The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

From a port set­tle­ment on the banks of the Thames that the Romans called Lon­dini­um came a thriv­ing city of “rough­ly 100,000 peo­ple” in Shakespeare’s time, “a cross-sec­tion of ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish cul­ture,” the British Library notes, includ­ing “roy­al­ty, nobil­i­ty, mer­chants, arti­sans, labor­ers, actors, beg­gars, thieves, and spies, as well as refugees from polit­i­cal and reli­gious per­se­cu­tion on the con­ti­nent.” The city thrived eco­nom­i­cal­ly and mer­chants from the known world passed through its ports. “As a result, Lon­don­ers would hear a vari­ety of accents and lan­guages as they strolled about the city — a cho­rus of voic­es from across Europe and from all walks of life.”

The cho­rus of voic­es became a cacoph­o­ny for many Lon­don­ers in the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry who res­ur­rect­ed a pas­toral ide­al and/or retired to the coun­try­side in the 1600s. The city swelled to a pop­u­la­tion of around half a mil­lion. “It is also a peri­od dur­ing which a high pro­por­tion of London’s inhab­i­tants were migrants,” writes the Pro­ceed­ings of the Old Bai­ley. “It was only by main­tain­ing this con­stant influx that the cap­i­tal could pos­si­bly main­tain its pop­u­la­tion growth,” slow as it was. “London’s pop­u­la­tion in this peri­od was also char­ac­ter­ized by its diver­si­ty,” and by stag­na­tion as plague and fire dev­as­tat­ed the city through­out the cen­tu­ry.

The city’s cos­mopoli­tan com­mu­ni­ties grew as Eng­land became a colo­nial world pow­er. Neo­clas­si­cal art and archi­tec­ture beau­ti­fied the city’s new wealth, and along with wealth came pover­ty, over­crowd­ing, immis­er­a­tion, and crime. “Here mal­ice, rap­ine, acci­dent, con­spire;  and now a rab­ble, now a fire,” wrote Samuel John­son in “Lon­don,” (1738), a poem writ­ten in imi­ta­tion of Juvenal’s satire on Impe­r­i­al Rome. In his “Lon­don” over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, William Blake saw “marks of weak­ness, marks of woe” on every face he met in the city — begin­ning a protest tra­di­tion that reached its zenith dur­ing the mas­sive pop­u­la­tion growth in Dick­ens’ time, and found new voice in glam, punk, grime, etc.

Peo­ple have come from all over the world to make their home in Lon­don for cen­turies. Each wave of migrants has had to nav­i­gate the city’s class hier­ar­chies — through plagues, fires, the Blitz, strikes, riots, protests, more fires, Brex­it.… Lon­don has burned, “Lon­don is drown­ing,” sang Joe Strum­mer. But Lon­don remains, a megac­i­ty of near­ly 9 mil­lion. In the video above, you can see the city’s growth mapped over a peri­od of 2,000 years, from the Romans to the Sax­ons; from Tudor to Stu­art, ear­ly and late Geor­gian, ear­ly and late Vic­to­ri­an, and into the wartorn 20th cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Lon­don Time Machine: Inter­ac­tive Map Lets You Com­pare Mod­ern Lon­don, to the Lon­don Short­ly After the Great Fire of 1666

Fly Through 17th-Cen­tu­ry London’s Grit­ty Streets with Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tions

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Roman Roads of Gaul Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

At a casu­al glance, some trav­el­ers may take the map above for a depic­tion of France’s envi­able inter­ci­ty high-speed rail net­work Train à Grande Vitesse, bet­ter known as TGV. In real­i­ty, its con­tent pre­dates that sys­tem’s inau­gu­ra­tion in the ear­ly 1980s — and by near­ly two mil­len­nia at that. This is in fact a map of Gaul, a region of Europe that, most broad­ly defined, includ­ed mod­ern-day France, Lux­em­bourg, and Bel­gium, as well as parts of Switzer­land, Italy, the Nether­lands, and Ger­many. Ruled by Rome for five cen­turies until the fall of the Roman Empire itself, Gaul was run through with a num­ber of Roman roads, a sub­ject of fas­ci­na­tion for many archae­o­log­i­cal­ly inclined his­to­ri­ans.

