Propaganda Redux

Some thoughts on the final project

All in all, I was very pleased with my final project. I overcame some pretty high hurtles, mainly that we thought it impossible to find a DEM of Europe, let alone a former Soviet Bloc country. When we were looking for paper topographic maps of the Czech Republic in 1998, the store owner would not sell them to us--we had to send our translator to buy them. Felt a little like a 19 year old outside a liquor store hoping to find a sympathetic adult. But three days of diligent study turned up a company that sold DEMs by the square kilometer.  Pricey, but worth it. Leave a message if you want their address. I had found a map of the Prague region printed in 1965--close enough to my project. But it was an old paper map, and I had to scan it in two different sections. I was really certain I could not make it fit--after all, our rubbersheeting exercises had mainly been digital on digital, not paper on digital. But I got the darn things to line up, so I was able to find a covert television station from the street map, then use the geography to find the line-of-sight target of the signal. Although I did not put it on the final project, I used NSD, placed the camera almost exactly where the microwave transmitter was--on a hill plus on the twelfth floor--then looked for a hill . Sure enough, I found a slight dip in the range of hills closest to my camera, then a single hill just beyond it. That was the target, perfectly hidden from any view save that single angle. Sadly, it did not read well, so I did not include it. But it was so cool to find an answer just pop out of thin air, so to speak.

    I had some problems with the printing process--I got it done, but am not happy with the results. I did not break it into two sheets, but had Kinkos print it as one 20"x13" sheet. (The counter jockey did not want to be bothered to help me turn it into two pages--he was not happy I wanted one day service. Customers just ruin his day, you know.) Consequently, no margins. So it won't display nicely. Also, it cost me $20 for matte finish. Glossy would have been twice that. I will try to divide it in two and get it printed somewhere else.

I will be going to Prague in January, so I will do some more investigation on my project. I also have another problem to figure out that our new techniques may answer. In the Old Town square stood two statues: a Marian column and a statue of Jan Hus. The Hus statue was erected in 1915, while the Marian column was destroyed in 1918. Mary faced west, and Hus, depending on who you believe, either faced her or looked past her. We know how tall the Marian Column was and exactly where it stood. So my problem is to get the measurements from the Hus statue, create mock-ups in Sketch-up, then figure out where Hus was looking. I need to get his height, and I won't be able to climb up to measure. This is why I am asking Santa for an Abney level for Christmas. This little device is used mainly by foresters to determine tree height. (You thought they climbed up those trees with a tape measure? These are the guys who wanted to mark trees from their pickups, so they invented the paintball gun.) The  function of the Abney level is very simple--you measure the distance between yourself and the object, then you sight the top of the object and find the angle. Here is a nice do-it-yourself guide to building and using one. But of course, I want a more exact one with lots of knobs and fiddldy bits. It might just come in handy for digital cartographers who want to know the heights of buildings, but can't get on the roof with a tape measure. Anyway, they are cheaper than laser range finders, and they look a bit like sextants, which I think are the gadget equivalent of Antonio Banderas. You know, weapons grade sexy.

    Just wanted to point out I had a terrific time in this class, and I hope to see you all around campus. Let us know if you are doing anything mapish in the near future.

"Hitting the Sawdust Trail"

Here is a project tailor-made for Historical Architectural Recreation: The Billy Sunday Tabernacle, built in New York City in April of 1917. Sunday was a charismatic preacher who started as a professional baseball player. He "got the calling" in 1892 and campaigned against demon rum in traveling events that chris-crossed the United States from 1903-1920. His tent revivals were so popular, he had to find a larger venue than the available tents. He started a tradition of building huge temporary speaking halls, which he called tabernacles, for use during his month-long appearances. My model is of his New York Tabernacle, built at a cost of $68,000 in 1917 dollars on the vacant lot that was the American League Baseball Park on Broadway and West 168th Street. This wooden structure could hold 18,000 worshipers, including space for a 2,000 person choir on the dais. The windows had no glass--just cloth covers  and the aisles were spread with sawdust to deaden the noise of boots on the plank floors. The entire structure--even the sawdust, was treated with fire retardant, and the aisles were arranged so that each led to an exit. Supposedly, each plank in the walls was only nailed in using two nails, so that in case of a panic, the audience could easily push their way out. Sunday was very conscious of fire danger after the disaster of the Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903, in which 600 audience members died. Fire extinguishers can clearly be seen in the photographs of the meetings.
The New York campaign was a media sensation, as were his campaigns in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia in that year. With the advent of radio and the use of public address systems, big revivals became more commonplace in baseball stadiums. The era of a single performer holding the complete attention of an audience of 18,000 with only his voice and gestures dissapeared. The tabernacles themselves were sold for scrap immediately after the shows were over. The last one, a small replica in the town of Winona Lake, Iowa, burned to the ground in 1992. The lot in New York is now the site of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Billy Sunday died in 1934, but he was immortalized as the inspiration for Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry."
I did want to get the interior done on this model--but the only plans I had were for the Chicago tabernacle, which was smaller. The plans may exist in the LOC or with the original architects, Kendal Taylor and Co. of Boston. This firm, by the way, is still in business and still creates churches, but of a more permanent form.   

