Miguel García Álvarez got his hands on a copy of the CD-ROM edition of the Great Korean Encyclopedia, a North Korean production replete with maps that reflect the regime’s narrative (Korea as one country) and show enemy countries in dark grey. Miguel shares a couple of dozen examples at the link.
Videos from the 2025 NACIS annual meeting, which took place last month in Louisville, Kentucky, have just been posted to YouTube: here’s a link to the playlist.
The City of Boston’s planning department has a room with a 1:40 scale model of downtown Boston and surrounding neighbourhoods. The Leventhal Center’s Facebook page has a few more photos. (Update: Bluesky, Instagram.)
What do distant quasars have to do with improving GPS accuracy? A 2019 article from the NASA Technology Transfer Program explains: “In the 1960s, NASA used a network of radio telescopes and a technique called very large baseline interferometry (VLBI) to capture images of quasars in distant galaxies. In the following decade, scientists reversed the process to determine the precise locations of the telescopes, painting a picture of Earth’s shape and orientation in space. Today, an evolution of that technology supports another location-based system that has arguably become the world’s most important communication infrastructure: the Global Positioning System (GPS).” [Ariel Waldman]
Itiner-e is a comprehensive digital atlas and dataset of the Roman Empire’s entire road network, based on fieldwork, existing maps, published data and remote sensing. It’s an attempt to provide more granular detail than past atlases of Roman roads such as the Barrington Atlas (the iPad edition of which I reviewed in 2013), and expands the known Roman road network to nearly 300,000 km. The flip side is that less than three percent of it is known precisely. The dataset rates the certainty of each road segment, and a lot of them are marked as conjectured or hypothesized (i.e., there is evidence that there was a road here somewhere). It’s meant to be refined over time with additional research. More at the article published in Scientific Data; news coverage at La Cartoteca, Euronews and Gizmodo.
The Onion: “An alarming new educational survey has found more than 70% of Americans lack the basic geographic literacy to locate the country, region, or continent they are currently being deported to.”
Jacob Weinbren has mapped the results of the 2025 Canadian federal election at the polling station level, along with the 2021 results so that we can see how the vote changed. Any project of this kind is going to be insufficient along some axis: because it shows percentages rather than raw votes and is a geographical map, it doesn’t represent the number of votes cast very well, and tracking six parties is a lot for a choropleth map. But for the purposes of seeing the change in voting patterns from 2021 to 2025, it works: I can tell at a glance, for example, that reserves on the Prairies got more Liberal, and my own neck of the woods got a lot more Conservative. Direct link to map here.
StateFace is a font made up of tiny state shapes—all 50 U.S. states, plus D.C. and the lower 48 as a whole. M is Idaho, v is Wisconsin and so on. Seems like it’d be awfully useful for web designers. It’s courtesy of ProPublica and has been around for at least 13 years but I’m only hearing about it now. [Jami Dennis]
Doug Specht has a piece about the British Library’s exhibition Secret Maps in The Conversation. “The exhibition does not shy away from difficult topics. Maps tracing the infrastructure of apartheid, or those produced to facilitate war or surveillance, sit alongside playful artefacts such as the iconic Where’s Wally? books. The effect is to remind us that all mapping, whether for adventure, statecraft, or protest, is fundamentally about control: who gets to see, who gets seen and who decides.”
I’d forgotten that past British Library exhibitions (London: A Life in Maps, Magnificent Maps) generated all kinds of coverage. This might not be the last piece we see on this exhibition.
Previously: New British Library Exhibition: Secret Maps; Secret Maps, the Book.
RTÉ has published an excerpt from Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, the latest book of cartographic histories published by Birlinn (though Birlinn’s website seems to be offline at the moment).
This book – Ireland – Mapping the Island – is a celebration of the maps of Ireland produced over the centuries. We aim to give our readers a sense of the huge variety of maps that have been drawn and of their value as documents. Quite a number of themes run through the book. We look at the importance of boundaries, what maps tell us about the development of towns and settlements, the ways in which maps have been used to create impressions of place, their role in the development of travel and how they facilitated the emergence of the ‘tourist’. We also look at how others saw us and particularly at the maps produced since the 1930s by the military powers of a number of countries. One central focus is on how we learned about the shape and internal geography of Ireland. Before the development of airplanes and spacecraft, people had to take it on trust that we correctly knew the shape of the island of Ireland. That knowledge had been gradually refined for centuries and the state of knowledge was captured in the maps produced in each era.
Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson. Birlinn, 2 Oct 2025 (U.S. 2 Dec 2025), £30/$45. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
