BCS President’s Monthly Bulletin October 2013

Anniversaries

The Panama Canal was finally completed in October 1913. The 48 mile long canal connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and is a key element for international maritime trade. There are locks at each end to lift ships up to Gatun Lake, 85 ft above sea level. Gatun Lake was created to reduce the amount of work required for the canal. The current locks are 110 ft wide. A third, wider lane of locks is currently under construction and is due to open in 2015. 

France began work on the canal in 1881, but had to stop because of engineering problems and high mortality amongst the engineers building the dam due to disease. The United States later took over the project and took a decade to finally complete the canal in 1913. The first traffic through the canal was not until the following year in 1914. The new route allowed ships to reduce their journey times considerably and also avoided the often treacherous passage around Cape Horn.

The project must have been a nightmare for geographers and mapmakers alike as during the construction period, the ownership of the territory that is now the Panama Canal was first Colombian, then French, and then American. When Panama became independent in 1903, the new government authorized French businessman Philippe Bunau-Varilla, to negotiate a treaty with the United States. The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty allowed the U.S. to build the Panama Canal and provided for perpetual control of a zone five-miles wide on either side of the canal.

The division of Panama into two parts by the U.S. territory of the Canal Zone caused tension throughout the twentieth century. This tension flared in the 1960s, leading to anti-American riots. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty which agreed to return 60% of the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979, with the canal itself and remaining territory, known as the Canal Area, returned to Panama on December 31, 1999.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has named the Panama Canal one of the seven wonders of the modern world. 

No prizes, but can you name the other six that were selected in 1994 to recognize the great engineering feats of the 20th century? Read on to the end of this bulletin to find out!

Senghenydd Mining Disaster

Britain’s worst ever mining disaster occurred on 14th October 1913 at the Universal Colliery at Senghenydd near Caerphilly in Glamorgan. A total of 439 miners and 1 rescuer died in an explosion and subsequent underground fire. The youngest victim was just 14 and thirty were aged under 18.

Nearly all of the families in the town were touched, in one way or another. And yet, despite the resulting enquiry finding numerous faults that could be laid at the door of the owners and managers, when compensation and fines were levied, they came to a derisive total of just £24.

The disaster first came to my attention in an article in GEOconnexion magazine in May this year, centered on the recent work by the local community to create and maintain a website to commemorate the disaster. Using a combination of modern and historic mapping they were able to show just how much of the community was directly affected by the disaster. Through a process of address matching based on OS Master Map, historic OS mapping and census records they were able to plot the properties that had lost someone in the tragedy. 
You can find more details at, http://your.caerphilly.gov.uk/abervalleyheritage/1913-pit-disaster

Sopwith Camel Aircrew

After two anniversaries from 100 years ago, there is one notable one from 50 years ago. Do you recognise this dapper young fellow? It is none other than our immediate Past President and Chair of Programme Committee, Peter Jolly.

Peter joined the Royal Air Force as an Officer Cadet on 8 Oct 1963 at RAF South Cerney. Peter has lasted longer than South Cerney, which closed as an RAF base in 1971, but is still an Army base housing 29 Postal Courier and Movement Regiment of the Royal Logistic Corps. As he said in the text that accompanied the photo he sent me “the rest is history! Rather too much of it actually!”

Cartography in the News

A lot of the material for this bulletin comes from monitoring Twitter for a particularly interesting or novel comment or tweet on any manner of things cartographic. I usually make a short note on my ipad and then come back to it as the month goes on to incorporate the salient details. One of my notes this month was “cartoblography dark maps”. When I subsequently searched for this it came up with an article by Ordnance Survey’s Charley Glynn from June, so it’s one I must have missed first time round. He points out that we have become accustomed to viewing maps with a light or white background, most likely due to the fact that the medium being used for distribution would be white paper. It just doesn’t make economic sense to coat a piece of paper with dark ink. The examples of ‘dark maps’ on the website are certainly different and challenge some of our traditional views of maps and as Charley contends “There is something cool, aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching about dark maps.” Check out the website to see if you agree.

