Behold a 19th-Century Atlas of the United States, Designed for Blind Students (1837)

In 1835, the New England Institution for Education of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a printing press.

Under the leadership of its first director, Samuel Gridley Howe, the press was customized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and visually impaired people to read unassisted.

Inclusivity was a prime motivator for Howe, who strove to make sure his students would not be “doomed to inequality” or regarded as “mere objects of pity.”

After investigating European tactile printing systems, he developed Boston Line Type, an embossed Roman alphabet that could be read with the fingers.

It eschewed flourishes and capital letters, but reading it required a lot of training and even then, was likely to be slow going. Howe estimated that reading it would take three times as long as a sighted person would take to read an equivalent amount of traditionally printed text.

Ultimately it proved far less user-friendly than braille.

Text accompanying the exhibition Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, notes that braille had been in use in Great Britain and France for decades before being widely adopted in the US:

The amount of time and money that Perkins and other American schools had invested into Boston Line Type made them resistant to adopting a new system. Boston Line Type was, however, much harder to learn than braille, and only braille allowed individuals with visual impairments to read and write tactilely.

The school used its Boston Line Type press to publish history, grammar, and spelling books, as well as the New Testament, and a complete Bible.

After a visit to the school, Charles Dickens paid to have 250 Boston Line Type copies of his novel The Old Curiosity Shop printed for distribution to blind Americans.

In light of Touch This Page!’s assertion that Boston Line Type’s print forms were “designed to be universally accessible rather than in those [print forms] most accessible to the touch”, we suspect that the school’s 1837 Atlas of the United States offered its readers the best value.

While there were many dense descriptive passages in Boston Line Type to wade through, it also boasted embossed maps to orient geography students with raised outlines of each state.

Rivers were charted as solid raised lines, while oceans were indicated with parallel lines. Sets of triangles represented mountains.

Longitudes, latitudes, and city locations were also noted, but the presence of negative space gave blind and low vision students the opportunity to grasp information quickly.

50 copies were printed, of which four survive.

Explore the Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind here.

via Kottke

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-speed rail service connecting those two countries, can get you from Paris to Brussels in about an hour and half. This stands in contrast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its political power lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expansive network of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imagining what it would have been like to travel Europe two millennia ago. And now, using the website OmnesViae, you can get historically accurate directions as well.

Big Think’s Frank Jacobs describes OmnesViae as “the online route planner the Romans never knew they needed.” It “leans heavily on the Tabula Peutingeriana” — also known as the Peutinger Map, and previously featured here on Open Culture — “the closest thing we have to a genuine itinerarium (‘road map’) of the Roman Empire.”

Though not quite geographically accurate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were connected and how. “Geolocating thousands of points from Peutinger, OmnesViae reformats the roads and destinations on the scroll onto a more familiarly landscaped map. The shortest route between two (ancient) points is calculated using the distances traveled over Roman rather than modern roads, also taking into account the rivers and mountains the network must cross.”

You can use OmnesViae just like any other way-finding application, except you enter your origin and destination into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities current day names are understood,” as the instructions note, it works better — and feels so much more authentic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Londinio.” The resulting journey between those two great capitals looks arduous indeed, passing at least three mountainous areas, thirteen rivers, and countless smaller settlements. And according to OmnesViae, no roads led to Brussels: the closest an ancient traveler could get to the location of the modern-day seat of the European Union was the Walloon village of Liberchies — which, as the birthplace of Django Reinhardt, remains an important stop for the jazz-loving traveler of Europe today.

via Big Think

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

Europe’s Oldest Map: Discover the Saint-Bélec Slab (Circa 2150–1600 BCE)

Image by Paul du Châtellier, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1900, the French prehistorian Paul du Châtellier dug up from a burial ground a fairly sizable stone, broken but covered with engraved markings. Even after he put it back together, neither he nor anyone else could work out what the markings represented. “Some see a human form, others an animal one,” he wrote in a report. “Let’s not let our imagination get the better of us and let us wait for a Champollion to tell us what it says.” Champollion, as Big Think’s Frank Jacobs explains, was “the Egyptologist who in 1822 deciphered the hieroglyphics” — which he did with the aid of a more famous inscription-bearing piece of rock, the Rosetta Stone.

