The Journal: “A 12ft by 11ft wool map of Ireland, which took four years of knitting and crocheting to complete, is in search of a new home to go on public display.”
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.
History of Cartography Project’s Fifth Volume Goes to Press
The History of Cartography Project’s fifth and final volume, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, has finally gone to press, though the massive book will take two years to work its way through the production pipeline. It’s scheduled for publication in 2027.
(All previous volumes are available as free downloads in PDF format. So will volume five, once it’s been out for a couple of years.)
Previously: History of Cartography Project’s Fourth Volume Now Available Online; Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Available Online; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Out.
Apple Maps Roundup
9to5Mac notes two features coming to Apple Maps as of iOS 26 this fall: natural language search and commute notifications.
Meanwhile, Apple Maps briefly failed to treat Ontario’s Highway 407 as a toll road earlier this month, in what was probably an updating error. (The 407 is a fairly expensive toll freeway, but it’s split between privately and provincially owned sections; the province is removing tolls on its section, but Apple apparently applied that change to the whole route.)
A new contact page replaces the old contact, FAQ, link submission and review guidelines pages. Simpler and less repetitive. And instead of a contact form, there’s just an email address. So much spam was coming through the contact forms that all form results got sent to the spam folder: I’ve been missing legitimate messages. So we’ll try this instead.
The Map Cutout Art of Joanathan Bessaci
The art of Joanathan Bessaci includes maps cut out and layered to form images.
I presently work with old Michelin maps dated from roughly 1920 to 1970. I use old French Michelin maps because I like their color and texture but also because for me, they symbolize the roads that various family members have taken to get to France. My maternal grandmother emigrated to France from Vietnam and my paternal grandfather emigrated to France from Kabylia (Northern Algeria). I myself moved to Washington D.C. from Paris in August, 2016.
I was also drawn to old French Michelin maps because I have been surrounded by objects like them since I was a child. Both my father and grandfather have stands in Lyon’s largest flea market and I spent long hours there as a child and adolescent. Many of the maps that I use come from Lyon’s flea markets and others throughout France.
My work presently consists of cutting portraits and other images into several maps. I chose my maps very carefully and try to integrate their geography, including lakes, rivers, oceans, roads, highways, parks and city centers into my images to highlight certain visual elements. Each of my pieces is made up of multiple maps which I cut out and layer on top of each other in between pieces of glass to create depth and texture.
It’s astonishingly well done. Bessaci’s maps often form images of animals, or people in motion; motorways intersect at locations on the body that evoke a circulatory system. The effect is even more dramatic in his anatomical works, where the map layers draw out hidden bones.
Here’s a time-lapse video of Bessaci creating one of his works:
An exhibition of Bessaci’s work, Mapping the Soul, wrapped up last week at the Zenith Gallery in Washington, D.C. It can also be seen at Galerie Jamault in Paris.
Mapping the Best Places to See the Aurora Borealis
Harry Kuril built a computer model to identify the places with a best chance to catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis during a short visit, assigning scores based on aurora intensity, cloud cover and light pollution data. The above map is the result. [Maps.com]
Maps on Vinyl in the Guardian
Damien Saunder’s book about maps on record covers, Maps on Vinyl, got a writeup in the Guardian last week.
Some designs address global social or environmental issues. Others map the mind, imaginary places, feelings, worldviews—or, in the case of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s The Equatorial Stars, deep space.
Among Saunder’s personal favourites is a sleeve from the long-gone Iowa alt rock band House of Large Sizes, showing a cake whose icing is decorated with a map, with a chunk missing. “It’s a commentary on how we’re consuming the world piece by piece, almost without noticing,” says Saunder.
Another favourite cover comes from Belgian punk band Hetze: an illustration of a globe dangling by a thread from the forefinger of an elegant, long-nailed hand, by tattoo artist Florence Roman.
Previously: Maps on Vinyl.
Upcoming Changes to the Email Digest
My hosting provider has announced that it will be retiring the announcement list feature on which The Map Room relies for its weekly email digest. Which means that at some point in the near future it will need to find a new home.
The best option, from a features and privacy standpoint, is probably Buttondown (which I already use for my personal newsletter). But adding The Map Room and its subscribers to my account will move me up the paid plan ladder, so this switch will cost me a bit (insert subtle reminder here that the Patreon exists). I don’t begrudge doing so: my email subscribers are an active and significant part of my audience (to the point where I sometimes wonder whether I should go email-first) so it’s worth doing that aspect of The Map Room properly. And I’ve been eyeing a move to Buttondown in any event; my hosting provider is just making it happen sooner rather than later.
Because email subscribers have properly opted in to the existing service, I can move subscriptions over seamlessly when the time comes. I’ll try to give a heads-up before that happens, though.