Restless Earth

Our schools programme looks like setting a record this year. We have already run two workshops, in Penarth and Godalming, with another 15 to come during the academic year. Over 60 schools have now attended a workshop and we are hopefully convincing the next generation of the importance of geography and cartography. Speaking to teachers it would appear that the numbers of students taking geography is on the increase again and our workshops are certainly at capacity at every school we go to.

We rely primarily on BCS members and RGS Ambassadors to deliver these workshops and whilst we have a good team assembled, it would be nice to involve more of our membership. With venues ranging from the Lake District to Devon, there must be one near you, so if you could come along and help out on the day we would love to see you there. Please email me at Peter.Jones991@mod.uk
We have also just updated our flyer to include a map of schools we have visited so please check it out to see where future opportunities may be. Latest Restless Earth Flyer.

You heard it here first!

Over the last month the Programme Committee has reviewed potential venues and has decided on a location for the BCS Symposium 2014. Our 50th Symposium will be held between 24th and 26th June at the Marwell Hotel, near Winchester – yes, it is on the same site as the Zoo! 
Easily accessible from the M3, Winchester Station and close to Southampton Airport, the venue comes highly recommended by BCS Members who have organised events there including Ordnance Survey and Esri. The programme theme and call for papers will be published shortly so please keep an eye on the website for further details.

Seven Wonders of the Modern World

In answer to the question I posed at the top of this bulletin, the other six are the Channel Tunnel, the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Itaipu Dam and the Netherlands North Sea Protection Works.

Pete Jones MBE, CGeog, FRGS

31st October 2013

Email: Peter.Jones991@mod.uk

Twitter: @geomapnut

BCS Presidents Report Maptember 2013

“I very much look forward to seeing all the delegates in Leicestershire.” This was how I closed my August bulletin and rather shamefacedly I now have to say that the eagle-eyed amongst you spotted that despite the fact that it had an ‘LE’ postcode, Hothorpe Hall is in Northamptonshire! Not quite as bad as a bus load of cartographers getting lost on the way to Keele and just goes to show that we are human!

Anniversaries 

Looking back 50 years and on 16th September 1963 Malaysia was formed through the merging of the Federation of Malaya and the British crown colony of Singapore, North Borneo (renamed Sabah) and Sarawak. 

This was an event not without controversy and on 18th September rioters burned down the British Embassy in Jakarta to protest against the formation of Malaysia. Some of the difficulties were related to historical and local factors as the new Federation brought together widely separated territories with very mixed populations at different stages of development. The Indonesian Government was particularly critical with the President describing the formation of Malaysia as a colonialist project with concerns that its formation would weaken the region and lead to the southward march of Communist China.
 
(>_<)  (@_@)  \(^.^)/ Don’t worry there hasn’t been a glitch in e-mail or on the webpage, these strange symbols do mean something to those able to interpret them. Now broadly familiar to most people it was only just over 30 years ago on 19th September 1982 that Scott Fahlman first proposed using  :-) and :- ( as a means of enhancing messages. 
Fahlman is credited with originating what he thought would help people to distinguish serious posts from jokes on a message board at Carnegie Mellon.

Now widely known as 'emoticons', these are described as “a pictorial representation of a facial expression which in the absence of body language and prosody* serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation.” 

Love them or hate them, I think they are here to stay. 

* Speech rhythms – go on, admit it, you would have had to look it up, I did.

Maptember 

Joining in with the general trend, this month’s bulletin has the ‘#Maptember’ tag, reflecting the sheer amount of events that were taking place during this month. If we stretch a point and include the International Cartographic Conference in Dresden in the last week in August there were 6 major map or map-related events in just over 4 weeks.

