WWO 02. Maps

I overextended a bit on yesterday's entry, so decided that I'd just share my favorite map-related content today!

mapBH

First off, we've got my friend's website mapbh.org which visualizes Bahrain's history and culture through maps.

It especially explores Bahrain's recent history of land reclamation, which, while potentially providing more land to be used by Bahrain's population, is worsening the effects of climate change and increasing the wealth disparity gap.

The site has an awesome feature that lets you overlay historical maps overtop modern satellite imagery. Really gives you a good sense of how things have changed over time.

Try it out here.

As a bonus, here's my favorite old map that's been scanned on the website:

A map of the Ottoman Empire, showing the Arabian Peninsula with an accurate description of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and Africa, and with many details about the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf region. It was published in Latin in 1606 and drawn by Jodocus Hondius based on the map of the famous Belgian cartographer Gerhard Mercator with some modifications. It is hand-colored, and the title is decorated with a drawing of one of the Ottoman sultans. Relief shown pictorially., Hand colored., The map has a decorative cartouche with the portrait of Ottoman Sultan Mahumet Turcorum Imperat 2., Detail is extracted from the maps of the Mercators.

Map Men

Two silly guys talking about maps on Youtube.

The Sarah Andersen comic about oddballs, where two gremlin people with the photoshopped heads of the Map Men hosts find each other at a party, to the despair of the other party-goers.
Literally every episode

Here's a fun one about why maps sometimes include places that don't exist.

May we all find our fellow oddballs out there!

Should this be a map or 500 maps?

This essay by Elan Ullendorff is a fun story about how different people can represent space differently through maps.

"At the end of the 18th century, Spain's official geographer, Tomás Lopez, was asked by the King to create an accurate map of the kingdom. In an attempt to delegate the herculean labour required, Tomás drew a series of circles, picked the town in the center of each circle, and asked the local priest to answer a questionnaire and draw up a map of their province. The goal was to amalgamate the responses into a single map. But none of these priests were trained in cartography, and many of them would have had limited access to maps at all.2 Nonetheless, 500 of them tried. In one map, the entire region is represented simply by a series of letters (“A” for church, “B” for hermitage, “C” for house, “D” for tree, and so on). Another represents the surrounding villages as if they are orbiting planets..."

We're all trained by things like Google Maps to have a consistent understanding of what a map even is, what it should look like, when really the top-down view is just one way to approach things.

I wanna see more weird maps in the world :D