The Mystery of Elkhams Grave
In this video, Paul Whitewick explores the strange case of Elkhams Grave, a name on the map that would normally refer to an old crossroad grave site—only it appears to be nowhere near a crossroad, parish boundary or other burial ground. It’s a place name with no apparent surviving evidence of the place named.
Making Maps in the Newsroom
Before joining Esri, Lauren Tierney spent a number of years making maps for the Washington Post. In this interview with Maps.com editor-in-chief Robby Deming she talks about her experiences making maps in the newsroom and the role of maps in journalism.
The Map Men Visit the Ordnance Survey, and Also Wrote a Book
Map Men Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones visit the Ordnance Survey in a (sponsored) set of two (vertically aligned short) videos: part one, part two. Complete with map-folding mishaps, gratuitous hi-viz vest wearing, and a Google Maps dig.
Meanwhile, they’ve also gone and written a book: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters) will be out from HarperCollins imprints in the fall of 2025: the U.K. edition will come out from Mudlark in October (£17) and the U.S. edition from Hanover Square Press in November ($30). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Allmaps Loses Digital Humanities Grant
The Leventhal Center has posted a statement on the future of the Allmaps project—Allmaps is a georeferencing tool for digital images—now that its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH has been terminated, like so many other NEH grants. “Although we’re disappointed that the U.S. government is backing away from supporting projects like Allmaps, LMEC and AGSL will keep working to support the Allmaps project (and we’re thankful that it has support from European agencies).”
Defense Department Cuts Off NOAA, NASA from Key Satellite Data Used in Hurricane Forecasting
Citing cybersecurity concerns, the U.S. Department of Defense is cutting off NOAA and NASA access to data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), throwing a wrench into the NOAA’s ability to forecast hurricanes, CNN reports. Of particular concern is the loss of access to the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS). CNN explains:
This tool is like a 3D X-ray of tropical storms and hurricanes, revealing where the strongest rain bands and winds are likely to be and how they are shifting.
Such imagery provides forecasters with information about a storm’s inner structure and is one of the limited ways they can discern how quickly and significantly a storm’s intensity is changing, particularly at night and during periods when hurricane hunter aircraft are not flying in the storm.
It does not appear that the agencies were given notice of this move. They managed to negotiate a one-month extension, to July 31. NOAA says it can use other sources for its hurricane forecasts.
Fuller Goes to Washington
Gareth Fuller’s latest creation is “The DMV,” a pictorial map of Washington, D.C., and the neighbouring bits of Maryland and Virginia (hence “DMV”).
Created over twelve months, including three months of on-the-ground exploration in 2023 and creation in 2024, this artwork becomes the fourth capital city within the ongoing series, Purposeful Wanderings. The third time capturing an entire region on canvas. And the very first artwork depicting the United States of America.
From its very beginning, Washington, D.C. has sat at the centre of American national identity, politics, conflict, compromise, and power. But it doesn’t work alone: it’s the wider region that sustains the Capital. The DMV—D.C., Maryland, and Virginia—isn’t just a geographic label; it’s a cultural badge, a collective effort shaped by the reach of the Metro, the sprawl of the Beltway, and the unique, fluid neighbourhoods that define its borders. These observations have guided my exploration; the drawings seek to uncover what binds The DMV together and creates its unshakable sense of place.
As with Fuller’s previous works, prints are available at several price points.
I missed the previous installment of Fuller’s Purposeful Wanderings series, “Shanghai,” which came out in 2022.
A Map in Every Pocket
It’s been more than 18 years since Steve Jobs demonstrated Google Maps on the then-prototype iPhone, and it’s hard to wrap one’s head around how transformational the fact that every mobile phone comes with a detailed, always up-to-date map of the world. James Killick makes the point in the final installment of his “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World”:
Well today there are estimated to be 7.2 billion smartphones in use around the planet. They are used by 4.7 billion people.2 That’s about 58% of the world’s population.
And every one of those devices has access to a maps app. And every maps app has a map of the planet.
So, if you boil it all down: at least one out of every two people on the planet now has a detailed map of the whole world in their pocket.
Process that thought. Before smartphones with data plans, car navigation meant GPS receivers with onboard maps that needed to be manually updated, often for a fee, or they’d slowly go out of date. And before that? Well, discussion of that (example 1, example 2) is a good way to make people feel old on the Internet. It meant a needing to own collection of paper maps. It meant knowing how to navigate from a map, which ain’t nothing—and was never universal. It meant asking for directions if you didn’t, or if you didn’t have the map you needed.
“A GPS in every pocket is one of the few truly great things about the smartphone age,” wrote Jeff Veillette on Bluesky, and I’m hard pressed to disagree. It will be harder for half the world’s population to get themselves lost: how is that anything but an unalloyed good?