Category — Mapping Documentaries

This comes to maptheuniverse via Courtney (with apologies to her for the delay in this posting!)

New York Public Library recently posted a short online video entitled “Mapping the World” that provides a behind-the-scenes snapshot of its map collection. The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division is the largest public library map collection in the world.

The library’s Alice C. Hudson walks through some beautiful examples of antique maps in the collection, and Matthew Knutzen highlights a library project that scans antique maps and georeferences them to present-day map layers, providing “snapshots” of an area over time in a geographic information system.

Thank you, Courtney!

[tags]map collections, new york public library, antique maps, GIS[/tags]

I ran across this all-to-brief, but highly entertaining 1953 film of cartographic history, brought to us courtesy of the British Ordnance Survey. Perhaps an early excample of the use of computers in mapping, the clip documents some of the steps Ordnance cartographers employed to keep up with the hectic pace of mapping the quickly changing British countryside. It’s the first I’ve ever heard tell of a “tellurometer“.

[tags]cartographic history, surveyors, cartographers, british ordnance survey, maps, map making, cartography[/tags]

A new 30 minute DVD from ODTMaps about Arno Peters’ cartography will be available for sale on April 21, 2008. The documentary, Arno Peters: Radical Map, Remarkable Man, traces the controversy and conflict the Peters World Map generated and “challenges viewers to think critically about media messages of all kinds.”

Trailer: Arno Peters: Radical Map, Remarkable Man 

Read the Press Release.

[tags]Peters world map, famous cartographers, Peters DVD[/tags]