TechCrunch: “South Korea is nearing a decision on whether to allow Google and Apple to export high-resolution geographic map data to servers outside the country. The detailed maps, which use a 1:5,000 scale, would show streets, buildings, and alleyways in far greater detail than currently available on these platforms. However, several regulatory and security hurdles remain unresolved.” South Korea, which is technically still at war with North Korea, restricts data from the National Geographic Information Institute from being used outside the country, and has denied previous requests from both Google and Apple; Google, which stores its map data outside South Korea, has hitherto had to make use of less-detailed, lower-resolution data.
Two Mapmakers Awarded MacArthur Fellowship
Tonika Lewis Johnson, whose Folded Map Project explores decades of segregation in Chicago neighbourhoods, and Margaret Wickens Pearce, whom Map Room readers might remember for Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada, are among the 22 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships. News coverage: AP, NPR. [Alan McConchie]
Strava v. Garmin
CBC News reports on Strava’s lawsuit against Garmin, which alleges patent infringement and breach of contract. Strava claims that Garmin is violating Strava’s patents relating to heatmaps and segments, and also says Garmin’s new developer guidelines require the Garmin logo to be present in every single post and image: “We already provide attribution for every data partner, but Garmin wants to use Strava and every other partner as an advertising platform.” Athletes who rely on both Garmin and Strava are just a bit concerned. (It may be worth mentioning that Strava added restrictions on third-party apps to its own API last year: see DC Rainmaker and The Verge.) Garmin isn’t commenting (pending litigation, etc., etc.).
Review: GeoAI
Save some room on the AI bandwagon for ArcGIS. This seems to be the central message of GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS, a slim (only 120-page) volume of articles and posts that previously appeared, for the most part, in Esri blogs and publications. They highlight examples and “real-life stories” of how Esri’s machine- and deep-learning tools have been successfully applied in the public, private and non-profit sectors. At a moment when “AI” is invariably a synecdoche for the awfulness that is generative AI, which I will not litigate here, it can be a challenge to remember that machine and deep learning tools, which have been included in ArcGIS since 2008, have all kinds of applications and benefits. (See Esri’s pretrained deep learning models for examples like feature detection, land-cover classification, and object tracking; see also their GeoAI landing page.) Calling these tools “GeoAI” strikes me as a way to package them to appeal to decision makers who are speedrunning their AI rollout, for better or worse. It’s those decision makers that this book is targeted to. Esri has something to sell them: this is the pitch.
I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.
GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS
ed. by Ismael Chivite, Nicholas Giner and Matt Artz
Esri, 2 Sep 2025, $40
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Review: Earth Shapers
The title of this book does not quite capture what Maxim Samson is doing. Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way isn’t really about shaping the earth, at least not in the way you or I might understand it, likewise neither is it about mapping in its literal sense. Samson uses “earth shaping” to mean something very specific: reshaping our world—physically, yes, but also in other ways—to make it “more interconnective,” as he sets out in the introduction.
In keeping with geography’s literal Greek meaning of ‘earth writing’, cultural geographers call attention to the notion that our planet’s various ‘cultural landscapes’, fashioned by humans onto the natural world, can be ‘read’ like story-filled texts. Earth shaping adopts the same principles, but adds to them a specific emphasis on the manifold power of geographical connections. Human history has been written in geographical connection—and when you know what to look for, these stories, both obscure and renowned, are everywhere. This book explores the reasons why we engage with our surroundings through connection, and how, through our actions, we write ourselves and a very specific history into the ground. (p. 2)
This is perhaps more theoretical than it needs to be. One could just as easily note that Samson’s first book, Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World, was about the lines that divide us; whereas Earth Shapers flips the script and explores the lines that connect us. And in Earth Shapers “lines” are just as important a word as “connect.”
Because everything in this book is a line. Each of this book’s eight chapters focuses on what is basically a connecting line or network of some sort: the Inca Empire’s Qhapaq Ñan; Mozambique’s separated colonial-era railway lines; the absolutely bonkers, 170-km planned linear city called The Line that is being built in northwestern Saudi Arabia (you can see the construction site in satellite imagery: it’s nuts); the Indigenous trails that endured after the imposition of Chicago’s regular street grid; the implications of Korea’s Baekdu-daegan for reunification.
What these lines principally have in common is scale. They’re transformative, but not necessarily in a physical sense. The Panama Canal is the obvious example of literal earth shaping, but the continent-level Great Green Wall, a project to combat desertification in the Sahel, has evolved into something a little less literal. And while the Baltic Way, as a single-day demonstration in 1989, though one that involved two million participants along a 675-km line, was ostensibly ephemeral, it was no less impactful.
It is in part the unexpected diversity of Samson’s wide-ranging examples—the connections between the connections, if that isn’t too meta—that makes Earth Shapers such an engaging read. This is the kind of book that fits in well with other books that gather geographical trivia and oddities, or islands (i.e., the sorts of books that Alastair Bonnett writes), though this one is decidedly more focused and substantive.
