Unit­ed King­dom of Great Britain and North­ern Ire­land.” Still con­fused? Well, Britain and the Unit­ed King­dom name the same coun­try. But “Great Britain” is a geo­graph­i­cal term that includes Scot­land, Eng­land, and Wales, but not North­ern Ire­land. As a “geo­graph­i­cal rather than a polit­i­cal term,” Great Britain sounds sil­ly when used to describe nation­al­i­ty.

But it gets a bit more com­pli­cat­ed. All of the coun­tries locat­ed with­in Great Britain have neigh­bor­ing islands that are not part of Great Britain, such as the Hebrides, Shet­land and Orkney Islands, and Isles of Angle­sey and Wight. Ire­land is a geo­graph­i­cal term for the land mass encom­pass­ing two nations: North­ern Ire­land, which is part of Britain, or the Unit­ed King­dom, and the Repub­lic of Ire­land, which—as you know—is decid­ed­ly not.

All of these coun­tries and “coun­tries of coun­tries” are part of the Euro­pean Union, says Grey, at which point it becomes clear that the video, post­ed in 2011, did not antic­i­pate any such thing as Brex­it. Nonethe­less, this infor­ma­tion holds true for the moment, though that ugly saga is sure to reach some res­o­lu­tion even­tu­al­ly, at which point, who knows what new maps, inde­pen­dence ref­er­en­da, and bor­der wars will arise, or res­ur­rect, on the British Isles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of the British Isles Ani­mat­ed: 42,000 BCE to Today

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The His­to­ry of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Ani­mat­ed in 12 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Interactive Map That Catalogues the 700,000 Trees Shading the Streets of New York City

in Data, Environment, Maps, Nature | October 23rd, 2019

It may sound odd, but one of the things I miss most about liv­ing in New York City is the abil­i­ty to hop on a bus or train, or walk a few blocks from home, and end up loung­ing in a for­est, the cacoph­o­ny of traf­fic reduced to a dim hum, squir­rels bound­ing around, birds twit­ter­ing away above. Such urban respites are plen­ti­ful in NYC thanks to its 10,542 acres of forest­ed land, “about half as much as the Con­ga­ree Swamp in South Car­oli­na,” notes James Bar­ron at The New York Times, in one of the most dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed urban areas in the coun­try.

“Most of the city’s for­est is deep in parks”—in Cen­tral Park, of course, and also Prospect Park and River­side, and dozens of small­er oases, and the lush Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in the Bronx. The city’s forests are sub­ject to the usu­al pres­sures oth­er wood­ed areas face: cli­mate change, inva­sive species, etc.

They are also depen­dent on a well-fund­ed Parks Depart­ment and non­prof­its like the Nat­ur­al Areas Con­ser­van­cy for the preser­va­tion and upkeep not only of the large parks but of the trees that shade city streets in all five bor­oughs.

Luck­i­ly, the city and non­prof­it groups have been work­ing togeth­er to plan for what the conservancy’s senior ecol­o­gist, Helen For­gione, calls “future forests,” using big data to map out the best paths for urban wood­land. The NYC Parks depart­ment has been busy com­pil­ing fig­ures, and you can find all of their tree stats at the New York City Street Tree Map, which “brings New York City’s urban for­est to your fin­ger­tips. For the first time,” the Parks depart­ment writes, “you have access to infor­ma­tion about every street tree in New York City.”

Large forest­ed parks on the inter­ac­tive map appear as flat green fields—the depart­ment has not count­ed each indi­vid­ual tree in Cen­tral Park. But the map gives us fine, gran­u­lar detail when it comes to street trees, allow­ing users to zoom in to every inter­sec­tion and click on col­ored dots that rep­re­sent each tree, for exam­ple lin­ing Avenue D in the East Vil­lage or Flat­bush Avenue in Brook­lyn. You can search spe­cif­ic loca­tions or comb through city­wide sta­tis­tics for the big pic­ture. At the time of this writ­ing, the project has mapped 694,249 trees, much of that work under­tak­en by vol­un­teers in the TreesCount! 2015 ini­tia­tive.