Book of Assumptions

I am afraid I will treat "Mapping Hacks" more like a recipe book than a "sit down and read book." I hope you will forgive me for this attitude. The information could be quite useful in designated arenas, but I am not to that level yet. I call it the book of assumptions for many reasons--first it assumes some knowledge on the readers part and a real desire to play around with computers.  I am afraid the second assumption will have to wait until hell freezes over when I get out of grad school. Another assumption comes from the content itself. I took the advise of the first chapter--map what you know--and found myself highly amused by the article in the second chapter about planning a trip from Portland,OR to San Francisco. I grew up in that area and have made that trip, along with all the various side trips about fifty times. Dr. Petrik can attest, Westerners travel differently than Easterners. We are used to getting on a Blue Star freeway (not "Blue freeway"--big difference, buddy) putting the cruise control on 70 + and driving for 300 miles at a stretch. No big deal. The fun comes when someone tries to take a "scenic route." Because 101 looks kind of like I-5 on a Google map, maybe not so many lanes and a little curvy. The second map he should have opened up is a topo map. Because the only road on the east coast that even approximates 101 is the drive in New Hampshire's White Mountains. And the route he chose from Grant's Pass to Crescent City isn't even that--it is a barely-paved alley through some really mountainous regions. Mostly impassible in the winter.I-5 also gets its share of winter closures too. Choked with logging trucks every other time. Oh yeah, the landslides block it up frequently. There is no way to assume you would spend only an extra 90 minutes taking that route. The map technology only goes so far--maps only show you what was when the map was made. A really good hack would include weather updates, current road conditions and descriptions of the route. Funniest thing about the article--he reported he got to the Bay Area at 4am. That means his entire trip through the scenic area would have been at night! Remind me not to car-pool with this guy.   

Anyone up for another field trip?

The National Gallery has a new exhibit on Baroque woodcuts. I bet they have maps.

Until our trip to the LOC I had no idea the woodcuts were created in small blocks. This makes perfect sense, since it is much easier to replace one cracked or banged-up block then the entire piece. Also, the carvers preferred fruitwood like pear, which has very tight grain, but is soft enough to carve. They carved the design on the end grain. This made the block stand up better under the pressure of the printing process, but also was easier to carve. However, arborists normally do not allow fruit trees to grow large--better exposure to sunlight--so the pieces of wood could not be very big. Certainly not folio size, anyway.

So can we apply this piece-meal method to a larger building, say Amiens Cathedral? All those beautiful pillars can be divided into blocks. In the diagram section, you can see the templates, then how they were arranged. Cut, smooth, stack, repeat. So how do you get to the template? I recently heard a paper--don't know if has been published--by a historian who just started playing with drafting tools and the footprint of the bell tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Pictured here is a model--the real thing is HUGE. Anyway, this historian figured out that the convoluted design could actually be replicated with a compass and a handful of angles--30, 45, 60, and 90. Just the sort of things any draughtsman has in his drawer, right Don? The designs were then scaled and turned to create new layers. Sound like just the application for Sketchup.

The nice thing about atlases. . .

is that you never really are finished with them. A book you can read, finish, then close it up and stick it on the shelf. You are done with it, and can never explore that virgin territory again. An atlas, on the other hand, is just the starting point. It can only suggest voyages, it can only supplement your experiences in traveling, and it can only remind you of the small amount of places you have traveled.
    Katherine Harmon's You Are Here proposes a whole glorious collection of voyages to take. And not all of them will make you late for supper. She expertly tied memory to maps--some of her voyages in Seattle had been my voyages when I was an undergraduate (I ate at the Doghouse too!)However, much of her work was based on explorations only to be found inside the imaginations of others. Once you start heading into those waters, God help you!The world expands at a really painful rate. Makes becoming conscious of your tongue seem trivial. You start to ask questions like "what does it feel like to be an octopus and change color? What mental command does one use to go from purple to red?" What does your yellow look like, and does it look at all like my color yellow?" "What is she smoking?" Sorry, but the book is like that
    Space becomes the movement of things around you that reflect the passage of time. Except in this wonderful book, the space has been captured, made static, and is accessible at any random time. You Are Here may never find a space on my bookshelf. As long as my son does not find the coitus demonstratum map. There isn't an image in the book that isn't worth an entire essay. No, I do not think the images stand on their own and do not need explanation. The purpose of a map is not to reveal all information about an area, we already agreed on that.  But a map allows you to see an area in a particular way--the specificity of information makes the map useful. That point is brought out powerfully in the book. Except for page 42-43, that guy was several legs short of a table. 