Earth Shapers was published in August by Profile Books in the U.K., and will come out in the U.S. from the University of Chicago Press later this month. I received an electronic advance galley from the latter.
Earth Shapers
by Maxim Samson
Profile Books, 7 Aug 2025, £22 / University of Chicago Press, 13 Oct 2025, $30
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Ethics in Cartography
Nat Case writes about the ethics of cartography in Psyche:
You might think there’s not a lot to get moralistic about in the world of mapping. You would be wrong. For decades now, various critiques have been raised about cartography, its history, its current practice, its complicity in the evils of the world, and cartographers’ degree of responsibility. On the one hand, cartographic history in the West is bound up with institutions that created maps to prosecute war, subjugate colonies, extract wealth from the earth regardless of who was already living there, and manage mass social engineering including a large-scale oppression. Maps can also be tools that create individual agency by giving any map-reader a manager’s view of the world. That part tends to be noncontroversial. It’s who we work for and with that causes some people to raise concerns.
First Radar Images from NISAR
Preliminary images are in from the newly launched NISAR Earth-observing radar satellite. A joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), NISAR will use L-band and S-band synthetic aperture radar to produce images of land cover, soil moisture, vegetation, sea and ice and so forth at resolutions of five to ten metres. (For comparison, SRTM’s resolution is one arcsecond—30 metres at the equator.)
Oculus Mundi
Geographical has an article about Oculus Mundi, the online home of the Sunderland Collection, a private collection of 13th- to 19th-century maps amassed over the years by its eponymous founder, Neil Sunderland, that sat in storage before the decision to digitize it and make it more accessible. I’m glad the article is here to introduce us to the collection, because the Oculus Mundi site is a bit over-designed and can be a challenge to navigate, especially at first. But making private map collections digitally accessible is always a good and laudatory thing, and in this case there’s plenty of good stuff to browse: try starting with this link.
How Maps Lie
Last week Andrew Middleton (he of The Map Center) gave a presentation at the Dickinson Memorial Library in Northfield, Massachusetts. Titled “How Maps Lie,” it’s the kind of introductory talk that can never be done too much: about what maps actually do, and the distance that can exist between the map and the territory. The video is an archived livestream; the talk itself stars about 15 minutes in.
The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Mapped at the Precinct Level
VoteHub has released a precinct-level map of the 2024 U.S. presidential election results that includes vote density as well as margin—in other words, taking into account how many votes are in a district, not just by how much (tempering the fact of winning 90% of the vote in a district with the fact that there are only 100 votes to be had in the district, say). [Maps Mania]
Meanwhile, VoteHub is also tracking the unusual and hinky attempts at gerrymandering U.S. congressional districts outside the usual census cycle, with a map showing which states are involved and what the potential impact might be.
Two Books Map London
Two books out this year, both from Batsford, explore London through maps. Vincent Westbrook’s Modern London Maps focuses on more than 60 maps from the 20th century. Like many books of this kind, Modern London Maps draws primarily from a single source: the London Archives. Mapping London reviewed it last month: “probably quite close to the book that we would have published.” And out next month, The Boroughs of London collects Mike Hall’s “boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design,” pairing it with commentary by Matt Brown.
- Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook. Batsford, 8 May 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. - The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown. Batsford, 9 Oct 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
Northern’s New Network Map
Matt Harrison explains how his firm, Transport Designed, redesigned the network map for Northern, a train company that handles passenger services across northern England, from Liverpool to Newcastle.
Northern’s historic network map, whilst representing the sheer size and scale of the train operator’s network, didn’t actually show you where you could travel to and from.
It represented the network as an amorphous blob of interconnected dark blue lines, but did nothing to communicate the intricacies of how to actually get between any two places.
That was our starting point.
How do you represent such a vast network, and make it make sense in a way that customers can quickly and easily understand?
2025 Ruderman Conference Announced
The fifth biennial Ruderman Conference on Cartography, which will be held 8-10 October 2025 at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center, focuses on the cartography of “anything but the earth’s surface,” viz., astronomy, geology, oceanography. Schedule, speakers and abstracts on the website; tickets (free) here.
The Guardian Looks at Recent Map Mishaps
With the organizers of the Great North Run apologizing for printing t-shirts and medals with a map of Sunderland rather than Newcastle, the Guardian takes the opportunity to look at recent instances of map mistakes, from dangerous routings to a too-short marathon route to a phantom supermarket in Wales.
More on Suspected Russian GPS Interference in the Baltic
Lots of coverage at Polish news network TVP World on suspected Russian GPS jamming in the Baltic region. A report submitted by the Baltic states to ICAO found that 123,000 flights were disrupted by GPS jamming in the first four months of 2025; 27.4 percent of flights were disrupted in April. Sweden’s transport agency says it’s getting near-daily reports of GPS jamming from pilots: “Since late 2023, reported GNSS disruptions to the Swedish Transport Agency have surged from 55 in 2023 to 495 in 2024, with a preliminary count of 733 incidents in 2025 as of August 28.” GPS disruptions in the region have been traced to a facility in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.