Month: March 2025

The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Today is The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. It’s also the final day of its membership drive, which as of the time of this writing is just three members short of the goal.

To mark those occasions, I’ve written something as an exclusive for those members: The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost, an essay about the origins of my rather personal relationship with maps.

Looking back, it seems clear that I have always had an obsession with knowing exactly where I was, at all times. No trip would be undertaken without having a map of the destination, even when I was a child. Every time I’d go to a summer camp, I’d have made a map of the grounds by the time I was done. And even into adulthood, not having a map of where I was made me very, very uncomfortable.

Also features dragons. Again, you’ll need to be a paid member to read the essay. And if we reach the target, paid members will also get access to my presentation on fantasy map design.

World of Maps Owners Retiring, Seeking New Owners

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A photo of the World of Maps storefront in a snowy day in Ottawa on 27 November 2017.
World of Maps on 27 Nov 2017.

Ottawa map and book store World of Maps is for sale, per their Facebook page: “After 30 years of running this interesting and profitable map & book business Petra and Brad want to sell and retire. There are plenty of adventures and trips still to take after we find the next owner(s) who we can help take it over.”

Previously: World of Maps Turns 25.

Final Weekend for the Membership Drive

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Map Room’s membership drive is entering its final weekend, and while we’re getting awfully close to the goal of 22 paid members by the end of the month (i.e., Monday), we’re not quite there yet. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time to push it over the top.

For some context on why I’m running a membership drive, I’ve posted an essay to the Patreon on the economics of blogging: how the golden age of ad-supported blogging came to an end, the challenge of doing what I’m doing in the current blogging landscape, and the state of the map blogosphere.

Online Maps Updates, Late March 2025 Edition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An updated disclosure on Apple’s website spotted by 9to5Mac says that imagery collected in support of the Look Around feature of Apple Maps (Apple’s Street View equivalent) will also be used to train Apple’s generative AI. Meanwhile, a recent Apple Maps glitch displayed baggage claims at ridiculously high zooms, and a Google Maps glitch deleted Timeline data for some users.

Hangul on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Hanbyul Jo looks at map labels written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, with a deep dive into whether it’s better to display the characters vertically, as in top-to-bottom like traditional Chinese, in certain circumstances. “I grew up consuming Hangul in a dominantly horizontal way. The idea that the readability of Hangul can be improved when written vertically was so foreign to me, whether it’s actually true or not.” [Lat × Long]

OpenTimes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Dan Snow announced the launch of OpenTimes, “a free database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between major U.S. Census geographies.”

The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying Google or Esri for the necessary data. By pre-calculating times between commonly-used research geographies (i.e. Census) and then making those times easily accessible via SQL, I hope to make large-scale accessibility research cheaper and simpler.

The idea here is bulk data for research purposes: think isochrones, not individualized route navigation.

A New Map of the Land Beneath Antarctica’s Ice

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An elevation map showing the topography of Antarctica underneath its ice sheet. Polar projection centred on the South Pole. Colour. From Pritchard et al., Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025).
From Pritchard et al., Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025).

The British Antarctic Society has announced the release of Bedmap3, the third and twice-as-detailed topographic model of the landscape beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Bedmap3, as the name suggests, is the third attempt to draw a picture of Antarctica’s rock bed that began in 2001, but this new effort represents a dramatic refinement. It includes more than double the number of previous data points (82 million), rendered on a 500 m grid spacing.

Big knowledge gaps have been filled by recent surveys in East Antarctica, including around the South Pole, along the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctic coastlines, and in the Transantarctic Mountains.

The outline of deep valleys is better represented. So too are those places where rocky mountains stick up through the ice. The latest satellite data have also more accurately recorded the height and shape of the ice sheet and the thickness of the floating ice shelves that push out over the ocean at the continent’s margin.

For crunchier details, see the article in Scientific Data.

Previously: Mapping Antarctica’s Bedrock.

