Blogging about maps since 2003
From May 2025: a blog post from TeleGeography looking back at their annual maps of submarine cables, which they’ve been putting out since at least 2013, and with a different design each year (here’s my post about the 2022 edition). Always the Mercator projection though. Affords a look at how the submarine cable network has expanded in recent years. [Kottke]
Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of the Earth. Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation. That work ultimately became the backbone of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—now essential to aviation, shipping, emergency response, smartphones, and daily life worldwide.”
Previously: Gladys West, GPS’s Hidden Figure.
How many novels include maps? For his 2013 monograph on fantasy maps and settings, Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman surveyed a random sample of 200 fantasy novels and found that about a third of them came with maps. Computational methods have now answered this question using a much bigger sample:
Digital humanities scholars from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers of Computing and Information Science have developed a computational system to mine maps from nearly 100,000 digitized books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, discovering that just 1.7% of novels include maps, mostly at the beginning or end, among other findings.
They also discovered that 25% of maps in novels depict fictional settings, and military and detective fiction—not fantasy or science fiction—were the book genres most likely to contain a map, contrary to initial hunches.
Contrary to what I would have expected as well! See the article here (PDF). [Tara Calishain]
In a Guardian piece last month, Laura Spinney briefly touches on three books and the ways in which they subvert our understanding of what’s on the map and how we use them to see the world. They are Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: a New Cartography of Borders and Migration by Henk van Houtum et al. (nai10, 2024); William Rankin’s Radical Cartography (Picador/
Doug Greenfield catches up with the 50 Maps series from Belt Publishing, focusing mainly on the two most recent: Cincinnati in 50 Maps by Nick Swartsell and maps by Andy Woodruff, and Columbus in 50 Maps by Brent Warren and maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. (Previously.)
Cincinnati in 50 Maps is one of two books—the other is Alan Wight’s Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas—that are the subject of a 23-minute segment on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition this week, which interviews the authors.
The Guardian maps the devastation wrought by wildfires across the globe. “Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, Australia and Canada have all endured some of their worst fire seasons in recent years, as heatwaves stoked by fossil fuel pollution drive the risk of extreme blazes higher. The maps, using data from the University of Maryland, show some of the hardest-hit forests.”
The British comedy/panel show QI had this short bit about silk escape maps being made into underthings after World War II. (This is from episode 6 of series U, which aired in February 2024.)
The folks behind the Melbourne Map also sell a series of silk/cotton map scarves [Mappery]. Hoopy froods may be more interested in the map towels, however.
A short piece in The New Yorker from Adam Gopnik about Proposal 5, which appeared on the New York City general election ballot last November. It called for a unified single digital city map maintained by the Department of City Planning, rather than a hodgepodge of maps held at the borough level. Gopnik:
Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on the part of the city’s map functionaries. (They exist.) There has been a digitized map of New York for nearly twenty-five years. The extended map, however, will add to its already rich inventory of features some street-specific ones that, for ancient and complicated reasons, have been jealously guarded on thousands of paper maps by the five borough presidents. Though no one in the know will say, exactly, that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps, you do get the strong impression that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps. Now street names, lines, and widths across the city will all be available on one consolidated official digital map.
From there Gopnik chases thoughtfulness by segueing to some national-level generalities, but I took the opportunity to poke at Proposal 5, which passed 73.6 percent to 26.4 percent. The main opposition came, as it seems to do with most things NYC, from the contrarian oasis of Staten Island. (See the precinct-level results map from “Fiveminutecrafts” on Wikipedia.)
Update, 18 Jan: Here’s more from Gothamist.
The Narwhal reports that flood map updates are getting pushback in Canada too:
As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.
Per the article, a big part of the problem is that despite flooding being the main risk from climate change, Canada is decades behind relative to other G7 countries in terms of flood planning, so a lot of this is new to people.
Related: Why FEMA Flood Maps Are Contentious.
Previously: Quebec Flood Maps Will Get a New Framework Next Year; The CBC on Inaccessible Flood Maps; Quebec’s Updated Flood Maps Prove Controversial; Quebec Flood Maps.
Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.
By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.
“The shortcomings and possibilities of generative AI are, of course, well chronicled across a million op-eds. I could write at length about the dangers or opportunities the technology presents,” writes Matt at Londonist. “But this is a newsletter about London, and I’m still in a silly holiday-season mindset. So all I’m going to do today is ask AI to draw some historical maps of the capital, and then take the p*ss out of them. Popcorn at the ready . . . ” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “terribly,” with results “as crazy as a yacht of numbats,” with labels “so bizarre that I don’t know where to begin.”
The State of The Map Room in 2025: On my Patreon, I look back on how this site did in terms of traffic and income over the past year.
Map Books of 2026: Already live, though at this stage there aren’t very many books listed. You know the drill: if you know something’s coming out this year, let me know.
Map Stores: Another work in progress, this is a list of brick-and-mortar map stores around the world. Does not include online stores, or antique map dealers (which are a different category, and could probably use their own page); these are retail stores you can visit during regular hours and buy maps from. For comparison, see Andrew Middleton’s map, which includes non-profit institutions like archives and libraries, and Zhaoxu Sui’s list of global map stores, from which I’ve been cribbing disgracefully.
The Onion: MTA Admits to Fabricating Large Parts of Subway Map. “‘Frankly, no one I know has ever ridden farther than the Carroll Street Station in Brooklyn. We’re not really sure what’s out there, but we figured we’d better put something on the map. Now we see the error in our ways. It was a mistake to trick New Yorkers into believing the G train exists—it does not.’” (Responses on social media are invariably some variant of I knew it.)
The Canadian Press reports on the closure of Canada Map Sales, a map store owned by the Manitoba government that sells topo maps, nautical charts, and other maps, posters and imagery, at the end of March 2026. It’s a victim of the digital age, says the cabinet minister responsible, who points to alternative online sources for the maps. (On the other hand, it might also be because the store is in a nondescript government building in an industrial park in southwest Winnipeg.)
MacRumors reports that Flyover city tours in Apple Maps appear to have been discontinued as of iOS 26. The Flyover imagery itself remains; this is about the feature that led the user from landmark to landmark using that imagery, which I guess wasn’t used much. It doesn’t happen very often, but online maps do retire features from time to time (Google has retired standalone apps for My Maps and Street View, for example).
On the Library of Congress’s Worlds Revealed blog, a fascinating piece on a fascinating piece of hardware used by NASA to process lunar photographs taken for and by the Apollo program into orthorectified imagery useful for mapping.
Designing these photography systems was quite complex, as the team had to account for the movement of the spacecraft, distortion introduced by the camera’s lenses, variation in terrain on the lunar surface, the scanning speed of the camera, the angle of the sun at a given time (which affected the amount of light available), and extreme temperature changes (to name a few!). Apollo’s new panoramic camera produced film images with very wide angles, resulting in a distortion of scale and a curved horizon with a varying scale. […]
To make the panoramic photos useful for mapping, the images themselves needed to be corrected such that the distortions introduced by the spacecraft motion disappeared. Enter the Apollo Transforming Printer. It was able to remove the distortion introduced by the panoramic camera by reconstructing the motions of the orbital camera. Unlike today’s digital rectification processes, this was an optical remapping. The Printer utilized the original film negative, reprojected it through a lens and mirror system, and produced a print that was geometrically corrected.
