A Cassini Exhibition in Paris

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An exhibition about the Cassini map, La Carte de France de Cassini: Une encyclopédie du territoire, is now running at the Musée des Archives nationales in the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris.

Chef d’œuvre cartographique du XVIIIe siècle, la carte de France de Cassini est la première carte de France levée géométriquement à l’échelle d’un pays entier.

Document historique emblématique, composé de 181 feuilles, c’est aussi un objet d’art monumental de onze mètres de largeur sur douze mètres de hauteur. S’appuyant notamment sur un versement majeur de l’IGN aux Archives nationales, l’exposition retrace l’histoire de la carte sous un jour inédit.

En 2021 et 2025, l’Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière (IGN) a versé aux Archives nationales le fonds des archives relatives à la carte de France de l’Académie, plus connue sous le nom de carte de France de Cassini.

Ce fonds remarquable se compose des calculs, des écrits, des minutes mais aussi des cuivres et des tirages originaux relatant la fabrication et la vie de cette carte entre 1750 et les années 1950. Un fonds dont le caractère exceptionnel permet de dévoiler aujourd’hui des aspects méconnus d’une œuvre à la portée universelle; une œuvre conçue par quatre générations d’astronomes et cartographes : les Cassini.

In French, bien sûr. Opened on 14 October, runs through 1 February 2027. Free admission. [Cartographie(s) numérique(s)]

A ‘Disgracefully Unoriginal’ Fantasy Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he says, pointing out all the ways it’s derivative. “Pull back and observe Douthat’s map more generally. There is no sense of place in it; its shape and features offer no suggestions about the societies they may have given rise to. There are no intriguing geographic or geological details that make you want to read on to see what goes on there. It tells no story. It is not the least bit interesting on its own. It is just a companion to a travel narrative.”

To be sure, Burneko is doing something I went into in my 2017 piece, “The Territory Is Not the Map”: he’s critiquing the fantasy geography, not the cartography. Conflating the map and the thing mapped is not new in fantasy maps. Nor, for that matter, is having a map for the sake of having a map.

A Taxonomy of Maps in Movies

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Vicky Johnson-Dahl has dug up her 2016 NACIS presentation on maps in the movies, titled “It’s a Map, Map, Map, Map World,” and resurrected it as a blog post. She assigns movie maps to five categories: maps the audience sees but the characters don’t, maps the characters use, maps that drive the plot (i.e., treasure maps), threat maps (think War Games or Bond villains), and jokes. This is the sort of taxonomy I find really useful (having done something similar myself for maps in written science fiction).

Tracé de 1927 du Conseil privé (non définitif)

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

We had a provincial election here in Quebec earlier this week, coverage of which served as a reminder that the Quebec government officially does not recognize the province’s border with Labrador—a border determined by a 1927 decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

It’s a long grievance, nearly a century old now, with periodic flare-ups of passive aggressiveness but few real implications. There’s no real chance of redress, and no one actually lives in the disputed area. Still, the Quebec government mandates, among other things, that all its maps show the Quebec claim (which follows the watershed line) alongside the official border, which is always de-emphasized and labelled “Tracé de 1927 du Conseil privé (non définitif).”

This includes official election maps. Which people notice each time there’s a provincial election: the boundaries of the electoral district of Duplessis encompass the disputed region (see this PDF map). It’s academic since no one lives there: we’re spared the problem of people who are eligible to vote in—or are taxed by—two different provinces.

Some Quebec separatists—sorry, sovereignists—show maps of Quebec that include all of Labrador, so that’s the maximalist position.

Alabama Now Requires ‘Gulf of America’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“Gulf of America” is now state policy in Alabama. Thanks to a law that took effect on October 1, state entities and employees in Alabama are now required to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, updating maps, documents and educational materials as required. As Inside Higher Ed reports, this includes public schools and universities—with a carve-out “when reasonable for historical purposes.” It also appears to include reporters at a university-sponsored NPR affiliate. Because free speech, I guess.

A Pop-up Staircase, Surrounded by Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The entrance to the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford is via a staircase whose walls are illustrated with maps from the Center’s collections. To mark the Center’s 10th anniversary, RJ Andrews and Ray Marshall engineered a pop-up papercraft model of the stairwell. The keepsake opens up to show every wall on every level. Produced in limited quantities and unfortunately not available for sale. See RJ Andrews’s post and Ray Marshall’s web page for how they did it, and images of the keepsake.

MapQuest’s Moment

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Product image of a MapQuest-branded tote bag with map of Lake Ontario, labelled: It's Lake Ontario on MapQuest.

MapQuest continues to ride a wave of positive publicity after their refusal to rename Lake Ontario. They’ve posted billboards in Chicago and Toronto with directions to the Lake, their CEO made a well-publicized visit to the lake itself, they have we’re-not-changing-the-name merch at their store. Call it principled or opportunistic—it can be both, honestly—but either way they’re making the most of it.

They’ve also posted their roadmap of upcoming features.

Simon Ayrinhac’s Studies of Tolkien’s Maps and Geography, Plus a Middle-earth Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A globe of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Columbus Globes

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month. (The page also includes a couple of bibliographies that I will have to steal from in order to update my own reading list.) In French. Lots for me to go through.