Still, the Saint-Bélec slab, as Châtellier’s discovery is now known, has attained a great deal of recognition in the more than 120 years since he unearthed it. But it did so relatively recently, after a long period of relative obscurity.

“In 1994, researchers revisiting du Châtellier’s original drawing found that the intricate markings on the stone looked a lot like a map,” writes Jacobs. “The stone itself, however, had gone missing.” Only in 2014 was it rediscovered in a cellar below the moat of the chateau in Saint-Germain-en-Laye once owned by du Châtellier, by which time it could be subjected to the kind of high-tech analysis unimagined in his lifetime.

Operating on the theory that the artifact was indeed created as a map, France’s INRAP (the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research) “found that the markings on the slab corresponded to the landscape of the Odet Valley” in modern-day Brittany. Then, “using geolocation technology, the researchers established that the territory represented on the slab bears an 80 percent accurate resemblance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet river,” which seems to have been a small kingdom or principality back in the early Bronze Age, between 2150 BC and 1600 BC. This makes the Saint-Bélec slab Europe’s oldest map, and quite possibly the earliest map of any known territory — and certainly the earliest known map of a popular kayaking destination.

Drawing by Paul du Chatellier, via Wikimedia Commons

via Big Think

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Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Islamic World

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

Explore the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Existence (Circa 1300)

If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe, the main attraction for the true believer, but also what we now know as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a large-scale (64″ x 52″) depiction of the entire world — or at least entire world as conceived in the pious English mind of the Middle Ages, which turns out to be almost unrecognizable at first glance today.

Created around 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi “serves as a sort of visual encyclopedia of the period, with drawings inspired by Biblical times through the Middle Ages,” write Chris Griffiths and Thomas Buttery at BBC Travel.

“In addition to illustrating events marking the history of humankind and 420 cities and geographical features, the map shows plants, animals, birds and strange or unknown creatures, and people.” These include one “‘Blemmye’ — a war-like creature with no head, but with facial features in its chest,” two “Sciapods,” “men with one large foot,” and “four cave-dwelling Troglodites,” one of whom feasts on a snake.

Amid geography we would now consider severely limited as well as fairly mangled — Europe is labeled as Asia, and vice versa, to name only the most obvious mistake — the map also includes “supernatural scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical tales and a collection of popular legends and stories.” As such, this reflects less about the world itself than about humanity’s worldview in an era that drew fewer lines of demarcation between fact and legend. You can learn more about what it has to tell us in the Modern History TV video below, as well as in the video further down from Youtuber ShūBa̱ck, which asks, “Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?”

The intent of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ShūBa̱ck says, is to show that “the Bible is right.” To that end, “east is on top, as that’s where they said Jesus would come from on the day of judgment. Jerusalem is, of course, at the center.” Other points of interest include the site of the crucifixion, the Tower of Babel, and the Garden of Eden — not to mention the locations of the Golden Fleece and Mount Olympus. You can examine all of these up close at the Hereford Cathedral’s site, which offers a detailed 3D scan of the map, viewable from every angle, embedded with explanations of all its major features: in other words, a kind of Google Medieval Earth.

via Aeon

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

The Rise & Fall of Roman Civilization: Every Year Shown in a Timelapse Map Animation (753 BC -1479 AD)

The Youtuber “EmperorTigerstar” specializes in documenting the unfolding of world historical events by stitching together hundreds of maps into timelapse films. In years past, we’ve featured his “map animations” of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945). Today, we’re highlighting a more ambitious project, an attempt to visually document the rise and fall of the Romans. The video covers 2,000 years of history, in just ten minutes.

Moving from 753 BC  to 1479 AD, the animated map shows Rome’s territorial boundaries changing as the Roman Kingdom morphs into the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. Then the gravity of history takes over and we experience the gradual decline of Roman civilization. We see the bifurcation that splits the Empire into Western and Eastern (Byzantine) parts, until only a little piece remains.

