A cartographer drew a freehand map of North America (2019) | Hacker News Reader

A cartographer drew a freehand map of North America (2019)

atlasobscura.com

111 pointsTomte46 comments

It is labeled correctly on his map, but he is recorded as saying something incorrect in the article:

> Also Baffin Island in Greenland. So few people have been to that part of the world.

Baffin Island is in Canada. Since this would be something silly for a cartographer to get wrong, I wonder if he didn't actually say "Baffin Island and Greenland" and his response was incorrectly transcripted.

FWIW, I've worked with professional cartographers, and a huge part of their focus was designing _how_ the information was displayed. They weren't specifically experts on the geography itself, though naturally they did have some steong knowledge there.

I really like this article but I don't know why!

> Melbourne-based Anton Thomas drew North America by hand

Why North America instead of Australia, m8? Potential market size? That's so American :-)

> a freelance cartographer

What the hell is a freelance cartographer, what does he do, and who are his colleagues? Buster Bluth and a bunch of Earth observation satellites? That's one competitive market.

> I was working as a cook in the old port of Montreal. And in classic Montreal fashion, we had littered the apartment with things we found on the side of the road. And one was this big fridge. It had all these rusty, brown stains on it. My housemate Douglas, from Zimbabwe, had been urging me to draw him something as a memento, since he knew I was going to go back to New Zealand. He had painted the fridge with white house paint to cover up the stains and I thought, “What about the fridge?”

That's it, I'm moving to Australia.

I only collect maps that predate the steam engine but I would love to buy a huge wall size print!

> Why North America instead of Australia, m8?

* He'd already just completed an Australiasian map,

* There's 23 countries in North America Vs. just the one in Australia (especially now that Prince Leonard of the Principality of Hutt River and Princess Shirley have passed on) .. borders are catnip to some cartographers.

> a freelance cartographer

This guy doesn't fold to Big Map. Fjords his own path, climbs his own mountains and is not fenced into you're completely plain and flat plateau of mediocrity you call "cartography"

No, this man is a pioneer, finding excitement around every butte, jetty and isthmus!

He peaks when you valley, he glades when you marsh, and he is a fertile alluvial flood-plain to your cold, damp peat-marsh of a life. A bread-basket of agricultural abundance and agrarian love-making, the seat of civilization! to your barren Gobi desert of a life.

Carter the Cartographer!

Otherwise known as MAP MAN!

> For Thomas, now—for the first time in his life—a freelance cartographer, who tours the world exhibiting the North America map, geography is a bit of a homecoming

Seems like the surrounding context answers your question. This freelance cartographer is someone who supports himself by talking about a cool map he drew.

Same thing that any freelance graphic designer or drafter would do. I've made maps for landscape architects and law firms before, for instance.

Montreal is in Canada, you know.

Don’t tell them that!

Maps are great. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps. Looking at places where I have already been in the past or following famous routes I yet have to travel. A map can be very simple but it sparks the imagination and it brings back the emotions I felt when I was in that place. A hand-drawn map highlights the individual view of the author of the various places. I really like it!

Merry Christmas everyone!

The cartographer's website has a bunch more stuff from him and some better photos of the map itself:

https://www.antonthomasart.com/the-north-american-continent....

Here's his website: https://www.antonthomasart.com/

South Asia and Australasia: https://www.antonthomasart.com/south-asia.html

North America: https://www.antonthomasart.com/the-north-american-continent....

World: https://www.antonthomasart.com/wild-world.html

Having traveled extensively throughout the East Coast and Latin America this map does a great job of capturing a lot of the feel of each place.

I've tried to do this same thing with Mexico, but this is 100x better.

It's a real triumph.

In my seventh grade history/social sciences class two of our main projects were to draw physical maps (no political borders) of Africa and North America. They were drawn on blank paper a few feet in each direction, and students would generally draw a faint grid to help with accuracy.

We were graded on the number of physical features included, and how accurately the coasts, rivers, mountains, etc. were drawn.

I wonder if anyone still teaches with similar projects. It was a great way to learn in detail about the surface of the Earth.

God I love maps, real or otherwise. In fact, I recently re bought The Lord of the Rings for the cartography!

My favorite by a country mile, though, is the Japanese scroll map detailing (and I do mean detailing) the road to Kyoto:

https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/07/the-road-to-kyoto/

Too bad tectonic shifts move about the same speed as the growth of a fingernail (some places even more). Land surveyors and will never go out of business. GNSS cannot possibly handle the resolution of a Multistation and theodolite.

(Current) Geodesist and Professional Land Surveyor (formerly employed as; license retained) here chiming in. While I appreciate the sentiment that we will never go out of business, I’d like to proffer a couple points related to this statement and the more technical one that followed (they’re integrally linked). While tectonic plates do move more than one might assume, it is actually those same surveyors who model this movement utilizing Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) (and other technologies) that are strategically placed and constantly collecting positional data - the National Geodetic Survey, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable and important scientific agencies the USA maintains. Land surveying measurements rely upon the datum’s and (soon) projections NGS publishes, which indeed does account for these movements, provided the user correctly applies the velocity movement and temporal changes to the epoch desired. However, it is less this movement that keeps surveyors employed and far more their legal expertise that does. Land Surveyors are the front line maintainers, interpreters, and, in a sense, the creators/subdividers of the cadastral system responsible for private property. So long as their are (on-the-ground) boundary disputes over land and title, a surveyor will be needed. Coordinates may one day be the controlling aspect of those boundaries, but unfortunately that is not for the land surveyors to decide (I digress…a simple comment on this forum could never account for the nuances needed in that discussion).

