A couple weeks ago, Colin Marshall highlighted for you Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On the Road. Now we have another Kerouacian map for you — a map for our times. Gregor Weichbrodt, a German college student, took all of the geographic stops mentioned in On the Road, plugged them into Google Maps, and ended up with a 45-page manual of driving directions, divided into chapters paralleling those of Kerouac’s original book. You can read the manual — On the Road for 17,527 Miles– as a free ebook. Just click the image above to view it online (or click here). Likewise, you can purchase a print copy on Lulu and perhaps make it the basis for your own road trip. Wondering how long such a trip might take? Google Maps indicates that Kerouac’s journey covered some 17,527 miles and theoretically took some 272 hours.
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“And what becomes of all the little boys who never comb their hair? They’re lined up all around the block, on the Nickel over there.” So sings Tom Waits on 1980’s “On the Nickel,” which he originally composed for Ralph Waite’s eponymous feature film, a story of shame, degradation, and good times in the sketchiest part of downtown Los Angeles, through which runs 5th Street — the “Nickel” of the title. That part of town has managed an astonishing cleanup since 1980 (then again, most parts of town have, including the once-seething corner referenced by Heartattack and Vine, the title of Waits’ album from that year) to the point that you’ll now find, just off 5th, the new-wave retro, hipster-friendly Nickel Diner: a favorite eatery of mine, incidentally, but hardly one describable with Waits’ signature rasp, a forcefully resigned instrument tuned to evoke the classically, near-mythologically ragged American life.
Still, you can find the old Nickel on The Tom Waits Map, which marks out all the lyrically identifiable places in Waits’ America, from Minneapolis’ 9th Street (“Hey Charlie, I’m pregnant and living on the 9th street,” goes “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis”) to the state of Idaho (“Danny says we gotta go, gotta go to Idaho, but we can’t go surfing ’cause it’s 20 below,” on “Danny Says”).
We may think of Waits’ artistic persona as a certain lower slice of America made song, but this map, when zoomed out to a global level, reveals references to many exotic lands, as when he sings about “a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels,” from the perspective of a character who “drank with all the Chinamen, walked the sewers of Paris” and of “Radion the human torso, deep from the jungles of Africa.”
The Tom Waits map itself, in fact, comes from an obviously die-hard Swedish fan by the name of Jonas Nordström. As he and the rest of the Waits faithful know, the man doesn’t just speak to an askew sensibility in America; he speaks to askew sensibilities all throughout humanity.
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The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States remains a valuable historical resource today. But, for all of these years, it had one notable shortcoming. Around the time of its first publication, John K. Wright acknowledged that “The ideal historical atlas might well be a collection of motion-picture maps, if these could be displayed on the pages of a book without the paraphernalia of projector, reel, and screen.” The technology that would lend itself to creating motion-picture maps wasn’t available in the 1930s. But it is today. And thanks to the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, we can now view The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States in a new digital, sometimes animated format. If you want to see a good example of historical data put into motion, then you might want to check out this map of American Explorations in the West, 1803–1852. (Click here and then click “Animate” at the bottom of the screen.) This map will trace for you the expeditions of Lewis and Clark and many other explorers. Then, if you’re ready to be an explorer yourself, you can start your journey through the digitized atlas by entering the Table of Contents.
The Odyssey, one of Homer’s two great epics, narrates Odysseus’ long, strange trip home after the Trojan war. During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again.
If you’re looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in The Odyssey, then we’d recommend spending some time with the interactive map hosted on the University of Pennsylvania’s website. The map breaks down Odysseus’ voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the whole concept of ancient travel, I’d suggest revisiting one of our previous posts: Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map. It tells you all about ORBIS, a geospatial network model, that lets you simulate journeys in Ancient Roman. You pick the points of origin and destination for a trip, and ORBIS will reconstruct the duration and financial cost of making the ancient journey. Pretty cool stuff.
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“Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace…I have spent, in all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side also…but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.”
You can click the image above to see it in a larger format. For many other maps made by Thoreau, visit the “Thoreau Lands and Property Survey” collection at the Concord Free Public Library. Also find works by Thoreau in our collection of Free eBooksand Free Audio Books.
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The Second World War was waged over six long years on every continent save South America and Antarctica. Seventy-some years later, the daily shifts of the European Theater’s front lines can be tracked in under seven minutes, thanks to a mysterious, map-loving animator known variously as Emperor Tigerstar or Kaiser Tigerstar (the latter accounts for the helmet-wearing kitten gracing the upper corner of his World War I time-lapse).
The power-shifting colors (blue for Allies, red for Axis) are mesmerizing, as is a relentless timer ticking off the days between Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and VE Day, May 8, 1945. Royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod and audio samples ranging from Hitler and Mussolini’s declarations of war to Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech add import.
Careful reading of his blog reveals a diehard history buff with a weakness for metal music, wholesome CGI movies, and statistics.
He’s also a workaholic. His YouTube channel boasts a boggling assortment of map animations. This in addition to an alternate YouTube channel where he remaps history in response to his own “what if” type prompts. Somehow he finds the time to preside over The Blank Atlas, a site whose members contribute unlabeled, non-copyrighted maps available for free public download. And he may well be a brony, as evidenced by the video he was purportedly working on this summer, World War II: As Told by Ponies.
Ayun Halliday didn’t know she’d be keeping things fresh by failing to listen to a single second of 8th grade Geography. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Just above you’ll find a sketched-out map of the paths Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom took through Dublin on June 16, 1904. If you’ve ever read James Joyce’s Ulysses (find it in our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books), you may well have tried drawing one of these yourself, connecting the locations as each chapter finds one of the protagonists somewhere else in Ireland’s capital on that “ordinary” day. Maybe you wanted to test the plausibility of the common assertion that, given accuracy and detail with which Joyce wrote about the city, one could, in case of the apocalypse, build the city all over again using the novel as a plan. This particular Ulysses fan map, however, comes from the hand of a very special reader indeed: Vladimir Nabokov, author of a few much-discussed works of twentieth-century literature himself, including Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory.
For those who teach Ulysses, Nabokov has a suggestion: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” A post from Raynor Ganan quotes him as saying that, adding, “Would you not have donated a litre of your own spinal fluid to audit this lecture?” Indeed, Nabokov speaks from experience, having not only produced well-respected literature but taught it, too. The fruits of his time at the front of the classroom appear in his collection Lectures on Literature, though if you want to get as close as possible to the experience of sitting in on one of Nabokov’s classes, go back into our archives and watch the WQED dramatization, starring Christopher Plummer, of his talk on Kafka at Cornell. It won’t give you any insight into Joyce’s Dublin, granted, but some Yale grad students’ more recent project to digitally, interactively map Ulysses just might.
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Americans use words differently in different regions of the country—a “moot” or “mute” point? There’s a grammatical argument to be made here for sure, but for a simple yes or no answer check out a series of new maps released by statistician Joshua Katz.
The maps are of the continental United States (Alaska and Hawaii are not included for geographical proximity purposes) and they reveal delightfully quirky trends. Some relate to things you might think of yourself: How do you pronounce aunt? (most respondents would say “ant” while those in New England would say “ahnt.”) Other questions get at more obscure (and questionable) regional differences, like drive-through liquor stores.
When most of the people on television sound like they’re from some generic American city with no accent or idioms, it’s easy to lose track of local dialect. How would you pronounce “caramel”? Differently, according to Katz’s maps, if you’re from the Eastern Seaboard than if you’re from the West or Midwest. And “pecan” has at least four different regional pronunciations.
Katz is a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He designed the maps to reflect responses to 122 questions about pronunciation and word usage based on research originally conducted by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University.
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