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.

‘One Bad Map a Day in February’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

#mapfailbruarychallenge: a list of categories to create one bad map a day in February.

It’s like the #30daymapchallenge in November, in which mapmakers are challenged to make a map a day on a given daily theme, only the reverse: the MapFailbruaryChallenge is about making a bad map on a given daily theme. “The idea is to create the worst map possible.” Bad maps happen; will a deliberately bad map be better or worse? Either way, it’s probably worth stocking up on popcorn for when maps with the #mapfailbruarychallenge hashtag start showing up on our timelines.

(Failbruary. Fai-EL-bru-AIR-y. Say that ten times. And resign yourselves to the fact that Reddit is probably going to kick everyone’s ass on this.)

Update, 19 Jan: There’s an official website now.

Imhof’s High School Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A relief map of a part of Switzerland. From Eduard Imhof (ed.), Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas, 15th ed. (Zürich, 1969), p. 7. David Rumsey Map Collection.
Eduard Imhof (ed.), Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas, 15th ed. (Zürich, 1969), p. 7. David Rumsey Map Collection.

Well, would you look at that. The David Rumsey Map Collection has uploaded a copy of the 1969 edition of the Schweizerischer Mittelschulatlas—a Swiss school atlas—edited by none other than Eduard Imhof. From the 1930s through the 1970s Imhof was responsible for Swiss school atlases at both the primary and high school level. And this example is, as you can see, just full of Imhoflichkeit. Just look at it.

The Lake District in Lego

Published on by Jonathan Crowe


BBC News has the story of Jon Tordoff’s 100-square-foot scale model of the Lake District, which he built during lockdown out of LEGO pieces.

New Boston-Focused Map Exhibitions at the Leventhal Center

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Atlas of the city of Boston, Roxbury: plate 14 (1931)
From Atlas of the City of Boston (1931). Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Opening today at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases is an exhibition that explores street-level changes to Boston in the period between the Civil War and World War II. Media release.

Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases features rare materials from the BPL’s historic collection of maps and atlases alongside lithographs, photographs, and sketches of familiar local landscapes. Visitors will discover how the atlas collections opens up a world of fascinating stories, with vignettes including the city’s first African Meeting House in the heart of Beacon Hill, landmarks of leisure like the “Derby Racer” and “Giant Safety Thriller” amusement rides in Revere, public health infrastructure on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, and many more.

The in-person exhibition at the BPL’s Central Library opens today; a digital version will follow online. Runs until 19 August 2023. A curatorial introduction will take place next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition, Becoming Boston: Eight Moments in the Geography of a Changing City, also opens today at the Leventhal: “In the eight cases of this exhibition, we follow the changing spatial forms of the place we now call Boston—from before the landscape carried that name all the way through the struggles, clashes, and dreams that continue to reshape the city today.”

See the Leventhal’s exhibitions page and their preview of 2023 events for more details.

New Fantasy Novel: The Map and the Territory

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The Map and the Territory by A. M. Tuomala I’m always interested in fantasy novels in which maps play a role beyond the endpapers—where maps or mapmakers are a key element of the story. So I’m noting for future reference The Map and the Territory by A. M. Tuomala (Candlemark and Gleam, Dec. 2022), which has a wizard and a cartographer as its protagonists. Nerds of a Feather has a review.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The Overture Map Foundation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Announced earlier this month, the Overture Map Foundation is an initiative founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta (i.e. Facebook), Microsoft and TomTom to build an ecosystem of interoperable open map data—an ecosystem, note, that does not at the moment include Apple, Esri or Google, so presumably this is a way for smaller owners of map data (at least for TomTom values of smaller) to form Voltron punch above their weight by making it easier to combine and share resources. From the press release:

Multiple datasets reference the same real-world entities using their own conventions and vocabulary, which can make them difficult to combine. Map data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. Open map data can also lack the structure needed to easily build commercial map products and services on top.

Making it easier to combine data—one of Overture’s aims is to create “a common, structured, and documented data schema”—sounds an awful lot like a way to address James Killick’s complaint about the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards (previously). It also sounds like TomTom’s map platform, announced last month, is part of something bigger.

Given the talk about open map data, it’s not surprising that the OpenStreetMap team has some thoughts about the announcement, and about how Overture and OSM might work together in the future.

A Christmas Map Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Detail from Willem Barentsz, <em>Map of the Polar Regions</em>, 1598, showing a man wearing a red suit in a sleigh being driven by reindeer.
Detail from Willem Barentsz, Map of the Polar Regions, 1598. Newberry Library.

The Newberry’s David Weimer explains the presence, in a 1598 map of the Arctic Circle, of a man in a red coat riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Maps Mania links to two Santa trackers: NORAD’s and Google’s.

In a post from last year, James Cheshire notes how Indian and Chinese laws about depicting their contested borders are reflected in Christmas ornaments made in each country. [Mappery]

Projection Connections: A Genealogy of Map Projections

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Projection Connections: a diagram showing the relationships between various map projections by Daniel Huffman
Daniel Huffman

Fresh off of producing a (now sold-out) line of map projection trading cards, Daniel Huffman has produced a 16×24-inch poster showing the surprisingly close and entangled relationships between the various map projections.

I first learned about a couple of these connections several years ago. I don’t quite remember how or where, but I found out that the Mercator projection was equivalent to a Lambert Conformal Conic with the standard parallels set opposite each other across the Equator. And that if you moved both those parallels up to a pole, you got a Stereographic. My mind was suitably blown, and I saved it as a fun fact to share with people. This year, while working on The Projection Collection, I spent a lot of time on daan Strebe’s site looking up details, and I often saw his notes (usually derived from Snyder/Voxland) about how projections were related to each other. I started to realize there were a lot of these connections out there, and I thought it might be fun to diagram them in some way.

The diagram is digital-only (PDF) and donationware.

Georeferencing Familiar Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On the Leventhal Map Center’s website, Ezra Acevedo describes what it’s like to georeference a century-old atlas of your hometown. “Spending many hours poring over maps of such a well known place was really exciting. My knowledge of the town coupled with its resistance to change meant that the historic maps of Ipswich weren’t all that difficult to line up with the modern map. However, I did learn four important lessons while georeferencing my hometown.”

NYC Tree Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of the NYC Tree Map
Screenshot

The impressive and/or insane thing about the New York City Tree Map is that it maps individual trees: now about 860,000 of them, all managed by the city’s parks department on city streets and in parks, down to the species and trunk diameter, which also means you can filter for those parameters, plus get most recent inspection and tree care data on specific trees. You can even favourite individual trees. If trees had social media accounts, they’d be here. [Bloomberg CityLab]

Previously: Mapping Central Park’s 19,630 Trees.

2022 Holiday Gift Guide

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Once again, I’m a bit late with my annual gift guide. The idea of which is, if you have a map-obsessed person in your life and would like to give them something map-related—or you are a map-obsessed person and would like your broad hints to have something to link to—this guide may give you some ideas.

This list is a long way from comprehensive. Be sure to check out gift guides from previous years: see, for example, the 2021, 2019, 2018 and 2017 gift guides (in 2020 I focused on map stationery). Much of what’s listed may still be available. And even more books are listed on the Map Books of 2022 page.

Please keep in mind that this is not a list of recommendations: what’s here is mainly what I’ve spotted online, and there’s probably a lot more out there. In many cases I haven’t even seen what’s listed here, much less reviewed it: these are simply things that look like they might be fit for gift giving. (Anyone who tries to parlay this into “recommended by The Map Room” is going to get a very sad look from me.)

Finally, this post contains affiliate links; I receive a cut of the purchase price if you make a purchase via these links.

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