Compare Map Projections: Out of more than 300 projection images, choose two to compare them directly to each other.

The entrance to the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford is via a staircase whose walls are illustrated with maps from the Center’s collections. To mark the Center’s 10th anniversary, RJ Andrews and Ray Marshall… More

MapQuest continues to ride a wave of positive publicity after their refusal to rename Lake Ontario. They’ve posted billboards in Chicago and Toronto with directions to the Lake, their CEO made a well-publicized visit to… More

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month.… More

Commentary on map projections continues in the wake of the UN resolution about replacing the Mercator projection with Equal Earth. There were two pieces in the Guardian last week. This one is less about projections… More

Turning the David Rumsey Map Center’s spectacular stairwell into a pop-up book.

YouTube video by Map Men

Mapping Tariffs visualizes the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian businesses. “Since May 2025, Tara Vinodrai and Karen Chapple have led a team of researchers at the School of Cities to develop interactive mapping and… More

Dan Vanderkam: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps. This post explains why these maps are interesting, how mapsnap works, and why this is worth… More

Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display

Matthew Edney’s response to last week’s UN resolution on phasing out the Mercator projection in favour of Equal Earth: “This event and the responses to it show that we are still being haunted by Arno… More

J. B. Crawford’s long essay on geodesy looks at the challenge of synchronizing the datums created by the various national surveys, giving the reader sufficient background technical information for understanding the culmination of those efforts:… More

Comedian Josh Johnson (you may know him from The Daily Show) explains what MapQuest is to younger people. (It was my running joke to say, “Remember MapQuest?” except that I’ve been doing this for 23… More

The third Tolkien Conference Switzerland, to be held in Lucerne on 13 March 2027, will have as its topic Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Tolkien’s maps are never merely geographical. While they guide the… More

Belatedly noting that ads have started rolling out on Apple Maps in the U.S. and Canada. 9to5Mac explains where and where they’ll appear (in Suggested Places, and in search results). John Gruber and Oliver Roick… More

We’ve seen before that solar storms can have an impact on GPS accuracy. A study published in Geophysical Research Letters determined that a severe geomagnetic storm in November 2025 caused positioning errors in excess of… More

South Park’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have announced that they are changing the show’s name. Variety: “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of ‘South… More

Apple has begun rolling out ads to its Maps app, displaying them in search suggestions and results with a blue "Ad" badge, though critics question their relevance and value.

John Gruber has a problem with Google and Apple showing “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” to users not in the U.S. and Canada: he compares it to China’s insistence on labelling Taiwan as a province of… More

Phantom islands—islands on the map that turn out never to have existed—have come up a few times here on The Map Room. But it’s wild to see one in real time—and in satellite imagery. Which… More

The Onion: “Touting the new feature as yet another innovation to help every traveler get where they’re going, Google Maps on Thursday began offering crawling directions for cyclists who have been hit by a truck.”

The Correct the Map campaign (previously) has come to the United Nations. The Guardian: The UN general assembly will vote on Friday on a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator… More

The Narwhal’s Michelle Cyca on the risks of relying on Google Maps and AI-generated recommendations when planning to hike trails that can be fairly gruelling and take far longer than expected. “Google Maps showed the… More

Usually when an island gets left off a map of Canada, it’s Prince Edward Island. Not this time. CBC News: “Hilroy Canada exercise books are known for the map of Canada on the cover. The… More

With Labour Day long weekend, a B.C. hike is tempting. Here are some hiking apps and resources a search-and-rescue officer recommends over Google Maps

Here we go again. Last week the U.S. president did to Lake Ontario what he did to the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half ago: rename it after America. This was part of… More

This OSM diary entry raises an interesting question: “We generally work under the assumption that ‘the more mapped places, the better.’ But what if the locals don’t consent to being mapped? What if they prefer… More

Every time I encounter a map of New York City’s trees, my first thought is that I must have covered it before, but no, each time it’s bigger in scope and covers more trees. First… More

Fascinating story from the National Library of Scotland about the Second Land Utilization Survey of Great Britain (ca. 1958-1974), told from the perspective of two women who participated in it as schoolchildren sixty years ago,… More

Mark Ovenden’s latest book, Mapping Britain’s Railways: The Design History of a Nation on Track, is out today from British Library Publishing. The publisher’s description: Railway diagrams have been at the forefront of mapping Britain’s… More

A New Yorker piece by Shayla Love looks at the consequences of our increasing dependence on GPS. It’s nominally about Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot (previously), but it’s one of those pieces that… More

Antonio Antoine also has something to say about generative AI in cartography. As I did in my piece about generative AI, he takes as his starting point the question of gatekeeping; unlike me, he’s coming… More

Recently, there has been some discourse on BSKY about the use of genAI in cartography. In particular, this essay was released on my birthday of all days, arguing in favor of using genAI to create m…

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).… More

In 2024 I blogged about a study that found the lowest incidence of Alzheimer’s-related mortality among ambulance and taxi drivers. At the time I noted that the study had a bunch of caveats and was… More

Bill Dollins has been thinking about how to future-proof geospatial data infrastructure. When we design systems expected to last for years or decades, we tend to ask which technologies will still be around. Will PostGIS… More

AFP fact-checks fake AI-generated maps of the Canadian wildfires that have been circulating on social media, many of which overstate the severity and spread of the fires, including hallucinating wildfires in places they don’t exist,… More

On August 10, 1846, Congress established the Smithsonian Institution with a simple mission: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” and gave it “perpetual succession.” One hundred eighty years l…

Government agencies and other organizations aggregate wildfire data into maps to communicate threat levels across geographical areas, but some AI-generated graphics on social media claiming to represe...