There are many more trees yet to map, and the department’s forestry team updates the site dai­ly. Out of 234 species iden­ti­fied, the most com­mon is the Lon­don Plan­e­tree, rep­re­sent­ing 12% of the trees on the map. Oth­er pop­u­lar species include the Lit­tle­leaf Lin­den, Nor­way Maple, Pin Oak, and Ginko. Some oth­er stats show the eco­log­i­cal ben­e­fits of urban trees, includ­ing the amount of ener­gy con­served (667,590,884 kWh, or $84,279,933.06) and amount of car­bon diox­ide reduced (612,100 tons).

Vis­it the New York City Street Tree Map for the full, vir­tu­al tour of the city’s trees, and marvel—if you haven’t expe­ri­enced the city’s vibrant tree life firsthand—at just how green the empire city’s streets real­ly are.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.) 

The Secret Lan­guage of Trees: A Charm­ing Ani­mat­ed Les­son Explains How Trees Share Infor­ma­tion with Each Oth­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Evolution of the World Map: An Inventive Infographic Shows How Our Picture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

in Maps | July 11th, 2019

For about 190 years, human­i­ty has known what the world looks like. Or rather, human­i­ty has known the shape and size of the land mass­es that rise up above the oceans, as well as where those land mass­es stand in rela­tion to one anoth­er. For gen­er­a­tion upon gen­er­a­tion, we’ve all grown up see­ing visu­al depic­tions of this knowl­edge in the form of the stan­dard world map — dis­tort­ed, of course, usu­al­ly by Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion, giv­en the impos­si­bil­i­ty of turn­ing a three-dimen­sion­al globe into a two-dimen­sion­al image with per­fect accu­ra­cy. We can call it to mind (or up on our phones) when­ev­er we need it. But what did the world look like before we knew what it looked like? Thanks to a Red­di­tor who goes by PisseGuri82, we can now take in, at a glance, human­i­ty’s image of the world as it evolved over the past two mil­len­nia.

This Shape of the World info­graph­ic begins in 150 AD with the world map used by Claudius Ptole­my of Alexan­dria, Egypt, “the first to use posi­tions of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude based on astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­tions.” Not that those obser­va­tions pro­duced any­thing imme­di­ate­ly resem­bling an ances­tor of the map we remem­ber from class­room walls grow­ing up, but it cer­tain­ly must have marked an improve­ment on the guess­work and pure fan­ta­sy used in even ear­li­er times.

World maps from the medieval peri­od, such as the one includ­ed on the dia­gram cre­at­ed by an unknown French monk in 1050, were meant “not to explain the world but the Bible.” Hence its focus on such Bib­li­cal parts of the world as Jerusalem, the Red Sea, and even the Gar­den of Eden.

Just over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a map by Italy’s Muhammed al-Idrisi employed the more objec­tive method of cal­cu­lat­ing dis­tances by what trav­el­ers and mer­chants told him about how long it took them to reach the dis­tant lands they vis­it­ed. Despite its “rec­og­niz­able and detailed Eura­sia and North­ern Africa,” how­ev­er, it still makes for a vague (and, need­less to say, hard­ly com­plete) approx­i­ma­tion of the world. Only in 1529, with the empire-mind­ed Span­ish Crown’s offi­cial and secret “mas­ter map,” updat­ed “by Span­ish explor­ers on pain of death,” do we arrive at a world map that would remind any of us of the ones we use in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Sub­se­quent devel­op­ments came from such advances as the afore­men­tioned Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion, invent­ed in 1569 in the Nether­lands and refined in Eng­land 30 years lat­er, as well as the inven­tion of the marine chronome­ter in 1778. The final map in the chart, an 1832 edi­tion by Ger­many’s Adolf Stiel­er in which “only the unex­plored Polar regions are miss­ing or depict­ed inac­cu­rate­ly,” may look almost exact­ly like the world maps we use today. But the evo­lu­tion cer­tain­ly has­n’t stopped: with the ever more detailed dig­i­tal maps and satel­lite imagery that now fea­ture in our world maps, our abil­i­ty to per­ceive the Earth still improves every day. Our descen­dants 2000 years hence may well place them­selves in a world we would hard­ly rec­og­nize. See the full-size “Shape of the World” info­graph­ic here. Make sure you click on the image once you open the page, and then you can see it in a larg­er for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Maps Reveal the True Size of Coun­tries (and Show How Tra­di­tion­al Maps Dis­tort Our World)

