A detailed look at the Verbiest Map from the University of Michigan’s Clements Library. Also known as the Kun yu quan tu (坤輿全圖), this is a 1674 Chinese-language map of the world by Jesuit priest Ferdinand… More
Are geofence warrants unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Geofence warrants require a data provider to provide information on all users and devices within a given area during a given time period.… More
A new edition of the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (the first edition was published in 2010) came out earlier this month from Yale University Press. From the publisher: In the first edition of Atlas… More
The Twentieth Century Society, a heritage group that campaigns to preserve 20th-century British buildings, is trying to get Grade II-listed status for the first and last trig pillars of the Retriangulation of Great Britain, which… More
CartographyObituarieshistory of cartographylibrariesNYPLwomen
Alice Hudson, chief of the New York Public Library’s map division from 1981 to 2009, died in 2024. Last month The Cartographic Journal published a long look at Hudson’s life and career, written by Daniel… More
Claims circulating on social media that Apple erased towns and villages in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps as a kind of support for the Israeli invasion are not true, says Apple. Apple’s coverage of Lebanon… More
Shri Khalpada explains the physics of GPS. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells… More
On page 96 the author notes that “the actual mapping of the heavens did not exist” in medieval Europe; on page 98, that “celestial cartography awaited its invention.” That these words appear nearly 40 percent… More
What a stream is called says a lot about its hydrology. An arroyo is dry and intermittent; bayous, swamps and sloughs refer to wetlands. Anthony Martinez, a data scientist with the USGS, extracted the feature… More
Reuters: “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo… More
It’s likely that artist Saul Steinberg may be best known for “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” an illustration that appeared as the well-known cover of the 29 March 1976 issue of The New… More
Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those… More
Per Apple’s announcement of its new Apple Business platform, ads are indeed coming to Apple Maps. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using… More
A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by… More
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… More
For the Guardian’s “It’s Complicated” feature, Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at how great restaurants end up being invisible when you search for a place to eat on Google Maps. He talks with data scientist Lauren Leek,… More
Linguisticsgeneral semanticsmap-territory relationphilosophy of science
In another side-quest from his current work in progress, Matthew Edney goes down a deep rabbit hole trying to work out a specific point related to Alfred Korzybski’s famous adage that “the map is not… More
The wealthy enclave of North Oaks, Minnesota got itself removed from Google Maps Street View 2008 and has stayed invisible to the service since then, thanks to the fact that the entire city of 5,272… More
A team of MIT researchers think that navigation systems have a parking problem. They’re capable of telling us about traffic congestion and offering us alternate routes, but once we’ve arrived at our destination, we’re on… More
In an interview in the Spring 2026 issue of The World Today, William Rankin, author of Radical Cartography, looks at cartography in the present geopolitical situation and argues that maps need to be up to… More
