Month: August 2026

Mapping Britain’s Railways

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mark Ovenden’s latest book, Mapping Britain’s Railways: The Design History of a Nation on Track, is out today from British Library Publishing. The publisher’s description:

Railway diagrams have been at the forefront of mapping Britain’s railways since they first began operating 200 years ago—a journey from A to B has always needed to be easily and quickly understood.

This book reveals the surprising history of how British railway cartographers have led the way in designing clear passenger information, even predating the iconic London Underground diagram, which itself has expanded to encompass overground routes around the capital and beyond.

Written and designed by bestselling author Mark Ovenden and National Rail mapmaker Andrew Smithers, this intriguing and lively history is illustrated with over 300 colourful maps from around the country, showing the evolution of schematics from simple line drawings to complex diagrams that incorporate ever more information.

Buy: Amazon UK (Canada) | Map Books of 2026

‘The Unintended Consequences of Knowing Where We Are’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A New Yorker piece by Shayla Love looks at the consequences of our increasing dependence on GPS. It’s nominally about Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot (previously), but it’s one of those pieces that uses the book as a launching pad—talks about what the book talks about, rather than talking about the book in and of itself. Here’s a thought-provoking paragraph from Love’s piece:

Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads the Spatial Thinking Lab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that by relying on G.P.S. we neglect an intrinsic navigation strategy: cognitive mapping, which depends on a spatial conception of the environment that is populated with landmarks such as trees or buildings. This approach is supported by “place cells,” specific neurons in the hippocampus, each of which represents a precise physical location. (One could think of them as the brain’s internal blue dots.) G.P.S. is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. This utilizes a different area of the brain, one that supports habitual learning. “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.

This is one of those lightbulb moments: I’ve never really relied on GPS receivers for navigation because my navigation strategy is pure cognitive mapping. I don’t follow directions when I travel, at least not unless I’ve worked out the general geography by poring over maps of the area first.

Who Are the Gatekeepers in Cartography?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Antonio Antoine also has something to say about generative AI in cartography. As I did in my piece about generative AI, he takes as his starting point the question of gatekeeping; unlike me, he’s coming at it as a working mapmaker. He takes the question at face value: who and where are the gatekeepers in cartography—for example, access to data, education, software licences—and asks what (if anything) generative AI can do about it. In the end he comes down on the side of accountability: “If one is not trained in geography/cartography, where does accountability step in to correct bad maps? Are formal cartographers supposed to police the internet? Like gatekeepers? Why not nip it in the bud at the source? […] As far as I am concerned, genAI in cartography is a race to the bottom. There will be little to no accountability in these maps as there is very little ownership in them.”

Lee Schwartz on That Messed Up Map of Africa

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Lee Schwartz, current CEO of the American Geographical Society and former Geographer at the U.S. State Department, has some words about the U.S. government map that messed up Africa at a conference last month (previously).

Maps are occasionally used that have an incorrect border or outdated name. A word misplaced or a typo can lead to a serious misunderstanding between both friendly and rival governments. Careless human mistakes, or a lack of guidance and oversight, are usually the reason. In this case, blame can apparently be placed firmly on the careless use of artificial intelligence rather than castigating an entire diplomatic corps with incompetence. The fact that this map made it to the light of day may be more reflective of failures and shortcomings in our institutions charged with representing U.S. foreign policy than a cartographer’s slip of the pen. […]

In international diplomacy, every recognition decision, every treaty map, every territorial dispute, and every official representation as rendered in maps depend on getting geography right. While software can presumably generate maps useful for a variety of purposes, geographic literacy is still required to provide historical understanding, socio-cultural context, and precision in conflict resolution negotiations. Not accurately locating or naming countries that can be potential allies for partnership agreements, investments, or security cooperation reflects a low priority placed on understanding them—and their unique people, places, and relationships.

This seems . . . diplomatic.

Alzheimer’s and Taxi Drivers: Hold on a Minute

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In 2024 I blogged about a study that found the lowest incidence of Alzheimer’s-related mortality among ambulance and taxi drivers. At the time I noted that the study had a bunch of caveats and was reluctant to draw conclusions; as I wrote, “this is a long, long way from being able to say, for example, that driving a taxi prevents Alzheimer’s.” Nevertheless, last week The Conversation published a piece by engineering professor Hatim Sharif, who has no qualms drawing those conclusions from that 2024 study. Said piece is making the usual rounds, but grains of salt by the truckload are advised. As one commenter on MetaFilter says, “the causal claim is doing more work than the data can support.”

