Best of Strange Maps

Present your favorite strange map and why you like it. Proposed by Igal Koshevoy.

(Photo by Reid Beels)

This fun session was part presentation, part group discussion, and part show-and-tell. The moderator presented some maps that showcased funny, frightening, niche and bizarre uses of cartography. The rest of the time was spent by the group discussing these and sharing additional strange maps suggested by the session participants.

Links to content shared in the session:

• Strange Maps - This wonderful blog is YOUR premier source for strange maps! Subscribe today! Operators are standing by!
• Dam You, Mediterranean: the Atlantropa Project and Engineers’ Dreams: Africa’s Central Lake - The session started with this frightening plan from 1932 Germany: “Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa is the craziest, most megalomaniacal scheme from the 20th century you never heard of.”
• Charting the Cherry Blossom Front - Next, audience members were asked to try to figure out this baffling map … it took 5 minutes of spirited discussion to solve the mystery.
• Inside the Hollow Earth - A fancifully-detailed map of the hollowed earth and its contents, including UFOs stolen from Venus.
• Entire Cities Recreated Using Thousands of Flickr Photos - “researchers with University of Washington’s graphics and imaging laboratory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of software that would search the web for images of a particular place and recreate that place in 3D in under a day.”
• HousingMaps - Mashup of Google Maps and CraigsList that helps one find housing.
• PhotoSynth video at TED - “Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.”
• Lorenz attractor - A 3-dimensional lemniscate shape that maps chaos, um, or something like that.
• Reid Beel's map bookmarks - A bunch of fun map-related bookmarks.
• The Internet Mapping Project - “Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your 'home'.”
• Ohio is a piano - An interactive musical map that you can play as a piano where each Ohio county is assigned a musical note.
• Marquam Gulch - “How did the maps with so many errors get made? Pursuing a mystery…” The sordid tale of a subdivision which never was, yet ended up on many maps.
• Russian Professor Predicts the US Will Collapse & Split Into Six Parts in 2010 – “While the Russian economy continues to tumble, Igor Panarin, a Russian professor, is being pushed out into the limelight of Putin's state media to make bold predictions of a United States collapse in 2010.”
• Republic of Cascadia - “Cascadia (commonly called the Republic of Cascadia as a full name) is a proposed name for an independent sovereign state advocated by a grassroots environmental movement in the Pacific Northwest of North America. This state would hypothetically be formed by the union of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington.”
• Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus - This endangered cephalopod is the official animal of Cascadia. “The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America.”
• State of Franklin - “The State of Franklin was an autonomous, secessionist United States territory created, not long after the end of the American Revolution, from territory that later was ceded by North Carolina to the federal government. Franklin's territory later became part of the state of Tennessee. Franklin was never officially admitted into the Union of the United States and existed for only four years.”
• State of Jefferson - “The State of Jefferson is a proposed U.S. state that would span the contiguous and mostly rural area of Southern Oregon and Northern California, where several attempts to secede from Oregon and California, respectively, have taken place in order to gain own statehood.”
• Intellectual Property Claims on Sex Chromosomes in the Human Genome – A map that links regions of the human body to firms that have claims on them.
• An Inaccurate Map of Charlottesville - A subjective map of a personal environment.
• Maps for Girls: bad feelings, bad maps - “this is what my depression looks like”, “Wrongs I've Done & their relative positions”, etc.
• The World According to Ronald Reagan - A funny map from the 80's poking fun at the skewed perspective of the US during the Cold War.
• Pot Kettle Black: Yugoslav Map of the Near-Collapsing US - A not-quite-funny map from the 80's showing how easily the US can be overrun by the glorious socialist forces, ranging from nuclear missiles to giant Cuban super soldiers.
• Czechoslovakia Threatens Germany (1934) - A propaganda map warning German citizens of the grave thread of Czechoslovak bombers that at any moment could be looming over German skies, and rallying citizens to invade Czechoslovakia to protect the Fatherland.
• Germany wins World War I (French worst case scenario) A propaganda map warning French citizens of what will happen if the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) were to win The Great War (WWI), were much of France is gobbled up into a “grande Allemagne” and Britain is a German colony.
• Secret Soviet Plans for the Complete Removal of the North American Continent - A starkly frightening Soviet map showing a plan to wipe out North America, leaving nothing but Cuba.
• First the Cartoon, then the War: Europe in 1870 - “This French satirical cartoon map (’Carte drôlatique d’Europe pour 1870‘) sought to get some laughs out of those tensions by showing an anthropomorphic map of Europe, where each country was represented by a caricature of its national ‘persona’.”
• The Whole World In A Cloverleaf - “The map shows a world divided into three parts (Europe, Asia and Africa), connected at a single central point: Jerusalem. This is essentially still the same symbolic map of the world as the one first devised by Saint Isidore in the seventh century. Isidore’s ’T and O’-shaped map, itself inspired by Scripture, influenced Christian European mapmaking up until the age of discovery.”
• A Cartogram of the World’s Population - “This map is part of a series of cartograms in which the actual geography is distorted in order to demonstrate information about the countries shown. In this case, the point made is that of population, with each country’s size ‘weighted’ to reflect the size of its population. The discrepancies between your average standard world map and this one are obvious – obviousness being a good indicator of how good a map is.”
• The Size of Africa - A startling map that shows the actual size of the African land mass compared to various nations.
• Where News Breaks - “Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines”
• Next Year In Birobidzhan? Stalin’s Siberian Zion - A map of Stalin's utopian state for Jews, left unsaid was that the Jewish population would be deported across Siberia to this state.
• Fritz and Ships: An 11-Year-Old’s Map of Jewish Emigration - A touching subjective map by a young boy describing his families flight from Germany to Montevideo. The map includes remarkable depictions of how the boy conceptualized the giant city of Hamburg, the trains, the enormity of Germany that displaces all of Europe and Asia, a tiny and featureless Africa, and a very detailed South America where his family made a new home.