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.
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.
Increasing levels of GPS interference have been reported around Venezuela over the past month. Since the U.S. has been moving naval assets into the area and generally rattling the sabre in Venezuela’s general direction, they are the likely culprit. Bloomberg, Sky News.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
The Onion: “An alarming new educational survey has found more than 70% of Americans lack the basic geographic literacy to locate the country, region, or continent they are currently being deported to.”
Jacob Weinbren has mapped the results of the 2025 Canadian federal election at the polling station level, along with the 2021 results so that we can see how the vote changed. Any project of this kind is going to be insufficient along some axis: because it shows percentages rather than raw votes and is a geographical map, it doesn’t represent the number of votes cast very well, and tracking six parties is a lot for a choropleth map. But for the purposes of seeing the change in voting patterns from 2021 to 2025, it works: I can tell at a glance, for example, that reserves on the Prairies got more Liberal, and my own neck of the woods got a lot more Conservative. Direct link to map here.
StateFace is a font made up of tiny state shapes—all 50 U.S. states, plus D.C. and the lower 48 as a whole. M is Idaho, v is Wisconsin and so on. Seems like it’d be awfully useful for web designers. It’s courtesy of ProPublica and has been around for at least 13 years but I’m only hearing about it now. [Jami Dennis]
