Category: Map Errors

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Maps are occasionally used that have an incorrect border or outdated name.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.

Mislabelled, Misplaced and Misshaped

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Guardian: “A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference in Brazil ⁠this week, ​causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.” Not only were the countries mislabelled, they were misplaced and misshaped; as Wonkette puts it: “They’re all shaped wrong, and they’re also wrong in all the other ways of geographical wrongness.” At least the outline of Africa was okay. Not that AI is required to make a map so perfectly wrong, but it appears to have been used in this case.

Review: This Way Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover art for This Way Up, a book by the Map Men Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman.

It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each episode, sandwiched between the catchy theme song1 and the long ad break for Surfshark, they took as their subject an odd map or cartographic situation and proceeded to say a lot of smart things in a very silly fashion.

Now those videos have led to a book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), which came out last fall to no small amount of fanfare and promotion, and we get to see whether the schtick that works on YouTube is translatable to the printed page. It turns out that the answer is, kind of.

Continue reading “Review: This Way Up” →

Moogle Gaps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Moogle Gaps, for when you want to be misdirected. TrendWatching: “Whipped up by two Australian ex-Droga5 creatives, Paul Meates and Henry Kimber, Moogle Gaps is an anti-wayfinder. Users input their navigational query as they normally would, but instead of the most efficient route from A to B, the app offers misdirections — or as its builders put it, ‘a way to get lost, visit a bar that‘s not local, or go to a restaurant where no one knows you.’” [Tara Calishain]

Londonist Asks ChatGPT to Draw Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The shortcomings and possibilities of generative AI are, of course, well chronicled across a million op-eds. I could write at length about the dangers or opportunities the technology presents,” writes Matt at Londonist. “But this is a newsletter about London, and I’m still in a silly holiday-season mindset. So all I’m going to do today is ask AI to draw some historical maps of the capital, and then take the p*ss out of them. Popcorn at the ready . . . ” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “terribly,” with results “as crazy as a yacht of numbats,” with labels “so bizarre that I don’t know where to begin.”

Ordnance Survey Asked to Change Route of Historic Path Through Dartmoor

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Nick Pannell wants the Ordnance Survey to change the route of the Abbot’s Way path through Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. Pannell says his own research shows that medieval monks took a more northerly route between Buckfast and Tavistock, and that the path shown on OS maps since 1886 is wrong. The OS doesn’t dispute Pannell’s research, but says that the current route existed 130 years before the initial survey, and there are no currently existing paths along Pannell’s preferred route. This seems to be a case of the prescriptive vs. the descriptive: Pannell shows where the path used to be or ought to have been, the OS shows the current reality on the ground. Nor can OS change the map unless, per the article, Historic England changes the official route: it’s not OS’s call to make.

Apple Maps Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.)

Online Maps Updates, Late March 2025 Edition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An updated disclosure on Apple’s website spotted by 9to5Mac says that imagery collected in support of the Look Around feature of Apple Maps (Apple’s Street View equivalent) will also be used to train Apple’s generative AI. Meanwhile, a recent Apple Maps glitch displayed baggage claims at ridiculously high zooms, and a Google Maps glitch deleted Timeline data for some users.

The Trouble with Inflight Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Air Canada has apologized after its inflight maps were found showing the Palestinian Territories but not Israel, blaming an outside supplier and disabling the feature until a fix is made. The times are such that this sort of thing can be inflammatory as hell. Thing is, it’s not remotely the first time it’s happened. Per CNN’s reporting, it happened with JetBlue’s maps last year and with British Airways back in 2013.

So what’s going on? None of the articles give any sort of explanation, though the Snopes page suggests that GeoFusion is the ultimate source of the inflight maps. My guess is that there are airlines that cannot or will not show Israel on a map: several Gulf state carriers come to mind, and GeoFusion lists several on its website (though to be fair I have no knowledge of whether this actually applies to them). Is it possible that GeoFusion has a bespoke no-Israel version for these carriers, and every so often other airlines get that version by mistake?

Frankly if GeoFusion doesn’t have different versions of its maps I’d be shocked, seeing as they list Air India and several Chinese carriers as their clients, and the map required by one country is illegal in the other. To say nothing of how a China-compliant map with the Nine-dash Line would land with Vietnam Airlines, or Crimea-as-Ukraine with Aeroflot.

Inflight maps aren’t an immediately obvious front line in the various map wars (disputed borders, place names, etc.) but now that I think about it . . .

Google Maps Has a Lot of User-Contributed Imagery in the Wrong Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geography Now was poking around northern Chad in Google Maps and came across a bunch of user-contributed 360-degree images of business interiors that had nothing to do with Chad: they were associated with businesses in Brazil, India, Hungary and so forth. I’m inclined to think these were geocoding glitches or user errors, since the Gulf of Guinea (home of Null Island) seems to have a particularly bountiful crop of them, but I’m spotting shop and schoolroom interiors in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean too.

Three Dead After Google Maps Routes Travellers Across Incomplete Bridge—That Wasn’t Closed

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The headline accompanying this Economic Times (India) article is more than a bit misleading: ”Google Maps leads three men to death as car plunges from incomplete bridge into river.” Horrifying. The bridge across the Ramganga River in Uttar Pradesh was closed after a part of it had been washed away in a flood several months previously. But there’s a twist. Google Maps didn’t mark the bridge as closed, and did route the travellers across it, but the road hadn’t been blocked or marked closed on the ground either. This wasn’t a case of ignoring local signage and blindly following online maps: local signage failed too. Google isn’t a panopticon: someone would have had to tell Google Maps that the bridge was closed, and I have to wonder whether that happened. But a Google Maps error makes for a better headline, one that goes international, than a horrible local lapse. At any rate, an investigation is ongoing. [Jalopnik]

Null Island as Easter Egg

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Stamen Maps

Null Island is an inside joke among cartographers: an imagined island situated at 0° latitude, 0° longitude, where maps suffering from data glitches point themselves. If your map is centred on Null Island, something has gone wrong. So of course mapmakers have been having some fun with it—after all, it’s not something you could stumble across by accident. In a blog post, Alan McConchie of Stamen Maps delves into the lore and history of Null Island and its status as an Easter egg on the Stamen Maps platform, where it takes the shape of the island from the Myst game.

(As an update to my 2016 post on Null Island: Alan reports that the buoy at 0°, 0° has ceased to be. Also, the Null Island website, complete with flag, has moved here.)

OpenStreetMap Is Dealing with Some Vandalism

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It seems OpenStreetMap has had to deal with a wave of vandalism attacks lately. If you see some nonsense on OSM, this post on their community forum outlines what to do about it (it may have already been taken care of even if it’s still appearing, so check for that; also, don’t post screencaps, because propagating the nonsense is what the vandals want). The OSM ops team provided this update on Mastodon today: “OpenStreetMap is now stronger with improved monitoring, automatic blocking, and respectful limits on new accounts. The default osm.org map is now quicker at fixing large-scale vandalism. Offline actions are also progressing.”