Previously: London Cabbies’ Unique Brains May Help Alzheimer’s Diagnosis; Jobs Requiring Spatial Memory and Navigation Associated with Low Alzheimer’s Mortality Rates.

Future-Proofing Geospatial Technology

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bill Dollins has been thinking about how to future-proof geospatial data infrastructure.

When we design systems expected to last for years or decades, we tend to ask which technologies will still be around. Will PostGIS still matter in 2046? What about GeoPackage/GeoParquet/PMTiles? Will S3 still be a thing? Will APIs even matter?

I’m increasingly convinced these are the wrong kinds of questions. We should be thinking about how to build infrastructure that doesn’t require us to know the answers.

An Exhibition on Transit Maps and Identity

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A map of bus lines in Paris in 1879.
Recettes des Lignes d’Omnibus de Paris en 1879, Ministère des Travaux Publics (1881). David Rumsey Map Collection.

An exhibition at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, You Are Here: Transit Cartography and Spatial Identity, explores the evolving design language of transit maps and the relationship of that design language with the identity of the place being mapped.

You Are Here, title illustration

You Are Here explores the unique relationship between regional and global transit maps and the socio-cultural identity of their subjects. Transit maps can be utilitarian, functioning as navigational tools, but they can also be aspirational, signs of cities and nations attempting to shift perceptions of their identity. The individual maps in this exhibition serve as a window into the histories of the places they represent as well as the history of transit cartography as a whole. With a wider view, the evolution of transit maps demonstrates how a transportation system can become synonymous with a city or nation’s identity, reflecting its change over time, spearheading cartographic innovations, or reifying an entirely new vision for space and place.

More at Stanford Report. The usual suspects (Beck, Vignelli) make appearances, but there are some interesting Chinese, Russian and colonial examples here as well. You Are Here was curated by Jayne Killander, the winner of a California Map Society student curation competition. The exhibition is both in-person and online; it opened March 25 and runs until August 21, so if you’re in the area, hurry up; I imagine the online version will stay up, at least for a bit. [Cartonaut]

Reading Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reading Maps plots fictional journeys on the map. Creator Aires Loutsaris explains:

Reading Maps came out of a nagging thought that every story has happened somewhere. Odysseus crossed a real sea. The Pequod sailed real water. Phileas Fogg’s eighty days ran on real railways and real steamer lines and that you could follow him in a way. However when you read a book, all that geography stays locked in your head. Once you close the cover and it goes with it.

So I started plotting them properly. Real coastlines, real ports, one journey at a time.

There are hundreds on the map now, books and films both. You can pick one up and follow it stop by stop. Where the ship left from, where it was becalmed, what happened at each landfall, etc. Some are roughly what you’d expect. Others surprised me. I didn’t know until I plotted it that Blood Meridian opens with a boy drifting down the Mississippi or that Alexander’s whole march east fits into a shape you can take in at one quick glance.

It’s just me and Fabio Moreira, the amazing developer that makes everything work. We built it because I wanted it to exist and nobody else had.

[Kottke]

Nauru Changes Its Name to Naoero

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

AP: “The Pacific Island country of Nauru has changed its name to the Republic of Naoero, its president said, matching the spelling and pronunciation in the national language.” See also RNZ coverage. This follows other countries’ name changes to match local usage or pronunciation (e.g. Swaziland to Eswatini, Turkey to Türkiye). Name changes like this don’t necessarily affect more linguistically distant exonyms: the Chinese name for Naoero is unchanged.

Worldmapper VR

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It makes sense that a mapping app for the Apple Vision Pro would evoke Boston’s Mapparium. Using that virtual space to display cartograms, which is what Worldmapper VR does, is not something I would have expected. Does a virtual space designed to eliminate map distortion make a difference when presenting the distortions of a cartogram? (Would cartograms work on a globe?)

‘Geospatial Trust Is Hard to Win and Terrifyingly Easy to Lose’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ed Parsons, who used to work at Google, has some words about the Google Earth AI image generation debacle. “Veterans of the Geo organization understood an unwritten rule that took decades to build: Geospatial trust is hard to win and terrifyingly easy to lose. Google Earth is relied upon by human rights investigators, journalists, emergency responders, and courts of law as a baseline truth layer of our planet. Once you train the public to accept that the satellite view can be whimsically altered by typing a prompt about a ‘lakeside cabin’ or a ‘futuristic metropolis’, you destroy the integrity of the platform. If anything on the screen can be AI-generated, then nothing on the screen can be trusted.”

Previously: Google Earth Goes Nano Bananas (which has been updated a few times since first publication).