As I was organizing globes in our stacks several weeks ago, a note on two of the boxes caught my eye. It said, “This globe sphere was produced by Gilman Joslin, but the significance of this work relates to the mounting which was invented by Ellen Eliza Fitz. Ellen Eliza Fitz patented a mount for …
Maps can tell us all kinds of things about how others have viewed and shaped the world – from the borders of ancient empires to the layout of your neighborhood street grid. Today, spatial data commonly powers the maps and applications we use to access basic information about the places we inhabit: opening an app …
With possibly as many as 7,000 languages used around the world, it was only a matter of time before some of them would make it onto a map. Language maps, linguistic maps, or – if the map shows ethnic information as well – ethnolinguistic maps are a type of thematic map: a map which displays …
Jules Verne was a prolific writer. He is often referred to as the “father of science fiction.” Verne became famous for his Voyages Extraordinaires, a series of 54 novels that were originally published by the French publisher and author Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The most widely read novels from the series are Around the World in Eighty …
No good result can come from any investigation which refuses to consider the facts. A conclusion that is based upon a presumption, instead of the best evidence, is unworthy of a moments consideration. –Ida B. Wells, 1901 The use of cartography to highlight economic and …
Growing up in Michigan, I was a lake enthusiast from a young age, and extremely proud that my home state was surrounded by North America’s most important inland bodies of water. These are, of course, the Great Lakes, so called because of their size – according to the 2020 National Geographic Atlas of the World, …
There are some maps that, at first look (or second, or one-hundredth), seem to offer more questions than answers. It can surely be said that the map of nationalities in New York City, part of a series of maps from the Tenement House Committee of 1894, is one such curiosity. Looking closer at its historical …
In 1887, a French lieutenant named Edmond Caron sailed a gunboat down the Niger River to gather information and expand French influence in the western Sahel. After setting out from the colonial capital in Saint-Louis, on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, he traveled inland to the Inner Niger Delta of modern central Mali, an area …
Launched in 2009, the World Digital Library [WDL] was a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, and contributions from libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. The WDL sought to preserve and share some of the world’s most important cultural objects, increasing access to cultural …