NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday had a segment on the Osher Map Library last Sunday.
Author: Jonathan Crowe
Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room. His essays and reviews have been published by AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.
A History of Swiss Cartography
Engineers of Map Art, a book on the history of Swiss cartography that focuses on work done at ETH Zurich, came out in English last September. (The German edition, Ingenieure der Kartenkunst, came out last January.) “This publication provides a comprehensive overview of 170 years of cartography at ETH Zurich and pays tribute to the personalities who have contributed to the development of the discipline. It is published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation and highlights its contribution to science and practice.” Eduard Imhof is covered in chapter 4. It’s available for free download as an open-access PDF; a hard copy can be ordered for CHF 50. Thanks to Peter Wrobel for the tip.
Cincinnati and Columbus in 50 Maps
Two more books from Belt Publishing came out this week, both part of their “50 Maps” series, each focusing on an Ohio city: Cincinnati in 50 Maps, edited by Nick Swartsell and with cartography by Andy Woodruff; and Columbus in 50 Maps, edited by Brent Warren and with cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. They join Cleveland in 50 Maps (2019) and other books in the series that aren’t about Ohio cities. Columbus-based independent news outlet Matter has a feature on Columbus in 50 Maps.
- Cincinnati in 50 Maps ed. by Nick Swartsell; cartography by Andy Woodruff. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
- Columbus in 50 Maps ed. by Brent Warren; cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
GIS and Enshittification
Linda Stevens believes that the GIS industry is showing signs of enshittification: “Coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow, ‘enshitification’ describes how once-great platforms decay under the pressures of greed and control. They begin as open, user-centered systems but gradually morph into closed ecosystems optimized for corporate rent-seeking rather than public good. GIS, long built on ideals of openness and shared data, now shows many of these symptoms.” In a second piece she says GIS, “with its specialized user base and high switching costs, is particularly vulnerable,” and lists some warning signs to watch out for (price hikes, degraded featurs and service, lock-in, upselling). She neither names names nor specifies specifics, mind.
Previously: Reimagining GIS.
Alabama’s New Election Map Was Drawn by a Teenager
Alabama’s state senate elections will now use a map drawn by an 18-year-old student. The judge chose the map over options put forward by the court’s special master because it changed the existing map less (see the court decision). The new map was necessary after the judge found the previous map violated the Voting Rights Act. [Glyn Moody]
National Rail’s All Stations Interactive Route Map
National Rail’s All Stations Interactive Route Map is only nominally interactive, in that you can pan and zoom, but clicking on lines or stations doesn’t actually do anything. That said, it shows every operator, route and station in Great Britain down to subways and tram lines, and unlike the static PDF version it’s actually legible when you zoom out. More rail network maps of Great Britain here. [Richard Fairhurst]
Map Books of 2025 Updated, Plus Some Gift Suggestions
It’s the end of November and I’m still finding titles to add to the Map Books of 2025 page. More to the point, I’m only now finding out about books that came out last January. The list is a mix of (1) GIS manuals, (2) academic monographs (many of which shamelessly lifted from Matthew Edney’s 2025 Books in Map History list), and (3) books aimed at the mainstream book market, most of which come out in the second half of the year to take advantage of the holiday season. Peruse the list and you might find something that fits the bill on that front; I’ve marked what look like some possibilities with a icon.
Speaking of which, I’ve done gift guides in the past but lately I haven’t been able to keep up. Fortunately, Andrew Middleton, who runs a map store and kind of has to keep up, has some book suggestions, not all of which came out this year (but then why do they have to). And if you’d like something other than books, or would like to avoid certain online retailers, have a look at what’s on offer via the Independent Map Sellers page.
GPS Jamming Reported Around Venezuela
The Man Who Drew Wellington
In the 1890s, Thomas Ward created maps of the city of Wellington, New Zealand that are the subject of a new book by Elizabeth Cox, Mr Ward’s Map, and this article in New Zealand Geographic about both Ward and Cox’s book:
Over two and a half years, Ward walked every street in the city. He drew the outline of every single building, including garden sheds and outhouses (but spared himself the effort of documenting henhouses). Historian Elizabeth Cox thinks that Ward may have knocked on all the doors of all Wellington’s houses, too, because he recorded the number of rooms in each dwelling, the number of storeys, and the building materials used. The resulting map is huge, spanning 88 sheets of paper, each the size of a poster. […]
After Ward stopped updating the map himself, others took on the task—much less perfectly, notes Cox—leaving behind ink spills, coffee-cup rings, drips of tea, and scribbled mathematical equations. It was the city’s primary map for more than 80 years, only superseded in the 1970s.
Today, a copy of Ward’s original, plus many of its subsequent versions, lives in a set of wide, shallow drawers in the Wellington City Archives—and online, as an overlay in mapping software for anyone to use.
Ward’s maps can be seen here and here (updated version). As you can see from the sample above, they’re at a level of detail that would give Sanborn maps a run for their money. Thanks to Ken Dowling for the tip.
Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street
by Elizabeth Cox
Massey University Press, 13 Nov 2025, NZD $90
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Above & Below: Cartography Beyond Terrain
Above & Below: Cartography Beyond Terrain, an exhibition at Stanford Library’s David Rumsey Map Center that launched in conjunction with this year’s Ruderman Conference, “explores how cartography depicts the depths of the Earth, the ocean floor, weather systems, the solar system, and even the seemingly intangible internet—anything but the thin boundary that divides land and sky that we tend to associate with maps.” Free admission, on display through 27 February 2026.
Maps from a North Korean Encyclopedia
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.
NACIS 2025 on YouTube
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.
Boston at 1:40 Scale
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.)
How Imaging Quasars Improved GPS Accuracy
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]
300,000 Kilometres of Roman Roads
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.