Also, apologies, but a correction: a multi-station DOES incorporate GNSS along with a theodolite (and Electronic Distance Measurer, which, when all three are combined is marketed as a “multi station”). I believe you meant a Total Station is more precise, which is a combination theodolite/EDM, excluding GNSS, and which does, locally, produce more precise standalone measurements though at the cost of being limited to direct line of sight. Each plays an integral part of survey field work and their application.

Thanks for your high quality response to my mediocre posting. I think our current maps are like a patchwork quilt made up of patches of high precision / high accuracy data sewn to high accuracy / low precision basemaps. Surveyors will use a ‘Horizontal/Vertical Datum of the day’ to keep things relevant to maps but in reality, their scope of work ends at xy = 5000,5000 and that’s it (relative coordinates). Most people I’ve met aren’t keeping up with NOAA. But nothing will come close to the bearings and distances (error of closure) to what a totalstation can generate in their arsenal. In the end, a Civil Engineer or GIS tech will be creating that mosaic out of the surveyor data and store it in a retrievable format for county records. The data is stored but there’s still a never reconcilable difference between survey data and mapping data.

Thus TotalStations with GNSS seem oxymoronic to me just as a GPS with a laser range finder is. There is a huge opportunity (for those interested) to build a surveyor-grade worldmap.

Super cool. Next he should make versions for individual states (Alaska would be amazing, maybe Georgia and Florida, or California)

I would love to buy a map like that, but at roughly 4x4 ft, it's unfortunately more than I could fit in my apartment.

If the artist happens to be reading this, and would like a place to stay in southern Utah, give a shout.

Very cool piece of work. Little bit weird that Springfield gets to be the other illustrated city in Massachusetts when Worcester is the second biggest city in the entire region after Boston.

Just as deciding what roads to show on a map, deciding what labels to place and where on a map is a hard problem. There may not be sufficient room for it in the location where you want to place it. If so, do you move it ‘a bit’, maybe also move another label, which means having to move another, etc. or do you leave it out?

Worcester likely is too close to Boston to have room for it at the chosen level of detail.

For what it’s worth, when I zoom in on Massachusetts in Apple Maps (which seems to have finer grained zoom levels than OpenStreetMap.org or maps.Google.com), the order in which cities appear is

- Boston

- Springfield

- New Bedford

- Worcester

How close are they to other named places? Back in the 1990s my father was astonished to see his little hometown in Canada on a map of North America but it is in an area with few other settlements so even though it isn't a seat of any level of government, it's still the "major" population center for the area. Meanwhile around Toronto cities 50x larger didn't make the map.

The Simpsons is culturally more relevant for an Aussie, and I would assume a Kiwi, than whatever is not Boston.

There must be at least 40 Springfields in the USA. Given Massachusetts's early statehood, I wouldn't be surprised if Springfield, MA was the "first" Springfield in USA, but are you thinking the artist illustrated all the Springfields because of the Simpsons?

Suddenly I have an urge to make a Voronoi map of the US using each Springfield as the capital of its own state.

It’s the first, largest and (unfortunately) poorest Springfield.

(I’m writing this from Springfield right now)

Springfield MO is larger. About as poor, but Springfield MA ekes that out still.

Yep, you’re correct, I was using old numbers - Springfield MA lost some population while Springfield MO grew. But we still have Dr. Suess!

Why does the headline read like an Onion article

Why is Canada faded out so much?

It's depicting snow

Canada is only semi-real.

Looks cool

Look warm you mean ?

Beautiful!

alternatives :

https://www.shadedrelief.com/north-america/#download

https://shadedrelief.com/maps-and-data.html

https://equal-earth.com/index.html

Looks like this come for a karma-farming account. But what do I know. Merry XMas anyway.

Interesting. I only know 2 models of geography that consider North America a continent, the rest treat America as a continent.

I guess this is no different than people calling United States of America "America". I wonder what citizens of the countries in North or South America think about it.

UPDATE: my comment got downvoted. I wonder why

Can you talk more about what models of geography you're referring to? In school in the US, I was always taught there were 7 continents, including the North and South Americas as 2 separate ones. As far as I remember, there was never even a mention of other models apart from maybe some historical understanding before lands had been fully explored by Europeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number

This, like history, is one of those dogmatic aspects of state education where only one side get taught and implicitly assumed to be the only one. Geography books need one big asterisk in so many sections

Continents are not natural features, but human determined. Some of the models don't make logical sense.

If Americas are one continent, then Afro-Eurasia must be continent. And end up with the four continent model with continuous landmasses.

If isthmuses make continent, then get the six continent model with tectonic plates.

If can split into non-geographical regions, then Europe and Asia can be separate continents and get the seven continents in the US model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number

I was never really taught a different model either, but the entire distinctions always felt strange. Moreso with Eurasia.

Different models are taught in different countries. Like with many things, if you never left your country, you are highly unlikely to find out.

Interesting read, do I believe it, I do not know.

But, a little tweak to this book, replacing one item with another could sync up with the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nitrogen_Fix

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