The Map Room

U.S.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

“Gulf of America” is now state policy in Alabama.

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.

MapQuest continues to ride a wave of positive publicity after their refusal to rename Lake Ontario.

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Commentary on map projections continues in the wake of the UN resolution about replacing the Mercator projection with Equal Earth.

Mapping Tariffs visualizes the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian businesses.

Dan Vanderkam: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps.

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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Comedian Josh Johnson (you may know him from The Daily Show) explains what MapQuest is to younger people.

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.

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).

We’ve seen before that solar storms can have an impact on GPS accuracy.

South Park’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have announced that they are changing the show’s name.

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.

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 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.

Usually when an island gets left off a map of Canada, it’s Prince Edward Island.

Here we go again.

This OSM diary entry raises an interesting question: “We generally work under the assumption that ‘the more mapped places, the better.’

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.

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.

A New Yorker piece by Shayla Love looks at the consequences of our increasing dependence on GPS.

Antonio Antoine also has something to say about generative AI in cartography.

Lee Schwartz, current CEO of the American Geographical Society and former Geographer at the U.S.