Amongst Simon’s articles is one exploring how Tolkien’s Middle-earth can be displayed as a globe, occasioned by the release, by Columbus Globes, of Middle-earth globes in various sizes and levels of detail (12, 26, 30, and 40 cm, all but the smallest illuminated; €25-€399). The problem, which Simon also notices, is that the known parts of Middle-earth take up too much of the globe: it’s actually only a small part of the whole, with the rest of the world only roughly sketched out. (Also, the legendarium of Middle-earth is such that it was only round after a specific catastrophic event, and a lot of the geography did not survive it.)

The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: Another Follow-Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Commentary on map projections continues in the wake of the UN resolution about replacing the Mercator projection with Equal Earth. There were two pieces in the Guardian last week. This one is less about projections but about why they matter, not just in terms of diminishing Africa, but also in terms of exaggerating Greenland: would Trump have been so obsessed with it if it if it wasn’t 14 times too big on the Mercator? This piece interviews the three creators of the Equal Earth projection—it’s understandably been a busy time for them!—and provides a bit more background to those just tuning in.

My impression is that the last main redoubt of Mercator is in web maps, where the projection is not a problem unless you zoom out too much. I’ve spotted a couple of new tools to address that: see Ben Joffe’s interactive map, and MapTiler’s demo. Both deal with distortion at the map’s edges by allowing you to drag the map so that any degree of longitude can be at the centre, and transitioning to Mercator as you zoom in.

Previously: The UN Is Voting on Whether to Phase Out the Mercator Projection; The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: A Follow-Up.

Mapping Tariffs

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot from Mapping Tariffs, an interactive choropleth map of Canada showing the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian communities.
mappingtariffs.org (screenshot)

Mapping Tariffs visualizes the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian businesses. “Since May 2025, Tara Vinodrai and Karen Chapple have led a team of researchers at the School of Cities to develop interactive mapping and visualization tools that measure and explore the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level. Our tools illustrate the highly localized and uneven potential impacts of U.S. tariffs reflecting Canada’s underlying urban, regional and sectoral specializations.” CTV News coverage.

The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: A Follow-Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Edney’s response to last week’s UN resolution on phasing out the Mercator projection in favour of Equal Earth: “This event and the responses to it show that we are still being haunted by Arno Peters’ damnable arguments. They were cursed when Peters publicized them, about fifty years ago, and they seem doomed to torment us even now.” See also André Ourednik’s take (in French), which points out the biases and editorial choices even in Equal Earth.

The transcript of the General Assembly debate on the resolution shows that Ukraine abstained from the vote because the Equal Earth map shows Crimea as disputed territory (which is a point about the default map, not the projection), and the United States felt the resolution trivialized the institution (which the U.S. would never do) and dismissed it as part of a “radical ideological project.”

Update: Japan’s mad about how Equal Earth depicts the Kuril Islands. Can no one understand the difference between a projection and the default map using it?

The First Trilateration of the Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

J. B. Crawford’s long essay on geodesy looks at the challenge of synchronizing the datums created by the various national surveys, giving the reader sufficient background technical information for understanding the culmination of those efforts: the North Atlantic Tie, by which the North American, British and European datums (NAD27, OSGB36 and ED50) were linked together, and the eventual creation of WGS60—just in time for satellite observations to take over. Worth a read.

Explaining MapQuest to Younger People

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Comedian Josh Johnson (you may know him from The Daily Show) explains what MapQuest is to younger people. (It was my running joke to say, “Remember MapQuest?” except that I’ve been doing this for 23 years and now people might simply say “no.”) Includes side quests to paper maps and TomTom, because we’ve had maps on our phones for a while now.

Forthcoming Tolkien Conference Explores Maps and Landscapes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The third Tolkien Conference Switzerland, to be held in Lucerne on 13 March 2027, will have as its topic Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s maps are never merely geographical. While they guide the traveller through the carefully drawn landscapes of Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to ancient kingdoms, they also chart moral and spiritual dimensions—from the corrupted wastes of Mordor to the timeless grace of Lothlórien. In Tolkien’s world, place is never neutral. 

In this conference, we will explore how Tolkien’s landscapes and cartographic imagination—from the vast plains of Rohan to the enclosed safety of the Shire—address deeper issues of belonging, loss and the meaning of home. How does the act of map-making reflect a longing for order, memory and possession? How should we interpret Tolkien’s geography in light of contemporary debates on ecology, mythology, and the human need to find safety in an unpredictable and perilous world?

Without reducing his world to mere allegory or escapism, the third Swiss Tolkien Conference will delve into the full imaginative depth of Tolkien’s spatial vision and examine what his Middle-earth landscapes might reveal about our own sense of belonging and the timeless question of what it means to lose it.

This conference couldn’t be more relevant to my interests, enough that I may have to work out whether I can manage to attend it myself. (One talk to be presented, Jost Schmid-Lanter’s “Fantasy Maps in the Context of Medieval and Early Modern Cartography,” even cites a couple of my articles. The other talks look just as compelling.)