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The History of the Byzantine Empire (or East Roman Empire): An Animated Timeline Covering 1,100 Years of History

Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the [plantet’s] surface and allow scientists to investigate complex geologic relationships both on and beneath the surface. These types of maps are useful for both planning for and then conducting landed missions.”

The map above lets you see Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Everest. The USGS goes on to add: “Map readers can visualize the caldera complex more easily due to the detail that is available at the 1:200,000 scale and the addition of contour lines to the map. The map covers a region that is roughly the size of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s summit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olympus Mons caldera complex allows scientists to more easily compare it to similar features on Earth (known as terrestrial analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa.”

You can find more Martian maps here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kottke

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How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

The oldest known writing systems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alphabet, which I’m using to write this post and you’re using to read it, gradually took the shape we know between the seventh century BC and the Middle Ages. Over the eras since, it has spread outward from Europe to become the most widely used script in the world. These are important developments in the history of writing, but hardly the only ones. It is with all known writing systems that historical map animator Ollie Bye deals in the video above: not just those used today, but over the whole of the past five millennia.

The conquests of Alexander the Great; the Gallic Wars; the colonization of Latin America; the “scramble for Africa”: these and other major historical events are vividly reflected in the spread of certain writing systems.

Up until 1492 — after the expiration of eight and a half of the video’s eleven minutes — the map concerns itself only with Europe, Asia, and the northern three-quarters of Africa (as well as an inlaid section depicting the civilizations of what is now Central America). Thereafter it zooms out to include the New World, and indeed the whole world, though centuries pass before most of its blank spaces fill up with the colors that indicate the adoption of a dominant script.

Arabic and Persian appear in lime green, simplified Chinese in red, and Cyrillic in light blue. Before Bye’s animation reaches the middle twentieth century, most of the world has turned medium blue, which represents the now-mighty Latin alphabet. The use of these very letters for all written communication by such a wide variety of cultures merits a volumes-long history by itself. But perhaps most intriguing here is the persistence of relatively minor scripts: Cree, used among the natives of northern Canada; hiraganakatakana, and kanji in Japan; and also hangul in Korea — which I read and write myself every day of my life in Seoul, and to whose continued dominance here I can confidently attest.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

The Biggest Mistakes in Mapmaking History

As we all know by now, every world map is wrong. But some world maps are more wrong than others, and the earliest world maps together constitute an entertaining festival of geographical mistakes and misperceptions. Like so many pursuits, mapmaking has utilitarian roots. For millennia, as Kayla Wolf explains in the Ted-Ed lesson above, our ancestors all over the world made “functional maps, showing trade routes, settlements, topography, water sources, the shapes of coastlines, or written directions.” But some also made “what are known as cosmographies, illustrating the Earth and its position in the cosmos, often including constellations, gods, and mythic locations.”

Creators of early world maps tended to mix their functionality with their cosmography. Commissioned in Eurasia and North Africa from the Middle Ages into the seventeenth century, their mappae mundi were “meant to depict the world’s geography, but not necessarily to be useful for navigation. And given their maker’s incomplete knowledge of the world they were really hypotheses — some of which have been glaringly disproven.”

Take, for example, the Spanish maps that for more than a century “depicted the ‘Island of California’ detached from the rest of the continent” (one example of which still hangs today in the New York Public Library).

Even Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer responsible for the “Mercator projection” still used in world maps today, “speculated that the North Pole prominently featured the ‘Rupes Nigra,’ a giant magnetic rock surrounded by a whirlpool that explained why all compasses point north.” But all knowledge begins as speculation, in geography and cartography as anywhere else. We must also maintain an awareness of what we don’t know, which medieval mapmakers famously did with fantastical beasts: “a tiny copper globe created in the early 1500s,” for example, labels southeast Asia with the famous warning “Here be dragons.” And “as late as 1657, English scholar Peter Heylin lumped Australia together with Utopia.” The land down under is perhaps the “lucky country,” but Utopia is surely pushing it.

Related content:

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

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Why Every World Map Is Wrong

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 Undertaken,” Is Free Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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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