Blogging about maps since 2003
About half of Minnesota artist Faye Passow’s Etsy store is filled with map-related merchandise—postcards, prints, napkins and towels, mugs and other stoneware—featuring colourful pictorial maps of the regional specialties of several U.S. states. For example, Minnesota hot dishes by region. What stand out most are the Minnesota and Texas casserole dishes in the shape of their respective states.
Jeff Clark of Clark Geomatics, who’s been producing backcountry recreation maps since 2008, plus some very nice wall maps of British Columbia coastal regions, gets a profile from CBC News. Always nice to see mapmakers make the news.
Google just announced a couple of fairly major Gemini AI-powered updates to Google Maps. Ask Maps is a a chatbot that produces personalized responses to questions—essentially an intermediary that sifts the data so you don’t have to, taking into consideration your known preferences (with all that entails: not necessarily good). Immersive Navigation is a 3D mode full of suggestions:
When it’s helpful, Maps will highlight critical road details like lanes, crosswalks, traffic lights, and stop signs to help you make that turn or merge confidently. This spatial understanding of your route is made possible with help from Gemini models, which analyze fresh, real world imagery from Street View and aerial photos to give you an accurate view of things along your route, like landmarks and medians.
Includes voice guidance in more natural language and explaining the pros and cons of alternate routes. All of which requires that the underlying map data be accurate and up to date. We’ve already seen what happens when people blindly follow GPS/satnav driving directions that are in error or out of date; if anything people have proven to be more even credulous with AI chatbots. So we’ll see how this goes.
BBC News on GPS jamming in the conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran:
The interference currently affecting ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz is far from the first time that [maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wise] Bockmann has observed GPS jamming impacting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).
The same thing happened in this region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and electronic interference has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But, she says, “This is next-level.”
Previously: GPS Jamming and the Iran War.
The Bodleian Map Room Blog looks at a specific kind of map of imaginary places, “designed to be a guide to cartographers by showing how to portray certain features, or for the map reader to show what the symbols mean.”
Here’s an example, ‘Colours and symbols used on fair sheets and fair tracing’, issued by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy in 1973. Fair here meaning a document after correction, ready to be used. But is it fair? With this ‘made-up’ map the Hydrographic Office have used real names but in random locations, so Campania, in reality a region of Italy, features, as does the English county of Rutland (though as a town here) and a made-up mountain, Montrosia. Best of all is mention of “Approaches to Valhalla”. The map shows different forms of landscape, both natural and man-made with the symbols used to show those features, and the names are added to give the whole an authentic feel.
It makes sense to do it this way: no single real map is likely to contain every single feature you’re trying to demonstrate.
La figure de la Terre: Un débat franco-anglais (XVIIe-XXIe siècle), an exhibition running at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris from 1 April to 20 June 2026.
This exhibition offers a historical and scientific journey through more than three centuries of research devoted to measuring, modeling and understanding the shape of our planet, from the 17th century through to the space age. Since ancient times, we’ve known that the Earth is, broadly speaking, a sphere. The key question was whether it was slightly flattened at the poles or elongated. To answer this question, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and geodesists have developed theoretical models, designed innovative instruments and conducted vast observation campaigns around the world. The exhibition features exceptional sources drawn mainly from the collections of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society, testifying to the intensity of scientific exchanges between Paris and London and the decisive role of international cooperation in the production of knowledge.
France seems to have quite a lot of map-related programming lately.
GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.
A symposium on maps and popular culture, Popcartographie : cartes et cultures populaires (XIXe-XXIe siècle), will be taking place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Mitterrand site in Paris on 10-11 April 2026. Its three themes: maps in popular culture, maps as amateur practice, and the map as a paraadigm of popular fiction. Free/registration; program at the link. English translation at H-Maps. [Matthew Edney]
Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical infrastructure failed. No global service collapsed. It is, however, a revealing stress case. It shows how open geospatial infrastructure behaves when exposed to a new class of demand. That demand is continuous, automated, and indifferent to the social and economic assumptions that shaped the system in the first place. This is not an isolated story. It is an early signal of a broader shift already underway.”
Reuters: “South Korea will soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps doesn’t work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.” Prior to this decision Google Maps had to use lower-resolution map data in South Korea because it was forbidden from storing South Korea’s high-resolution data on its own servers outside the country. Google will have to abide by certain restrictions, including blurring military and other sensitive facilities and disallowing lat/long coordinates on South Korean territory—South Korea really doesn’t want Google Maps to be used by a military adversary. [Tara Calishain]
Previously: South Korea Deciding Whether to Grant Google and Apple Access to Domestic Map Data.
I’m as much a fountain pen nerd as I am a map nerd, but I somehow only found out just now that Italian pen company Aurora has been releasing a collection of antique map-themed fountain pens. Each is named after a famous mapmaker, with five planned and two announced so far: the Tolomeo (i.e. Ptolemy) in 2024 and the Fra Mauro last year. Your guess is as good as mine as to who the next three will be named after. (The Aurora Instagram account seems to be the one to watch, as it’s more active than other channels.)
Only 680 of each are being made, so these are limited editions. The top and bottom finials represent an armillary and a compass rose, respectively; the trim is silver, the bodies are cellulose acetate, and the nib is 18k gold. The pens use a piston-filling mechanism.
These are not the first map-themed pens I’ve encountered, but they’re certainly the most expensive, with prices somewhere around 1,400 euros (VAT included) at the various online pen stores I’ve checked at. If they’re still in stock, that is.
A short interview with Jude Leimer, who joined the History of Cartography Project in 1981 (!) and has served as managing editor for every single volume. (That’s a lot of institutional memory.)
(AI) Bots Ate My Map Tiles: In which Gary Gale discovers that his Vaguely Rude Places Map’s 200K-map-tiles-per-month plan is no match for the hammering delivered by AI crawlers.
Every so often Matthew Edney posts something that had to be cut from his work in progress. In this case it’s a piece about what he calls “the most amazing map exhibition ever mounted”: Cartes et figures de la terre, which ran at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1980.
The curators of Cartes et figures de la terre were not map specialists. The principal curator was Giulio Macchi (1918–2009), an Italian film maker and producer for Italian state television, who was also an experienced curator of art exhibitions. The large accompanying volume, of the same title as the exhibition, was edited by Jean-Loup Rivière (1948–2018), a playwright, director, and theater critic and theorist who was then a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou.
Neither Macchi nor Rivière were committed to established scholarly and professional attitudes towards maps and their history. Entranced by the great variety of scientific and artistic map images, both past and present, they emphasized the aesthetic form of maps rather than map content. In doing so, Macchi and Rivière challenged the seemingly eternal verities of the normative map, even as they remained bound to those verities, not least to the idea that all maps are somehow all the same and a necessarily exceptionalist form of representation. They were especially enamored of the spectacular and of the creative in mapping.
Among other things, they brought the Coronelli globes out of storage.
In conjunction with the exhibition was a short surrealist film about cartography, Le jeu de l’oie (Une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie), written and directed by Raúl Ruiz for France 2; you can watch it on YouTube (English subtitles are available):
Quincy Morgan has released Pinhead Map Icons: “So you’re making a map and need some icons. Well, maybe a lot of icons. Like, for anything that might appear on a map. And they need to be visually consistent. Like the size and direction and whatever. And they gotta be free. Even public domain. In vector format. With no AI. Oh, and they all need to be legible on the head of a pin.” 1,045 icons and counting, in SVG format.