They’ve also become a sub­ject of fas­ci­na­tion for a young data sci­en­tist and graph­ic design­er by the name of Sasha Tru­bet­skoy. His work, much fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, includes maps of the Roman Roads of Britain, Italy, Spain and Por­tu­gal, as well as, at a larg­er scale, those of the entire empire.

“This was an inter­est­ing map to make, but I can’t say it was fun all the time,” writes Tru­bet­skoy. “Gen­er­al­ly I enjoyed the process, but it was far more chal­leng­ing than I had antic­i­pat­ed.” You can hear him describe some of the chal­lenges involved, and even show how solv­ing them played out in his design process, in his three-hour explana­to­ry live stream now archived on Youtube.

You can down­load Tru­bet­skoy’s Roman Roads of Gaul map from his site, and even buy a high-res­o­lu­tion file suit­able for print­ing as a poster (USD $9). “As far as I can tell, it’s done,” writes Tru­bet­skoy of the work, wise­ly — or from frus­trat­ing per­son­al expe­ri­ence — acknowl­edg­ing that, despite or because of the cen­turies of dis­tance between us and the rel­e­vant his­tor­i­cal and geo­graph­i­cal facts, those facts could still change. Just as ancient his­to­ry can­not both make its way to us and main­tain absolute­ly per­fect fideli­ty to the past, so the kind of prac­ti­cal visu­al design embod­ied in a sub­way map neces­si­tates a great deal of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and approx­i­ma­tion to be use­ful. And speak­ing of the graph­ic arts, just imag­ine how use­ful this par­tic­u­lar map would’ve been to Aster­ix.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visu­al­ized as a Mod­ern Sub­way Map

The Roman Roads of Spain & Por­tu­gal Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map: Ancient His­to­ry Meets Mod­ern Graph­ic Design

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 Oldest Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonardo da Vinci (1504)

Image by Davidguam via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Every time you think you’ve got a han­dle on Leonar­do da Vinci’s genius (which is to say, you think you’ve heard about the most impor­tant things he paint­ed, wrote, and invent­ed), yet more evi­dence comes to light of the many ways he meets the stan­dard for the adjec­tive “genius”.… Recent­ly, Leonar­do re-appeared not only as an inven­tor of futur­is­tic mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy or dis­cov­er­er of com­plex human anato­my, but also as the first Euro­pean to depict the “New World” on a globe–proving he knew about Colum­bus’ voy­ages when the globe was made in 1504.

The dis­cov­ery “marks the first time ever that the names of coun­tries such as Brazil, Ger­ma­nia, Ara­bia and Judea have appeared on a globe,” notes Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing, who released a book by the globe’s dis­cov­er­er and pri­ma­ry researcher, Ste­faan Missinne. The arti­fact attrib­uted to Leonar­do is engraved, “with immac­u­late detail,” writes Meeri Kim at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “on two con­joined halves of ostrich eggs.” And it fea­tures a sin­gle sen­tence, in Latin, above South­east Asia: Hic Sunt Dra­cones–“Here be drag­ons.”

We’ll notice oth­er unique fea­tures of the engraved egg Missinne calls, sim­ply, “the Da Vin­ci Globe,” such as the fact that in place of Cen­tral and North Amer­i­ca are the islands of Colum­bus’ “dis­cov­ery,” sur­round­ed by a vast ocean in which Pacif­ic and Atlantic join. Why ostrich eggs? Humans have used them for dec­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es for mil­len­nia. Also, “in that time peri­od,” says Thomas Sander, edi­tor of the Wash­ing­ton Map Society’s jour­nal, Por­tolan, “the ostrich was quite the ani­mal, and it was a big thing for the noble peo­ple to have ostrich­es in their back gar­dens.”

Missinne, a real estate devel­op­er, col­lec­tor, and globe expert orig­i­nal­ly from Bel­gium, dis­cov­ered the globe in 2012 at the Lon­don Map Fair. It was pur­chased “from a deal­er who said it had been part of an impor­tant Euro­pean col­lec­tion for decades,” and its buy­er and own­er remain anony­mous. After the globe appeared, Missinne “con­sult­ed more than 100 schol­ars and experts in his year-long analy­sis,” putting “about five years of research into one year,” says Sander, call­ing the research “an incred­i­ble detec­tive sto­ry.”