The one field of mapmaking she did not approach is the world of on line gaming. In those games, you are totally dependent on maps to find your way around. And you have to do it at the speed of an epic mount (flying griffin, giant eagle, etc.) Not an easy task when some creature is attacking you--right Brad?

Travails with Illustrator

OK, let's see if this works. I am having a horrific time getting this right. This is only part of my map--I cannot seem to get the image to crop properly, or to rasterize. I made certain elements too big, and I want to trim them, but that doesn't work like Photoshop. Naw, it seems to be taking forever, so obviously I had done something wrong. So this example of my map is a much lower resolution EPS file. Much of my problem with this assignment comes from not knowing the program. I think doing more of the tutorials may help, but I keep getting stuff hanging around--I tried to use the slice function to trim the excess, now I have trim lines with weird symbols and I can not get rid of them.
Another problem I am having is with the content itself. Between 1948 and 1989, the Czechs changed many of the prominent street names to reflect Marxist heritage, i.e. Maxim Gorky Square, First of May bridge, etc. After 1989, everyone promptly forgot  these, and changed to pre-'48 names or gave them new names. As you can guess, I am sitting here with several books and maps, trying to cross check the names. Also, most of the maps I have show the streets with uniform widths and the buildings with nice square corners. Not at all correct, and these little details are pivotal to my story. I used Goggle maps as my basis, because the real forms can be seen in that format. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice some accuracy as far as scale, so I need to work that out.

So the historical issues behind my map are these: in the Spring of 1968, the Czechoslovak government, under Alexander Dubcek started a liberalization program. They attempted to create "socialism with a human face." The Soviet Union decided the Czechoslovaks had gone too far, and on the night of August 21 rolled over five thousand tanks into the small country, most of which ended up in Prague. At this moment in time, Prague was still a city formed around a medieval core and dependent on buses, street cars, and foot power to move its one million inhabitants from home to job. The Soviet T-55 tanks were made for warfare on the Steppes, or better yet, nice flat Polish and German landscapes. They could not maneuver in the congested fourteenth century streets and kept shorting out their antennas on the overhead tram wires. The Red Army soldiers had to resort to tourist maps to get around downtown, and even this tactic failed after the Czechs painted over the street signs. They mistook the National Museum for the parliamentary buildings located in the Castle across the river, and filled the facade full of bullet holes. Ironically the most important building, and the one most fiercely fought over, was the radio station. The Czechs lost the station but managed to stay on the air with portable transmitters (if you have read the final installment of the Harry Potter books, you have read how effective an underground radio station can be.) In order to patrol the entire city, the Red Army troops had to get out of their tanks, and that is where the real warfare began. You see, they were told they would be welcomed as liberators (sound familiar?) and all they found were little old ladies shaking their fists and telling them (in perfect Russian) they were bad boys and should go home.  Oh yeah, the Czechs also painted swastikas on the tanks (not very nice) and passed out leaflets. After about a week of this sort of abuse the commanders of the Red Army had to pull the tanks and the soldiers out of the city and into the suburbs.  The absolute audacity and cleverness of the unarmed Czechs in the face of the might of the Soviet Union began to unnerve the soldiers. The play has a very sad third act, because the Soviets crack down on the Czechoslovak government--once they find them--and for the next twenty years the Czech and Slovak lands become the most tightly repressed nations in the Warsaw Pact. Anyway, I hope my map helps express the hazards occupational forces face, and how native insurgents can forestall or even overcome a more powerful force.   

Welcome to the World's Smallest Mountain Range

The Northern Sacramento Valley in California was at one time an inland sea. Surrounded on three sides by the Cascade Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, the valley floor is a huge expanse of flatlands. Skillet-flat flatlands. And in the middle is the Sutter Buttes, also known as the World's Smallest Mountain Range. Barely ten miles across and reaching 2,117 feet in elevation, these mountains are actually the lava domes of a group of 2.5 million year old volcano vents. The Maidu Indians called them "Histum Yani" or middle mountains. They did not live on them, but believed the spirits of the dead resided there. Before modern hydrological practices, the wet season often flooded the entire valley, leaving these peaks sticking out as the only refuge for fifty miles in any direction. Currently during the dry months, the valley floor is a sea of rice, onions, tomatoes, and grapes, as well as millions of almond, walnut, and olive trees.