Mapping the University of Chicago’s Expansion into Its Surrounding Neighbourhoods

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, has posted a story map showing the university’s relationship with, and expansion into, the surrounding neighbourhoods. “As the University of Chicago has expanded its property footprint on the South Side, conflicting priorities, land use disputes, and racial tension have characterized a historically fraught ‘town and gown’ relationship with the surrounding neighborhoods. Setting the stage for others to follow, the University was the first higher education institution to embark on an urban renewal campaign of its kind, a topic University scholars and students have written on extensively.”

The Trouble with Inflight Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Air Canada has apologized after its inflight maps were found showing the Palestinian Territories but not Israel, blaming an outside supplier and disabling the feature until a fix is made. The times are such that this sort of thing can be inflammatory as hell. Thing is, it’s not remotely the first time it’s happened. Per CNN’s reporting, it happened with JetBlue’s maps last year and with British Airways back in 2013.

So what’s going on? None of the articles give any sort of explanation, though the Snopes page suggests that GeoFusion is the ultimate source of the inflight maps. My guess is that there are airlines that cannot or will not show Israel on a map: several Gulf state carriers come to mind, and GeoFusion lists several on its website (though to be fair I have no knowledge of whether this actually applies to them). Is it possible that GeoFusion has a bespoke no-Israel version for these carriers, and every so often other airlines get that version by mistake?

Frankly if GeoFusion doesn’t have different versions of its maps I’d be shocked, seeing as they list Air India and several Chinese carriers as their clients, and the map required by one country is illegal in the other. To say nothing of how a China-compliant map with the Nine-dash Line would land with Vietnam Airlines, or Crimea-as-Ukraine with Aeroflot.

Inflight maps aren’t an immediately obvious front line in the various map wars (disputed borders, place names, etc.) but now that I think about it . . .

Apple Maps Surveyor

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot of Maps Surveyor from the Apple App Store
Maps Surveyor screenshot. Apple App Store.

Last week Apple launched Maps Surveyor, a mapping app with a specific purpose, MacRumors reports. “The app is not public facing and appears to be for use with companies that Apple partners with to assign mapping tasks. […] Strings in Apple’s Surveyor app found by MacRumors suggest that once assigned a mapping task by the Premise app, Premise users will be instructed to attach an iPhone to a mount, rotate the iPhone‌ to landscape orientation, and capture images along a route while driving using the Surveyor app.” In other words, it’s the user end of a crowdsourcing pipeline that funnels local data to Apple Maps via a third party “task marketplace.” Not something most of us would ever use.

Multispectral Imaging Comes to a 15th-Century Mappamundi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Leardo mappamundi, 1452.

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is bringing in the Lazarus Project to carry out multispectral imaging on a 1452 mappamundi by Giovanni Leardo. This is the oldest map in the collection of the American Geographical Society Library, which is housed at UWM. The Lazarus Project is a portable laboratory that brings multispectral imaging to the artifact, rather than the other way around (artifacts being fragile and all, and the Leardo mappamundi is no exception).

“It’s fascinating to watch for the first 10 minutes,” [Lazarus Project board member Chet] Van Duzer said. “After that, it’s like watching paint dry.” The map will be scanned with at least a dozen frequencies of light, and probably more, ranging from infrared through visible light up to ultraviolet. But in the months after taking the original images, “the real magic is in processing,” Van Duzer said. Different combinations of images at different strengths may reveal faded writing that used various pigments of ink.

Previously: Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart.

Google Maps Has a Lot of User-Contributed Imagery in the Wrong Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geography Now was poking around northern Chad in Google Maps and came across a bunch of user-contributed 360-degree images of business interiors that had nothing to do with Chad: they were associated with businesses in Brazil, India, Hungary and so forth. I’m inclined to think these were geocoding glitches or user errors, since the Gulf of Guinea (home of Null Island) seems to have a particularly bountiful crop of them, but I’m spotting shop and schoolroom interiors in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean too.

FEMA Risk Maps Purged

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The current U.S. administration’s map vandalism isn’t limited to a certain international body of water. Maps Mania reports that FEMA’s online flood and risk maps have gone offline as part of the ongoing purge of everything related to climate change. One map, the Future Risk Index, has been salvaged by independent engineers.