Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Second Edition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A new edition of the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (the first edition was published in 2010) came out earlier this month from Yale University Press. From the publisher:

Cover for Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics.

In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries.

With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages, with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed., by David Eltis, David Richardson and Philip Misevich. Yale University Press, 7 Apr 2026, $65. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Heritage Group Seeks Listed Status for First and Last Trig Pillars

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Twentieth Century Society, a heritage group that campaigns to preserve 20th-century British buildings, is trying to get Grade II-listed status for the first and last trig pillars of the Retriangulation of Great Britain, which took place between 1935 and 1962. Many of the Retriangulation’s 6,500 pillars were adopted by local groups after the Ordnance Survey backed down from the proposal to remove them in 1992. Guardian coverage. [Derek Lyons]

Ten years ago: The Trig Pillar at 80.

Alice Hudson and Women in Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Alice Hudson, chief of the New York Public Library’s map division from 1981 to 2009, died in 2024. Last month The Cartographic Journal published a long look at Hudson’s life and career, written by Daniel Anger and Elizabeth Baigent. It was done as part of a special Cartographic Journal issue on women in cartography, which grew out of a 2021 conference on the subject. The issue does not yet have a single page I can point you at, but until it does you can see the contents via the latest articles page. A few articles are free/open access, including the editorial preface, a look at two map librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an article about the 19th-century mapmaker Selina Hall, and an editorial refuting the notion that women didn’t do cartography.

Apple Denies Removing Lebanese Towns and Villages from Apple Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Claims circulating on social media that Apple erased towns and villages in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps as a kind of support for the Israeli invasion are not true, says Apple. Apple’s coverage of Lebanon has never been that great: the towns and villages were never on the map in the first place. But I suppose the people circulating the claim never bothered to look at Lebanon in Apple Maps before this. [AppleInsider]

Previously (and similarly): Google Didn’t Stop Obscuring Imagery of Russian Military Sites Because the Imagery Hadn’t Been Obscured in the First Place.

The Physics of GPS

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Shri Khalpada explains the physics of GPS. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.”

Previously: Bartosz Ciechanowski Explains GPS.

The Sky Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On page 96 the author notes that “the actual mapping of the heavens did not exist” in medieval Europe; on page 98, that “celestial cartography awaited its invention.” That these words appear nearly 40 percent of the way through The Sky Atlas (Simon & Schuster UK, 2019) should hint at what this book does and does not do. Despite appearances, this is not strictly speaking a history of celestial cartography. Do star maps appear, and are they discussed? Certainly. Absolutely. But not to the extent you might expect.

To the extent that this is a book by Edward Brooke-Hitching, whom you may remember from The Phantom Atlas (reviewed here) or The Golden Atlas (not seen), there are some thing that are familiar, at least in terms of design and presentation. The Sky Atlas is an illustrated history of observational astronomy from the ancients to the present day, aimed at a general audience, with short, digestible chapters. It’s expansive and inclusive—there are chapters on Jain and Mesoamerican astronomy, for example. And it has, as you might expect, lots and lots of illustrations, which given the timeline and scope of the book means artistic representations and maps of the skies from every era and multiple cultures.

You’re not getting what what you see in Nick Kanas’s Star Maps (reviewed here)—deep dives on specific celestial cartographers and their work (in Kanas’s case, from a collector’s perspective). The Sky Atlas gives celestial cartography a more ancillary role. Apart from a chapter on Hevelius, most of the text about maps takes place in the captions. Now in a book this illustrated there are a lot of captions, and the captions are not terse. But the maps themselves are there to illustrate and document the observations and discoveries that are the focus of this book—interesting in and of themselves, but not the main focus of the narrative. There is, to be sure, less of an audience for celestial cartography pur et dur, and this is a book for a general audience. So the direction the book takes is understandable. And as a collection of maps and illustrations it is quite lovely; as I said about The Phantom Atlas, “it’s the kind of map book you look at as much as you read it.” Even so, when something doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin, it should be noted.

Got this one from my public library.

The Sky Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching. Simon & Schuster UK, 17 Oct 2019, £25 (U.K. edition); Chronicle, 25 Feb 2020, $35 (U.S. edition). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

The Vocabulary of Water

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Two firefly maps showing (1) the relationships between stream names and water’s persistence in the landscape and (2) the non-English origins of stream names.
USGS/Anthony Martinez

What a stream is called says a lot about its hydrology. An arroyo is dry and intermittent; bayous, swamps and sloughs refer to wetlands. Anthony Martinez, a data scientist with the USGS, extracted the feature names from streams in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database—no mean feat, considering the messiness of names—and plotted the patterns in the firefly maps shown above. Strictly speaking, these are data visualization tutorials, with lots of code in R; it’s nonetheless fascinating to see the feature names follow the conditions. See also Keir Clarke’s interactive version. [Maps Mania]

Previously: Ben Smith’s Maps of British Stream Names.