Missinne’s inves­ti­ga­tion seems to sub­stan­ti­ate his claims that the globe was made by Leonar­do or his work­shop. The evi­dence, some of which you can find on the Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing site, includes a 1503 prepara­to­ry map in da Vinci’s papers; the pres­ence of arsenic, which only Leonar­do was known to use at the time in cop­per to keep it from los­ing its lus­tre; “The use of chiaroscuro, pen­ti­en­ti, tri­an­gu­lar shapes, the math­e­mat­ics of the scale reflect­ing Leonardo’s writ­ten dimen­sion of plan­et earth”; and a 1504 let­ter from Leonar­do him­self stat­ing, “my world globe I want returned back from my friend Gio­van­ni Ben­ci.”

Missinne and Geert Ver­ho­even, of the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for Archae­o­log­i­cal Prospec­tion & Vir­tu­al Arche­ol­o­gy, have pub­lished a paper on the “unfold­ing” of Leonardo’s globe into the two-dimen­sion­al image above (see an inter­ac­tive ver­sion here). “This minia­ture egg globe is not only the old­est extant engraved globe,” the authors write, “but it is also the old­est post-Columbian globe of the world and the first ever to depict New­found­land and many oth­er ter­ri­to­ries.” Pre­vi­ous­ly, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, a small cop­per globe, was thought to be the old­est known such arti­fact. Dat­ed to around 1510, this globe, Missinne dis­cov­ered, is actu­al­ly a copy made from a cast of the old­er, orig­i­nal ostrich-egg globe.

Missinne’s find­ings have their detrac­tors, includ­ing John W. Hessler of the Library of Con­gress, who claims Missinne him­self is the anony­mous own­er of the globe, which rais­es issues of con­flict of inter­est. “Where this thing comes from needs to be clar­i­fied,” says Renais­sance car­tog­ra­phy expert Chet Van Duzer of the John Carter Brown Library in Prov­i­dence, R.I., though he adds, “It is an excit­ing dis­cov­ery, no ques­tion.” Missinne’s claims for the egg’s prove­nance are more mod­est than his mar­ket­ing. He “spec­u­lates,” writes Kim, “ the egg could have loose con­nec­tions to the work­shop of Leonar­do da Vin­ci.” Hessler’s view is less equiv­o­cal: “The Leonar­do con­nec­tion is pure non­sense.”

A layper­son like Missinne, what­ev­er his per­son­al invest­ment, might be inclined to over­in­ter­pret evi­dence or make ten­u­ous con­nec­tions a trained schol­ar would avoid. The many schol­ars he cites in sup­port of his claims for the globe are also vul­ner­a­ble to these charges, how­ev­er, though to a less­er degree. What do we make of French Mona Lisa expert Pas­cal Cotte’s tes­ti­mo­ni­al, “I here­by con­firm the evi­dence of the left-hand­ed­ness of the engrav­ings on the Ostrich Egg Globe. As Leonar­do was the only left-hand­ed artist in his work­shop, I here­by endorse the hypoth­e­sis of Leonar­do da Vinci’s author­ship”? As in all such aca­d­e­m­ic debates, “Here be drag­ons.” Weigh the case in full in Missinne’s 2018 book, The Da Vin­ci Globe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Stud­ies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Behold All 42 Maps from Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, the Author’s 54-Volume Collection of “Geographical Fictions”

Jules Verne’s tales of adven­ture take his char­ac­ters around the world, through the deep­est seas, even into the cen­ter of the Earth—on jour­neys, that is, dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Verne him­self, how­ev­er, spent most his life in France, writ­ing of places he had not seen. In one apoc­ryphal sto­ry, the young Jules Verne is caught try­ing to sneak aboard a ship bound for the Indies and promis­es his father he will hence­forth trav­el “only in his imag­i­na­tion.” Whether or not he made such a vow, he seemed to keep it, though the idea that he nev­er trav­eled at all is a “tire­some canard,” writes Ter­ry Har­pold in an essay titled “Verne’s Car­togra­phies.”

Verne’s famed nov­els Twen­ty Leagues Under the Sea, Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days con­sti­tute only a frac­tion of the 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires, a col­lec­tion of fic­tion con­ceived on the basis of a sci­ence we might not think of as a rich field for mate­r­i­al.