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans – Not Land – at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Download Beautiful Panoramic Paintings of U.S. National Parks by H.C. Berann: Maps That Look Even More Vivid Than the Real Thing

in Art, Maps, Nature | July 8th, 2019

The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks have been inspir­ing artists even before they were offi­cial­ly declared nation­al parks. That goes not just for Amer­i­can artists such as the mas­ter land­scape pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ansel Adams, but for­eign artists as well. Take the Aus­tri­an painter Hein­rich C. Berann, described by his offi­cial web site as “the father of the mod­ern panora­ma map,” a dis­tinc­tive form that allowed him to hybridize “old Euro­pean paint­ing tra­di­tion with mod­ern car­tog­ra­phy.”

Berann found his way to car­tog­ra­phy after win­ning a com­pe­ti­tion to paint a map of Aus­tri­a’s Gross­glock­n­er High Alpine Road, which opened in 1934, a cou­ple years after Beran­n’s grad­u­a­tion from art school. “In the fol­low­ing years,” says the artist’s bio, “he improved this tech­nique, cre­at­ed the mod­ern panora­ma map and became famous all over the world for his maps that are in a class of their own.” Maps in a class of their own need geo­graph­i­cal sub­jects in a class of their own, and Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks fit that bill neat­ly.

Beran­n’s panora­mas of Denali, North Cas­cades, Yel­low­stone, and Yosemite “were cre­at­ed in the 1980s and 90s as part of a poster pro­gram to pro­mote the nation­al parks,” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Bet­sy Mason. Just a few years ago, U.S. Nation­al Park Ser­vice senior car­tog­ra­ph­er Tom Pat­ter­son got to work on scan­ning the art­works in high res­o­lu­tion. When the project was com­plete, “the Nation­al Park Ser­vice released the new images on their new­ly redesigned online map por­tal, which also has more than a thou­sand maps that are freely avail­able for the pub­lic to down­load.”

Beran­n’s 1994 paint­ing of Denali Nation­al Park just above was his final work before retire­ment. It came at the end of a long and var­ied career in art that saw him paint not just the Alps, the Himalayas, the Vir­gin Islands, and the floor of the Pacif­ic Ocean (as well as oth­er impres­sive parts of the world under com­mis­sion from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic soci­ety and six dif­fer­ent Olympic Games) but trav­el posters and draw­ings of every­thing from land­scapes to por­traits to nudes.

But it is Beran­n’s panoram­ic paint­ings of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks, which you can down­load in high res­o­lu­tion here, that have done the most to make peo­ple see their sub­jects in a new way. Not least because, with an artis­tic sleight-of-hand that com­bines as many land­marks as pos­si­ble into sin­gle vis­tas ren­dered with a strik­ing­ly wide range of col­ors, Berann pro­vides them a series of van­tage points entire­ly unavail­able in real life. In one sense, these are all real nation­al parks, but they’re nation­al parks cap­tured in a way even Ansel Adams nev­er could have done.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Browse & Down­load 1,198 Free High Res­o­lu­tion Maps of U.S. Nation­al Parks

Down­load 100,000 Pho­tos of 20 Great U.S. Nation­al Parks, Cour­tesy of the U.S. Nation­al Park Ser­vice

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Down­load Icon­ic Nation­al Park Fonts: They’re Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Use

Yosemite Nation­al Park in All of Its Time-Lapse Splen­dor

Artist Re-Envi­sions Nation­al Parks in the Style of Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth Maps

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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