Historically, this area is virtually a blank spot. The local Native Americans were nomadic tribes who left only a few stone mortars. The early settlers looked for gold, but found nothing and abandoned the area. John C. Fremont stayed there briefly . Aside from a couple of gas wells on the south side of the Buttes, the land was only valuable as grazing land and stayed in the hands of a few private families. In 1963, an ICBM missile silo was built on the site, but dismantled two years later. This gave rise to local myths about alien landing sites and underground bunkers. Having been ignored for so long, this area is now a wildlife preserve and will soon be turned into California's newest state park. Unlike a site of memory, the Sutter Buttes are a site of curiosity. They hold abundant interest for scientists interested in tiny ecosystems, or in geological oddities. They also hold some undisturbed anthropological sites. The Buttes are also a beautiful recreation area.

These maps were relatively easy to put together--the topo map fit the second try. I wanted a site with lots of contour, but not very big, and this tiny mountain range fit the bill nicely. I hope you can see the trees--they are small. The view from the south also shows the gas wells- also very tiny.  The original map was not big enough to show how odd these mountains look on the flat expanse of rice. If you travel north of Sacramento on I-5, they are visible for thirty miles in any direction and look totally out of place. If I had time, it would be fun to but together a bunch of these maps to show how lonely these Buttes look.

Shaded Relief

Sorry I am running a bit late--all the wind is out of my sails. Someone very vital has left George Mason, and we are all bobbing in place, where before we were water-skiing in his wake. That and my guts feel like two cats in a sack. Oh well, we soldier on. I am not used to working in colored pencils. I like to add my colors dark to light, not light to dark. So my colors got too dark--so dark I could not put in identifiers. The area I drew, Prairie Creek State Park in Humboldt  County is Coastal Redwood country. You can literally look at the satellite images on Google and see individual trees. I tried to get the rough look on the southern hills, but could not get the shading correct, so I went for just dark to light. I did try to get the sunward side of the wills warmer than the shade sides, and I think that worked.   

I am a somewhat happy camper

So I just got the word from Amazon--Derek Hayes is releasing a historical atlas of California October 30. Hoorah. And it is on sale now--get it before the rush!
Two, I have discovered an interesting past time for those who have some free time. Available through Amazon is the Mechanical Turk. It is a group of jobs that computers cannot do, ie identifying images, finding things on documents, etc. They have a system where registered users get paid per hit to do these jobs. Not that I am suggesting we should give up our day jobs, but that you can also volunteer to look at satellite images of the Nevada Desert to aid the search for Steve Fossett. It is an interesting exercise in looking at these images that cover roughly 85 meters by 85 meters of uninhabited terrain. You really develop an eye for looking at slope, foliage, etc.
I felt stymied about this project--my historical place does not have a lot of slope. And, the maps were hard to find on the internet. However, my husband (who never files anything away properly) pulled out a file folder of maps of Prague--including topos, etc. And in the file was a highway map of Czechoslovakia dated 1966! Yippie!. Part of legend of my historical event was that Soviet tank drivers in the invasion of 1968 had to rely on just this sort of tourist map--written not in Cyrillic but in Chesky. So now I have something to compare modern and historical.
After reviewing the websites on shading, I have seen two methods that I am experimenting with. The first uses grayed-out colors on the shade side of the ridges. This technique is very much like the techniques used in the Italian Renaissance to  create distant backgrounds. Da Vinci  mused about it in his notebooks. The other technique employs a warm hue on on the sunny side of the ridge, and a cool hue on the shade. We have been doing that in theatre lighting for over 70 years. One of the earliest "electricians with notions" Stanley McCandless proposed this method --still called the McCandless system--to give actors' forms more shape. In the theatre, it takes hanging and focusing two separate lights. Since circuitry and dimmers were at a premium, giving an actor one side warm and one side cold allowed for both lights to be circuited together. the concept is to imitate natural lighting. We are used to seeing a singular source--the sun--as a very warm, bright, direct light. However, there is also another aspect to that, and that is the omni-directional fill light of the sky. This light highlights the blue end of the spectrum, making shadows less dark.

Other Stuff

Two in between post issues:

My husband insists DEMS are now being called NEDS. Is this true or are they a new standard?

Also, Here is an absolutely fascinating study by the film maker Errol Morris on the interpretation of historical  photographs.It is a long article, but his findings are amazing. BTW, I am of the  camp that figures the ON photograph was taken first, and the OFF photograph was taken later, but this question will be an ongoing one...