• ICC from 25th to 30th August, with additional pre-conference activities
• The SoC Summer School from 2nd to 4th Maptember
• The BCS Annual Symposium from 3rd to 5th Maptember
• The OSM State of the Map Convention from 6th to 8th Maptember
• FOSS4G Conference 17th to 21st Maptember
• AGI Community Conference 16th to 18th Maptember

If you managed all six, I think you need October off for a lie down and a good 

long rest  :-| 

I am going to concentrate on the BCS Symposium, which was very much a celebration of our 50 years. Professor Mike Wood, one of our founder members, cut the birthday cake; the event was attended by a host of past Presidents; we had more delegates than in many recent years and the programme ran very smoothly. The content of presentations offered a mix of old and new, with both retrospectives of the last 50 years and some cutting edge developments. Our keynote session was the only one which gave me more grey hairs, where I very quickly learnt that trying to keep Chief Executives to time is a virtually impossible task. A full report on the Symposium is in the issue of Maplines that is about to arrive with you.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those involved in the organisation and running of the Symposium – you did a fantastic job. :-)

Drivers returning to atlases

Despite there being frequent predictions of the death of the paper map, it would appear that there is life in paper yet and that there will continue to be so for some time to come. Nicolson, has reported a 10 per cent rise in sales of motoring atlases over the past year, especially among older motorists.

The AA has also seen a surge in demand for its atlases in recent months, suggesting at the very least, drivers want the reassurance of an up-to-date map in the car as well as their satnav. I think it is ‘up-to-date’ that is key here as the UK’s road network changes by up to 15% per year and an old road atlas is as likely to cause you problems as a satnav that doesn’t have a regular update feature.

With news stories seeming to delight in pointing out when satnavs get it wrong, does this indicate that there is a backlash against the metallic voice urging a driver to make a sudden u-turn in the middle of a traffic jam? 

Interestingly the comments in the article from motoring organisations are supportive of the use of atlases, probably because they represent a major income stream and perhaps the “belt-and-braces” approach to route-finding that is mentioned is the sensible compromise. For the full article, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/10292351/Sale-of-road-atlases-soars-as-satnav-drivers-seek-extra-help.html

Think like a web designer not a cartographer

This is an attention grabbing strapline, but are the two mutually exclusive? Can you not think like a web designer and a cartographer?

The author’s contention is that because a web map is competing for the attention of its users in a medium where rapid access is all important and users flit from one page to the next very quickly, your map needs to grab the attention very quickly to avoid the user navigating elsewhere.

For those of us not fully familiar with the world of web design, when a user only visits your page for a second and then navigates away again, usually via the back button, it is called a “bounce”. Reducing the "bounce rate" for your page is apparently the major factor in web design!

The two examples that the author presents are reproduced below:

The author readily admits that neither is going to win any cartographic awards and even though they are both displaying exactly the same data the one on the left is most likely to engage a visitor. The use of bold colours and large fonts lends itself to display on a small screen and captures the user's attention more readily, thus reducing the "bounce rate".

So if you are a cartographer designing for the web, apparently you need to “take your prompts from the world of Web 2.0 where everything is big, brash, colourful and has a massive neon sign above it’s head saying “LOOK AT ME” :-) 

Whilst I agree with some of this, surely there is a very big role for cartographers to play, simply by applying some of the key cartographic principles – which colours work well together to convey a message clearly, where to place type so that it can be readily interpreted, the type style itself making it easy to read quickly, and ensuring that the big brash presentation is not compensating for poor data or information underneath.

Mango Map’s full article can be found at: http://blog.mangomap.com/post/62329022340/think-like-a-web-designer-not-a-cartographer

Coming Soon 

The celebrations of our 50th birthday remain in full swing and we have three specific events still left in 2013.

• 25th October – Jack Dangermond, the founder of Esri, will give a talk at 11:00 at the RAF Club in London entitled “GIS and Web Cartography. Note the late morning time slot.

• 7th November – Following on from the GeoDATA 2013 event in Edinburgh at which BCS will be represented, there will be a talk from Chris Fleet of the National Library of Scotland at the Dynamic Earth Centre.

• 25th November – after the Annual BCS AGM, Nick Crane, author and TV broadcaster will give a talk entitled “Reflections of a Map Man”.

