Giacomo (Jacomo) Franco (1550-1620) spent his whole life in Venice where he worked as a cartographic engraver and publisher in the family business. Although there is scant background material online, evidence for his mapmaking competence can be inferred from a mention that the noted cartographer Abraham Ortelius relied on a Franco map as a reference source.
This is incredible. It’s a reproduction of what was once the oldest map known in the world! You can see it at the Boston Museum of Science.
I think this one from a Spanish cave has now eclipsed it, though, in terms of age.
I’m going to try to see this while I’m in Europe in June:
Maps can be works of art, propaganda and indoctrination. Opening on 30 April 2010, “Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art” offers a rare chance to see an unrivalled collection of cartographic masterpieces on paper, wood, vellum, silver, silk and marble, including atlases, maps, globes and tapestries that were intended for display side-by-side with the world’s greatest paintings and sculptures. The exhibition coincides with two BBC Four series about maps broadcast this April. Peter Barber was series consultant for Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps which featured maps held in the British Library.
One example of a map showing “Deep Time”
From the Cartogrammar Blog:
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.
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un:
Another attempt at a world flag, this one by artist Rory Brady.
My flag takes the 210 flags from the countries in the world as outlines layered on top of each other to create a global flag. Black and white are the only tones used as they are the only two colours universally with a word appointed to them across the world. The flag contains 295 stars, 13 moons, 19 suns, 16 birds and 4 dragons. (source)
This project, “My Way” by Julie Michel, is really cool.
Mapping Your Professional Network
We organize information on maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, they also inspire us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities. To ask for a map is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’”
This line, written by Peter Turchi, comes from the beginning of his book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. The very beginning—the first page, in fact, which I just read minutes ago. Normally, I’d never quote from a book I’ve just started. Something about that seems a little strange—as if I haven’t yet earned the right (to support this, I searched a bit on Google to see if others had written about the etiquette of quoting from the first page of a book but came up with nothing). But Turchi’s line spoke directly to a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while now: If you were to visually map your professional network, you might be able to better understand which people are really important to you.
I often encourage our team members to put energy into developing their professional network. Meeting and developing semi-professional relationships with people that you don’t work directly with will enable networking and learning opportunities that strengthen your career. It’s always healthy to get exposure to how other people see and do differently the things you do all day. Gaining that kind of perspective can only improve your own work, and of course may make it easier for you to find other opportunities if you need them. No, I don’t necessarily want anyone on our team to “network” themselves away from Newfangled, but I trust that encouraging professional networking will always be a good thing. If it’s good for our people, it’s good for our company.
So with this in mind, I thought about what my professional network might look like if I mapped it visually. I tried a few different configurations, but was interested in what happened to the way I thought about my network when I mapped it in terms of how often I speak with the people in it. Besides the 16 people with whom I speak on a daily basis—my co-workers at Newfangled—I listed those with whom I speak at least several times a month in one group and those with whom I speak least once every few months in the other. What surprised me is that I found that there were more people in my extended professional network (not Newfangled employees) listed among the group with whom I speak less regularly than the the more frequent group. Now that I see it plotted out and think it through, it makes a lot of sense. It probably isn’t that normal to expect to be in very regular contact with people you know professionally but don’t work directly with. But what’s even more interesting is that the two or three people that have significantly impacted my career in the last year (remember, not coworkers) are among those in theinfrequent group, not those that I am in contact with even on a weekly basis. Perhaps my relationship with them is just fine as it is now, but when I consider how infrequently I’m in touch with these people I value so much, it makes me motivated to be in touch with them more often.
Here’s the basic point, and it’s a short one: Visualizing the make-up of your professional network, whether in terms of frequency of contact or some other metric, will tell you a story about the people you know and probably reveal to you their importance in a new way. Once you do this, you’ll probably be in a much better position to extract value from your network than you were before.
Have you done anything like this? If so, what have you learned about your network that you didn’t know before?
From James Bridle:
[The Newslaper Club] wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…
![From James Bridle:
[The Newslaper Club] wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxzog7rz9r1qzw5oyo1_500.jpg)
detail from “Sun vs shadow II, - if every day was a sunny day.”
Alternative Ways of Representing the Earth’s Surface
via BLDGBLOG:
“Making truly accurate maps of the world is difficult,” New Scientist points out, “because it is mathematically impossible to flatten a sphere’s surface without distorting or cracking it. The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to ‘unfold’ and cut into the Earth’s surface in a way that minimises distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum.”
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