Posts from the Map Division

The collections of the Map Division of The New York Public Library contain a rare gem of information graphics and cartographic design: a copy of Charles Minard's self-published folio of 1861, Des tableaux graphiques et des cartes figuratives.

The mission of my Short-Term Fellowship was to research the development of thematic map technique in the West: the way that proportional circle, flow line, isopleth, choropleth, dasymetric, dot density, and cartogram techniques were invented and developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.

Our collection of New York City maps spans a large swath of time, tracking the growth of the city from its early days as a small North Atlantic Dutch colony to its modern incarnation as one of the capitals of the globalized world.

An interview with John Keene: a writer-in-residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study in 2013, where he researched and wrote Counternarratives, for which he received an American Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award in Fiction in 2016.

The OldNYC experience is now available on mobile phones—discover what was there at thousands of locations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. We talked to the developers to learn more about their work with our collections.

Nearly 300 years ago today Daniel Defoe published his tale of high-adventure, high-stakes, all-or-nothing hero Robinson Crusoe, and a classic was born. The faux travelogue captured the zeitgeist—in 1719, it seemed the whole world was up for grabs if you were just willing to get on a ship and take it. You were risking scurvy and cannibals, but think of the discoveries you could make! 

Now, of course, the whole idea of "discovery" has 

Spring has sprung and new maps have been added to the NYPL Map Warper. No joke!

The Library's collection includes a diverse range of cartographic material including well-known topographic surveys depicting the landscape before the park’s construction as well as numerous maps published after its completion with indexes that list amenities and places of interest.

Among the hundreds of maps from the Great War, you'll find commercial maps produced for sale to the general public, pictorial propaganda maps, newspaper maps intended to illustrate the unfolding conflict, and military maps produced for a variety of purposes including training, planning offensive and defensive operations, troop dispositions and more. The languages printed on the map mirror the international range of the conflict.

As an Armenian-American keenly aware of the devotion to lost homeland of my ethnic compatriots, I’ve always been on the lookout for Armenians among the researchers from many large ethnic groups who have found their way to the Map Division. April 24 is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, and one way to honor those who were not able to find refuge is to learn all we can about them and celebrate our link to them.

Comment créer vos propres cartes géo-référencées à l’aide d’outils Web gratuits.

We can gain a deep understanding of the development of the city’s public transit infrastructure simply by examining nine maps published between 1845 and 1921.

Una guía para trabajar con varias herramientas web gratuitas para que puedas hacer tus propios mapas interactivos.

A primer on working with various free web mapping tools so you can make your own awesome maps.

Come to the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division to view three examples that demonstrate the role that maps play, years after their informational current-events function, in documenting histories of changing boundaries.

Nearly one hundred land auctioneering pamphlets from the 1860s to 1920s and covering the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were digitized this past year. With their richly designed covers, these promotional brochures provide modern day researchers with a window onto neighborhood development and changing patterns of land use in the city.

NYPL Labs is pleased to announce the Library's first-ever Net Artist Residency, in partnership with local hardware startup Electric Objects.

As a web developer who works on a screen and an illustrator that works on paper, I have always admired those who could paint big—often on impossibly large and inconveniently placed walls—only to be erased in a matter of weeks or days. The ephemeral nature of street art is what makes it simultaneously appealing and frustrating as a viewer. However, Google Maps recently rolled out a feature allowing users to go back in 

At a recent internal hacking event here, NYPL Labs developer Paul Beaudoin recruited me into an interesting project: transforming one of the library's 20,000 digitized historical maps into the three-dimensional world of the building game Minecraft.