4 replies to this topic

[Tom Patterson]

At NACIS St. Petersburg, we announced the launch of ShadedReliefArchive.com, a website containing manual shaded relief art from the twentieth century that today's digital mapmakers can use. The goal of our project is twofold: giving cartographers a high-quality alternative to generic digital relief, and scanning manual relief that still has production value before it is permanently lost. We are in a race against time—mapping organizations having now gone digital are discarding photomechanical production materials, including manual shaded relief. Much of this beautiful art deserves to be used by future mapmakers.

The ShadedReliefArchive.com website offers manual shaded relief that is georeferenced, saved in GeoTIF format, and, when the scale is appropriate, adjusted to fit Natural Earth coastline and drainage vectors. The margins of the raster scans contain embedded metadata: latitude/longitude ticks, map projection information, and a brief description about the provenance of the art, including the name of the artist and creation date. The site only contains shaded relief that is free from use restrictions, or has modest restrictions, such as citing the person or organization donating it.

You can check out the site at www.shadedreliefarchive.com.

And if you have a manual relief that you would like to contribute, or know of a good source, please let us know.

Tom Patterson, US National Park Service
Bernhard Jenny, Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich

Edited by frax, 18 October 2010 - 03:19 AM.
Made the link clickable

[Hans van der Maarel]

Many thanks to Tom and Bernhard for setting this up and preserving these cartographic treasures for future generations, both to see and to use.

[Matthew Hampton]

I echo Hans's thanks. I'm wondering if there is going to be any updates regarding the georeferencing of the maps that have not been georeferenced yet?

I have also been chuckling every time I think of Tom's manual hillshading of Southern Florida. Can you please post that brilliant work to this forum? I've been trying to make my own, but it lacks the subtle detail.

[Tom Patterson]

We are focusing our efforts on georeferencing smaller scale shaded reliefs that are useable with Natural Earth vector data. This is mostly a matter of time. Just georeferencing the 120 large-scale Park Service reliefs and then adjusting them to fit vector drainages would take months. Of the non-georeferenced reliefs on the site, we spent hours working on the "China" and "Pacific" reliefs but could not figure out the projections of these. If anyone else would like to tackle this challenge, please give it a try. Good luck!

After our NACIS talk we received several promising leads about other manual relief sources. We hope to add significantly to ShadedReliefArchive in the coming months, which we will announce on CartoTalk.

As for the very subtle shaded relief of Florida, Matthew is referring to a joke slide during our presentation depicting Florida as uniform 20 percent grey. The idea for this came to me years ago when an outside publisher insisted that I give them a shaded relief of Everglades National Park. Because most other park maps have shaded relief backgrounds, so too should Everglades, so they thought. When they accused me of withholding data, I just gave them a TIF filled with 20 percent grey. My easiest shaded relief ever!

[oombaca]

Thanks, great idea, I'm glad it's being done!

If what you are lacking is manpower/manhours to get the georeferencing done have you considered opening up that end to a commons-type project?

I don't have a lot of time but I'd gladly georeference a few every now and then and I bet there are many who feel the way I do.