“Of the 80 nov­els and oth­er short sto­ries he pub­lished,” geo­g­ra­ph­er Lionel Dupuy writes, “62 make up the cor­pus of Extra­or­di­nary Voy­ages (Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires). These books, in which imag­i­na­tion played a vital role, were termed ‘geo­graph­i­cal nov­els,’ a cat­e­go­ry the author him­self used for them.”

Verne would also use the term “sci­en­tif­ic nov­el,” but he made it clear which sci­ence he meant:

I always had a pas­sion for study­ing geog­ra­phy, as oth­ers did for his­to­ry or his­tor­i­cal research. I real­ly believe that it is my pas­sion for maps and great explor­ers around the world that led me to write the first of my long series of geo­graph­i­cal nov­els.

As a geo­graph­i­cal nov­el­ist, and mem­ber of the Geo­graph­i­cal Soci­ety from 1865 to 1898, it was only fit­ting that Verne include as many maps as he could in his quest, as he put it, “to depict the Earth, and not just the Earth, but the uni­verse, for I have some­times car­ried my read­ers far away from the Earth in my nov­els.” To that end, “thir­ty of the nov­els” in the first edi­tion of Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires” pub­lished by Pierre-Jules Het­zel, “include one or more engraved maps,” Har­pold points out. “There are forty-two such engrav­ings in all.” View them here.

“These images and design ele­ments are nuanced, grace­ful, and evoca­tive; draft­ed and engraved by some of the finest artists of the time,” Har­pold writes. “They rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle of late nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar-sci­en­tif­ic car­tog­ra­phy.” They also rep­re­sent the author of geo­graph­i­cal fic­tions who, as both a sci­en­tist and artist, refused to let either form of think­ing take over the text, com­bin­ing myth and poet­ry with obser­va­tion and mea­sure­ment. As Dupuy puts it, “in Extra­or­di­nary Voy­ages, the pas­sage from real­i­ty to imag­i­na­tion and back is encour­aged by the emer­gence of a ‘mar­velous’ that we can call ‘geo­graph­i­cal.’”

In one sense, we might think of most kinds of fic­tion as geo­graph­i­cal, in that they describe places we have nev­er seen. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly so in fic­tions that include maps of their imag­ined ter­ri­to­ries, such as those of William Faulkn­er, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Louis Steven­son, and so on. We might look to Jules Verne as their tow­er­ing for­bear. “Sev­er­al of the maps appear­ing in the Het­zel Voy­ages were draft­ed under Verne’s close super­vi­sion or were based on his sketch­es or designs. Maps in three of the nov­els (20,000 Leagues [top], Hat­teras [fur­ther up], Three Rus­sians) were draft­ed by Verne him­self, whose tal­ents in this regard were appre­cia­ble,” writes Har­pold.

Verne’s maps mix real and fic­tion­al place names and are “always ambigu­ous and semi­ot­i­cal­ly unsta­ble objects.” They appear almost as admis­sions of the myth­mak­ing that goes into the sci­ence of geog­ra­phy and the act of explo­ration. Near the end of his life, maps became more real to Verne than the world out­side. As he grew too weary even to leave the neigh­bor­hood, he wrote to Alexan­dre Dumas fils, “If I have main­tained a taste for work… , noth­ing remains of my youth. I live in the heart of my province and nev­er budge from it, even to go to Paris. I trav­el only by maps.” See all of Verne’s maps from the Het­zel edi­tion of Extra­or­di­nary Voy­ages, such as those for Around the World in Eighty Days (above) and Five Weeks in a Bal­loon (below), here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)

Most of us do not, today, live in des­per­ate need of maps. On the inter­net we can eas­i­ly find not only the cur­rent maps we need to nav­i­gate most any ter­ri­to­ry on Earth, but also an increas­ing pro­por­tion of all the maps made before as well. You can find the lat­ter in places like the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, which, as we wrote last year here on Open Cul­ture, now boasts 91,000 his­toric maps free to down­load.  It will sure­ly add even more, as human­i­ty seems to have only just begun dig­i­tiz­ing its own many attempts to make the phys­i­cal world leg­i­ble, an art that goes back (as you know if you read the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy online) to pre­his­toric Las­caux cave paint­ings of the night sky.