Places are still available at all three, but book soon via the BCS Website to avoid disappointment.

Lost Worlds 

The splendid gala dinner held to celebrate our 50th Anniversary was made even more splendid by our fine table decorations, namely miniature globes. These were purchased from a variety of locations as to find them in such quantity was difficult… I was amazed to be told that they had all disappeared the next morning. :-(

Pete Jones MBE, CGeog, FRGS 

30th Maptember 2013

Email: Peter.jones991@mod.uk 

Twitter: @geomapnut

PRESS RELEASE - 50th Anniversary maps way for Dangermond Talk

Successful BCS 50th Annual Symposium Maps Way for Dangermond Talk

Cartographic professionals and enthusiasts from around the world gathered together for four days of presentations, debate, networking and social activities at the British Cartographic Society’s 50th Annual Symposium. Set in the historic surroundings of the 18th century Hothorpe Hall in Leicestershire the anniversary event took place from 3-6 September and attracted nearly 200 attendees.

“This was a hugely rewarding event for all involved,” commented Mr Peter Jones MBE, President of the British Cartographic Society, “truly fitting for our 50th year. We are now looking forward to further anniversary celebrations continuing into the autumn when we will be delighted to welcome Jack Dangermond, sometimes referred to as ‘the father of GIS’, and well known broadcaster Nicholas Crane to forthcoming events.”
 
About the Symposium  
Sessions included the Map Curators workshop, Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings as well as presentations from commercial organisations and academic institutions. The opening ceremony was followed by the Helen Wallis Memorial Lecture delivered by Nick Millea, Map Librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This included the hugely relevant quote from Alfred Wainwright’s A Pennine Journey ‘Give me a map to look at, and I am content’.  
One of the highlights of the Symposium was the heads of the five British Mapping and Charting agencies coming together to discuss the future of mapping. This keynote presentation – ‘probably the most important conference session held in the UK, this year, on the future of mapping’ – saw Vanessa Lawrence CB, Director General and Chief Executive of the Ordnance, extol the importance of cartography in an age when so many people had become map makers while Paul Hancock, Director of the Defence Geographic Centre explained how geography had become a vital element in conflict. John Wilkinson, Chief Executive Land and Property Services, Rear Admiral Ian Moncrieff, CBE, Chief Executive of United Kingdom Hydrographic Office and Professor John Ludden, Executive Director of the British Geological Survey all contributed to the session which was well received by the audience. 
 
Forthcoming Events
Jack Dangermond, founder of global GIS company Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), will present ‘GIS and Web Cartography’ at the Royal Air Force Club in London on Friday 25th October. This is a rare opportunity to hear from this acclaimed speaker and tickets, including refreshments, are available from £15.    
Nicholas Crane, presenter of notable BBC series such as Coast, Great British Journeys, Map Man and Town, will also present. ‘Reflections of a Map Man’ will take place at the British Library Conference Centre, London on the 25th November with tickets starting from just £5.  
Tickets for both these events are now available online at www.cartography.org.uk. Early booking is recommended. To find out more about these and other events in the BCS 50th Anniversary Calendar follow the society on: twitter @bcsweb, facebook  or visit the webpage www.cartography.org.uk  
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Notes to editors
The 2013 BCS Annual Symposium was kindly sponsored by the Society’s corporate members Cadcorp, ESRI (UK), Harper Collins, Leica Geosystems, Newgrove, Ordnance Survey, Star-Apic, The GeoInformation Group and Victoria Litho and was organised on behalf of the Society by Training4GIS.

About the British Cartographic Society The British Cartographic Society promotes the art and science of cartography through awards, events, publications and special interest groups. 2013 marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Society, a registered charity, and is being celebrated with a year-long programme of promotional, lecture, social and outreach events.  The 2013 calendar of events is sponsored by society corporate members Cadcorp, ESRI (UK), Harper Collins, Leica Geosystems, Newgrove, Star-Apic, The GeoInformation Group and Victoria Litho. www.cartography.org.uk