The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan

A lienzo is a painting on cloth that was used by indigenous peoples in Central America to communicate knowledge.  The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan dating from the 1530's tells the story of how the Quauhquecholtecans of central Mexico allied with the Spanish conquistador Jorge de Alvarado to conquer Guatemala.  The painting forms a map showing the path of conquest with important rivers and towns represented as symbols.

The lienzo is kept in a museum in Puebla, Mexico. The Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM) in Guatemala City restored the painting in digital form and developed a web site to display the Lienzo interactively with a map, timeline, graphics and historical details. Clicking the Dynamic Web Map link will get you to the interactive experience. However, it will probably ask you to download Silverlight-Microsoft's new-ish web plugin that allows for smoother web browsing. This plugin is free, works in all major browsers and platforms (according to our Microsoft overlords) and should not affect anything else on your computer. It will take a few minutes for the process to run and another couple to load the page.

Here are some screen shots from the interactive map.

This shows the area around Retalhuleu, the first area the allies reached from Mexico. Notice the similarity of the dashed green line on the map above and the path of travel shown in the detail below.

 

Clicking on the red dots accesses information about the meaning of each area.

 

There are also pages that interpret the symbols, digital restoration information and lots of other good stuff on the web site.

Map of the Week- Pumpkins!

Denis Wood, an artist and cartographer has co-written several books on mapping, most notably "The Power of Maps" and "Making Maps." Since the 1970's he has been working on a "narrative atlas" of Boylan Heights, his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. While the atlas has not been published, there are excerpts on the "Making Maps" blog. One of the most well known of these is his jack-o-lantern map.

The map shows the locations of jack-o-lanterns using an image of each one. The lack of any other detail challenges the idea of this being a map. The author aims to break down boundaries between mapping and art and to focus on the patterns rather than on the specific locations that would be apparent if the streets were included.

Map of the Week - Heavy Metal Cartogram

DJ Yuletide from Melting Point Radio (WRMC-Middlebury College) presents this heavy metal cartogram. It is based on the number of bands registered on Encyclopedia Metallum. While obviously the bigger countries have more bands, the per capita metal leader was Finland with 2300 bands. Bands like Diarrhea Vomit and Life is My Enemy.


Questions arise such as:
Why is so much of the area of the USA taken up by Alaska? -
Do they really have more bands there than the rest of the country
or is it the "mediocre" Mapresso cartogram applet?
Does Greenland represent Denmark or Greenland?
Are all Europeans metal crazed freaks?
What are those 3 islands floating down near Antarctica? -
Or are they just there to look creepy?

Map of the Week addendum

Here is a nice Election 2008 cartogram that goes by county. I found it on this site. There's a more red/blue version but I like the purple gradations - it makes us seem less divided for what that's worth.
Unfortunately it's missing two states.
Watch out! The San Francisco Bay area is trying to escape!


And here's the same map geographically.

Map of the Week-Election Cartograms

You may have heard that the US Presidential Election just is around the corner. The best way to see the true distribution of electoral votes is to use a cartogram. A cartogram is a map showing areas sized by some factor other than area (in most cases population). Cartograms are usually pretty ugly things.


They can be one-legged spiny monsters;








or they can be acid trippy lava lamps.








That's why when I'm shopping for a cartogram, I usually go with the more subdued kind that you get from a serious sedate publication like the New York Times. By the way - if these colors don't look right to you, change them! Many of these sites let you change the states to whatever color and pattern makes you happy.

Map of the Week-Mapping Web Trends

Information Architects Japan produces this map of web trends. In their own words:

"The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map. Different train lines correspond to different web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on."


I've spent a fair amount of time looking over this subway map of Tokyo for the similarities and they're not obvious. However, there is a detailed description of the various lines and the how changes in web traffic affect the placement of sites.
Here's a description (and map) of google's recent promotion to Tokyo's central station.

"In terms of traffic, Tokyo station is the center of Tokyo. That’s why Google (which is slowly becoming a metaphor of the Internet itself) has moved from Shinjuku to Tokyo Station. Google continues to push new modules into the main lines in an attempt to occupy the center circle."
Hey look! Blogger's on there! Maybe Map of the Week will earn its own station someday!

MOTW @ the Baltimore Festival of Maps!

I finally made it to Baltimore for the Festival of Maps! The picture below is proof!

I spent a very good four hours at the Walters Art Museum (my normal museum limit is two) and could have spent even more time there if I had more stamina and fewer sleeping family members to consider. I could spend another four hours gushing about how great it was but I like to try and keep these entries manageable. If you want a really good, comprehensive review of the Maps: Finding Our Place in the World exhibit check out the Pond Seeker - his review is from the Chicago exhibit so it won't be identical but most of those maps are at the Walters also.
I will give a quick look at the highlights in this post and then maybe revisit the exhibit and other festival notes in a future post.

Logistics note: We drove down from Philly for the day-if I had it to do again I would have stayed overnight so I could have spent more time at the Walters and seen more of the satellite exhibits and events.

My favorite things from the exhibit were the more non-traditional maps, particularly this thing that looks like a back scratcher but is really an Inuit map of the coast of Greenland. Travel down the right side and you head south down the coast-as you go back up the left side you are heading further south. The shapes of the inlets are shown, but also the slope of the coastline is represented by the slopes on the wood so they had an idea of the coastal topography. Pretty clever-and we think they're primitive!

On the left is what is considered to be the "earliest known map drawn to scale" from Nippur, Babylonia - I had to steal this image from the Book of Joe - the blogging anesthesiologist. Thanks Joe!
There's so much more to say and show but it's very late so I will highlight more stuff when my mind is fresh!
Remember you only have until June 8th to see all this great stuff so hurry down to Bawlmor!

Map of the Week 119-Swedish Meatballs on String

The thing below is a map of sorts. Not the prettiest thing you'll ever see and only "waguely" understandable. Still it would be cool to see it as a 3D model so you could look from all angles and see all the different connections. I forget where I originally found it but it's posted on Flickr. If you click it it will tell you in the title that it shows "Road Traffic" between Swedish counties, however a reading of the text below indicates that it is actually showing the tonnage of goods transported. You will also get some more info and the author (Arenamontanus).
Not knowing my Swedish counties as well as a geographer should I downloaded the county map below right from World Atlas. Note that there is at least one mistake on the county map - Dalarna County is labeled Kopparberg which is actually a town located in adjacent Orebro County.




Realizing that this blog layout doesn't lend itself to looking at these maps side by side I took the liberty of making my own image to compare the two maps - Click below to get a larger image - if that helps any.

MOTW #65

For a very different take on mapping look at the Marshall Islands. They construct "stick charts" that emphasize ocean swells as much or more than geographic locations. Click the image and the page shows some examples and gives you more information about them.