By that stan­dard, the maps cur­rent­ly being dig­i­tized and uploaded by the British Library are down­right mod­ern — or ear­ly mod­ern, to be more spe­cif­ic. Dat­ing between 1500 and 1824, says Medievalists.net, these maps “are part of the Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III (K. Top),” which also includes “maps, atlases, archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings, car­toons and water­col­ors.”

Part of “the larg­er King’s Library which was pre­sent­ed to the Nation by George IV in 1823,” the col­lec­tion was amassed “dur­ing the for­ma­tive peri­od of the British Empire” and thus shows “how Britain viewed and inter­act­ed with the wider world dur­ing this peri­od.”

The British Library plans to post 40,000 of these maps (broad­ly con­sid­ered), and you can now view the first set of rough­ly 18,000 at the insti­tu­tion’s Flickr Com­mons col­lec­tion. Medievalists.net names as high­lights of the full Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III such arti­facts as “a hand-drawn map of New York City, pre­sent­ed to the future James II in 1664,” “The vast Kangxi Map of Chi­na of 1719 made by the Ital­ian Jesuit Mat­teo Ripa,” “the ear­li­est com­pre­hen­sive land-use map of Lon­don from 1800,” and even “water­col­ors by not­ed 18th cen­tu­ry artists such as Paul Sand­by and Samuel Hierony­mus Grimm.”

Many of the pieces the British Library has thus far uploaded to Flickr look like maps to us still today, but just as many, per­haps most, strike us more as works of art. This goes for tra­di­tion­al bird’s-eye-views ren­dered more vivid­ly (and some­times imag­i­na­tive­ly) than we’re used to, as well for as rich­ly drawn or even paint­ed land­scapes, all of which exist to pro­vide a faith­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion of land, sea, and sky. You can view more such images along that spec­trum, as well as read their sto­ries in con­text, at the British Library’s Pic­tur­ing Places site. The artis­tic and his­tor­i­cal rich­ness exud­ed by these maps today echoes the more tan­gi­ble val­ue they had when first cre­at­ed: back then, those who had the maps pos­sessed the world.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

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

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

GPS Tracking Reveals the Secret Lives of Outdoor Cats

We track sharksrhi­no, and bears, so why not Boo Boo Kit­tyPeanut, and Pump­kin?

The Long Island feline res­i­dents volunteered—or more accu­rate­ly, were volunteered—by their human com­pan­ions to par­tic­i­pate in a domes­tic cat move­ment study as part of the inter­na­tion­al Cat Track­er project.

Each beast was out­fit­ted with a GPS track­er-enhanced har­ness, which they wore for a week.

(Many cat own­ers will find that alone some­thing of an achieve­ment.)

In total, almost a thou­sand house­holds in four coun­tries took part—the Unit­ed StatesNew ZealandAus­tralia, and the UK.

Sci­en­tists were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed to learn the degree of may­hem these cher­ished pets were vis­it­ing on sur­round­ing wildlife in their off hours.

Any­one who’s been left a present of a fresh­ly mur­dered baby bun­ny, mole, or wing­less bat can prob­a­bly guess.

It’s a con­sid­er­able amount, though by and large the domes­ti­cat­ed par­tic­i­pants stuck close to home, rarely trav­el­ing more than two foot­ball fields away from the com­forts of their own yards. The impulse to keep the food bowl with­in easy range con­fines their hunt­ing activ­i­ties to a fair­ly tight area. Woe to the field mice who set up shop there.

Their move­ments also revealed the per­il they put them­selves in, cross­ing high­ways, roads, and park­ing lots. Researcher Hei­dy Kikil­lus, who tracked cats in New Zealand, report­ed that a num­ber of her group’s sub­jects wound up in a fatal encounter with a vehi­cle.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, gen­der, age, and geog­ra­phy play a part in how far a cat roams, with males, younger ani­mals, and coun­try dwellers cov­er­ing more ground. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, those who have not been neutered or spayed tend to have a freer range too.

“With­out the moti­va­tions of food and sex, most cats seem con­tent to be home­bod­ies,” zool­o­gist Roland Kays, one of the US Project lead­ers, not­ed.

