What You’ll Find Here

Cartoko is a place to find good, generally copyright-free, and high-resolution maps. Currently the United States and Canada are covered the most heavily. Historical subjects are provided as well. Some maps are hard to find elsewhere, such as the Library of Congress’ Area Handbook Series (Country Studies), or Charles O. Paullin’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.

You’ll also see maps here that are readily available elsewhere. Pulling together the best maps on a subject, and making them more accessible, is what Cartoko was made for.

But this purpose is not just about collecting maps. We’re also organizing them and letting them tell their story along the way. For example, British cartographers mapping Boston around the American Revolution included a place called simply “Mount Whoredom.” Far from being a mountain in any geographic sense, it was an informal name for the red light district of Boston at the time, frequented by sailors, and British troops during their occupation of the city in 1775-1776.

Subscriptions

You’ll find a Subscription button at the top of the first sidebar to your right. This is a context-based tool, meaning it does different things depending on where you are on the site. Here’s the breakdown:

Individual Map Post

If you’re reading a detailed description about a single map, clicking on subscribe will alert you to comments made about the map by you or anyone else.

Tag

Have a favorite subject? Click on any tag, then subscribe. You’ll be notified within minutes when any map gets tagged with that term. You can easily access tags either of two ways: use the tag cloud to the right, or locate a map on the subject you’re interested in and click on one of its tags. Then subscribe.

Text Page

For any page like this one that is more narrative in nature, you can subscribe to comments. Unfortunately, comments are presently disabled for these pages until we begin to develop the narrative side of the site, so this option won’t help you much yet. More on that in the months to come.

Status

Cartoko began life as a wiki site in early 2009, but to improve accessibility we’re migrating more than 8,000 maps to a WordPress platform. Bear with us as we make this transition. In the meantime, you can still access the original wiki.

Focus now is on building up content, especially for Pennsylvania and development of local areas. Stories will grow from there. Anyone interested in helping with this effort by offering information about a particular map, adding content, or anything else, is encouraged to contact us.

Background

The idea of indexing maps in books is far from new. Publications from the mid-19th century attempted to do this in the knowledge that a lot of good maps could be found inside bound volumes. Unlike sheet maps, these cartographic pieces couldn’t be physically stored in any kind of logical system.

Thomas Letts, one of the first librarians to specialize in cataloging maps, was a librarian at the American Geographical Society around the turn of the 20th century. Seeing the potential loss from losing track of these published maps, he sought to index as many maps as he could from the AGS collection, leaving his initials by the maps as he finished them. Sadly, this process takes more time than most people have, so projects like his tend to fall by the wayside.

Cartoko is slightly different in that it tries to not only index maps in book, but provide the best source for finding maps on a given area or theme. This is far too great a task for any one person, so for starters, we’re going local and experimenting with good ways to combine maps hosted on the site with links and references to outside sources.

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About

Cartoko is all about finding good maps on any subject. Since going online in early 2009, over 8,000 maps have been added and organized.

Contact

admin@cartoko.com