The Map Room
Blogging about maps since 2003
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Latest posts
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Review: Mapping the Mountains
I spent my youth and twenties hiking the Canadian Rockies as much as I could, always with topo maps in hand. So a book like Mapping the Mountains by Andrew Davies (Uitgeverij Moving Mountains, 2026) holds considerable… More
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Night Maps
Night Maps is an exhibition “exploring the visual and intellectual history and the real-world consequences of mapping the night sky” at the Warburg Institute in London. Many of these objects are on public display for… More
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Hegseth’s Minions Break Eisenhower’s Globe
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted a 30-inch floor globe used by Dwight Eisenhower during World War II moved to his office. Rather than wait for specialist movers, his staffers tried to move it themselves,… More
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A Google Maps Roundup
Whatever you think about generative AI—and you know what I think—you have to concede that it isn’t very good at making maps out of the box: there are so many examples of it going horribly… More
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A Cassini Exhibition in Paris
An exhibition about the Cassini map, La Carte de France de Cassini: Une encyclopédie du territoire, is now running at the Musée des Archives nationales in the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris. Chef d’œuvre cartographique… More
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A ‘Disgracefully Unoriginal’ Fantasy Map
Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he… More
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A Taxonomy of Maps in Movies
Vicky Johnson-Dahl has dug up her 2016 NACIS presentation on maps in the movies, titled “It’s a Map, Map, Map, Map World,” and resurrected it as a blog post. She assigns movie maps to five… More
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Tracé de 1927 du Conseil privé (non définitif)
We had a provincial election here in Quebec earlier this week, coverage of which served as a reminder that the Quebec government officially does not recognize the province’s border with Labrador—a border determined by a… More
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Alabama Now Requires ‘Gulf of America’
“Gulf of America” is now state policy in Alabama. Thanks to a law that took effect on October 1, state entities and employees in Alabama are now required to refer to the Gulf of Mexico… More
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A Pop-up Staircase, Surrounded by Maps
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
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MapQuest’s Moment
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
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Simon Ayrinhac’s Studies of Tolkien’s Maps and Geography, Plus a Middle-earth Globe
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
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The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: Another Follow-Up
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
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Mapping Tariffs
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
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Georeferencing Fire Insurance Maps
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
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The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: A Follow-Up
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
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The First Trilateration of the Globe
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
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Explaining MapQuest to Younger People
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
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Forthcoming Tolkien Conference Explores Maps and Landscapes
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
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Apple Maps Has Ads Now
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