Amer­i­can cit­i­zen sci­en­tists who’d like to enroll their cat can find infor­ma­tion and the nec­es­sary forms on the Cat Track­er web­site.

The cat-less and those with indoor cats can enjoy pho­tos of select par­tic­i­pants and explore their tracks here.

And what bet­ter fall craft than a DIY cat track­ing GPS har­ness?

via Nation­al Geo­graph­ic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Hand-Colored Maps of Wealth & Poverty in Victorian London: Explore a New Interactive Edition of Charles Booth’s Historic Work of Social Cartography (1889)

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A New Interactive Map Shows All Four Million Buildings That Existed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

New York­ers have borne wit­ness to a notice­able uptick in the num­ber of shiny, new build­ings going up in the city over the last few years, crowd­ing the water­front, ris­ing from the ash­es of com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens and old­er, infi­nite­ly more mod­est struc­tures.

Their devel­op­ers have tak­en care to top load them with luxu­ry ameni­ties—rooftop cabanas, 24-hour fit­ness clubs, mar­ble coun­ter­tops, screen­ing rooms.

But one thing they can’t pro­vide is the sense of lived his­to­ry that imbues every old build­ing with a true sense of char­ac­ter, mys­tique, and oft-grub­by charm.

I fear that the occu­pants of these new­er build­ings won’t have near­ly as much fun as the rest of us search­ing for our cur­rent address­es on the NYC Munic­i­pal Archives’ inter­ac­tive map, above.

Every dot rep­re­sents a Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion pho­to­graph of a New York City build­ing, snapped between 1939 and 1941 as a means of stan­dard­iz­ing the way in which prop­er­ty val­ues were assessed and record­ed.

There are 4,282,000 dots, spread out between five bor­oughs.

Does that sound dense­ly packed?

You should see it today… there’s been a lot of ver­ti­cal build.

This unas­sum­ing fuel oil plant near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has giv­en way to a 430-unit build­ing boast­ing a yoga room, spin stu­dios, and valet ser­vices for those in need of dry-clean­ing, laun­dry, apart­ment clean­ing, or dog walking…though sad­ly, no on-premis­es motor oil. We find that omis­sion some­what sur­pris­ing for such a full-ser­vice res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment on the banks of a Super­fund site, whose clean up is esti­mat­ed to tip the scales at $500 mil­lion.

We also won­der what the occu­pants of the above build­ings would have made of the glassy 25-sto­ry com­plex that opened on their coor­di­nates ear­li­er this year. Is it just us, or does it seem a bit disin­gen­u­ous of its devel­op­ers to trum­pet that its loca­tion is “the epit­o­me of New York City’s authen­tic­i­ty, with over a cen­tu­ry of rich his­to­ry, where the world’s sar­to­r­i­al and culi­nary trends are born”?

(You can find us a few blocks away mut­ter­ing into our chopped liv­er at Russ and Daugh­ters, a ven­er­a­ble food shop that looks much the same today as it did in 1940, though you’ll have to con­firm with a bit of research on your own if you don’t want to take our word for it, the WPA “dot” reveal­ing lit­tle more than a man with a stick and sev­er­al mov­ing vehi­cles.)

Our final stop is one of many archi­tec­tur­al ghosts to haunt the Hud­son Yards colos­sus, the self-described “epi­cen­ter of Manhattan’s New West Side… a bea­con for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, a hub for fash­ion, design, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and art.” In addi­tion to a much reviled $200 mil­lion shawar­ma-shaped “3‑dimensional pub­lic space” and state of the art wine fridges, ameni­ties now include diag­nos­tic and anti­body test­ing “per­formed by top med­ical pro­fes­sion­als.”

It’s telling that in the sum­mer of 2020, prospec­tive ten­ants were offered incen­tives includ­ing two months’ free rent and a $2,000 gift card.

Proof, per­haps, that New York will con­tin­ue as it always has—a city in con­stant flux. The preva­lence of mod­ern high rise build­ings in dystopi­an fic­tion gives us pause.…

Explore the Street View of 1940s New York here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Inter­ac­tive Map That Cat­a­logues the 700,000 Trees Shad­ing the Streets of New York City

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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