Who Gets to Digitize Colonial-Era Congolese Geological Maps?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reuters: “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo ‌in the museum’s archive.” The colonial-era records in question take up some 500 metres of shelving and are already being digitized under a separate project with the DRC. The AfricaMuseum says it can’t hand the records over to a private company; the mining startup, KoBold Metals, also has an agreement with the Kinshasa government to digitize the data. [Tara Calishain]

Saul Steinberg’s Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Saul Steinberg, “The View from 9th Avenue,” cover for The New Yorker, 29 March 1976.

It’s likely that artist Saul Steinberg may be best known for “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” an illustration that appeared as the well-known cover of the 29 March 1976 issue of The New Yorker. But as an essay on the Saul Steinberg Foundation website argues, “Isolating View of the World from the rest of his oeuvre, you miss its larger significance: as one work within a parade of images that harness the graphic device of the map to visualize more than geography. The map for Steinberg is not a system of geographic measurement but a way of thinking.” The post has lots of other examples of Steinberg’s work where he plays with maps and place, providing some context for that famous cover. [Robert Simmon]

Previously: McCutcheon’s View.

Now on Patreon: The Territory Is Not the Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those who might think of joining, I’m presenting the slides and text of a presentation exploring the fantasy map style and its origins I gave at Scintillation, a Montréal science-fiction convention hosted by the author Jo Walton, in October 2019.

(Yes, this is the talk I offered during last year’s pledge drive, which target we didn’t quite meet; this time I decided to simply give the slides and text, rather than record a video of me delivering it—a task that in hindsight would have been a bit too overwhelming for me.)

This talk summarizes most of my thoughts on fantasy maps up to that point. If you’re curious about this talk but are unable to join the Patreon at a paid membership level, a lot of what I had to say can be found elsewhere. See in particular several of my articles on Reactor, plus this eponymous post on The Map Room and my review of Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons, all of which are free to read.

If, on the other hand, you’re sufficiently intrigued to sign up for a paid membership to have a peek, one, that’s kind of what I was hoping for, and two, I hope you like it (and The Map Room) well enough to stick around as a supporter. Now that I’ve taken down the ads, support via Patreon is frankly what keeps the lights on around here; more supporters will enable me to make some upgrades looming on the horizon while still keeping things in the black. I’m grateful to everyone who’s decided to back this little project.

(As for the talk itself, it’s something I’d rather not share with a wider audience, at least not until I’ve given it a proper rewrite—what’s good enough for a small sf convention audience isn’t necessarily good enough for public distribution—so for now it’s staying behind a paywall.)

Ads Coming to Apple Maps This Summer (U.S. and Canada)

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Per Apple’s announcement of its new Apple Business platform, ads are indeed coming to Apple Maps.

Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Apple maintains that the ad platform will come with user privacy protections. “A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.”

From last year: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps; Ads Coming to Apple Maps: Report.

John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. An engraved map of 18th-century London in 24 panels.
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. Map on 24 sheets, 203 × 385 cm. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by journalist W. Crawford Snowdon that was published to mark the map’s 200th anniversary. The new edition, out from Atlantic Publishing, is updated with better-quality map reproductions and additional illustrations. The “street-by-street” subtitle kind of pitches it as an 18th-century A to Z map. BBC News, Daily Mail, Londonist.

The map itself is available online: see the Library of Congress’s version. Rocque published a smaller-scale map of London in the same year, for which see this Royal Museums Greenwich article.

London in the 18th Century: Street by Street—John Rocque 
by W. Crawford Snowden
Atlantic Publishing, 5 Mar 2026, £25. 
Amazon (Canada, UK)

Moogle Gaps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Moogle Gaps, for when you want to be misdirected. TrendWatching: “Whipped up by two Australian ex-Droga5 creatives, Paul Meates and Henry Kimber, Moogle Gaps is an anti-wayfinder. Users input their navigational query as they normally would, but instead of the most efficient route from A to B, the app offers misdirections — or as its builders put it, ‘a way to get lost, visit a bar that‘s not local, or go to a restaurant where no one knows you.’” [Tara Calishain]

How Google Maps Disappears Restaurants from Search Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

For the Guardian’s “It’s Complicated” feature, Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at how great restaurants end up being invisible when you search for a place to eat on Google Maps. He talks with data scientist Lauren Leek, whose London Food Map tries to surface restaurants that, according to a machine learning model, should have a higher rating than they do. Lauren points to the Google’s ranking system’s reliance in part on “prominence”—a factor that bestows cumulative advantage on already-visible locations.

A Deep Dive on ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In another side-quest from his current work in progress, Matthew Edney goes down a deep rabbit hole trying to work out a specific point related to Alfred Korzybski’s famous adage that “the map is not the territory”—a metaphor for the description not being the thing described. The precise quote is as follows:

Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.1

Insofar as I follow Edney’s line of argument,2 it’s the question of self-reflexivity—the idea that any ideal map of the territory would include itself, as part of the territory being mapped, on the map, with infinite regressions—that he is trying to grapple with, along with the question of what Korzybski and his general semantics successors were doing when they were talking about the “ideally correct map”—a subject about which Edney has had something to say.