Author: Jonathan Crowe

Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room. His essays and reviews have been published by AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.

Reimagining GIS

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Linda Stevens says it’s time to move past GIS:

Since its inception, the evolution of GIS has often felt like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Over the years, the layer-based model has been stretched and modified to accommodate everything from long transaction editing to the intricate modeling of interconnected ecosystems.. Yet, as computing power grows, cloud resources expand, and database technologies advance, the limitations of a map- and layer-centric GIS have become increasingly evident.

The time has come to reimagine GIS—shifting towards a truly geographic-centric information system, one that fully embraces modern technology. It might go by a different name, and some may see it as unspecial, but I believe it has the potential to revolutionize how we approach data modeling.

Update: Mastodon commenters are more than a bit skeptical.

Unauthorized Waffle House Index Disaster Maps Taken Down

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used to assess the severity of a storm in the U.S. South, because Waffle House restaurants don’t close unless Things Are Very Bad. But when Jack LaFond scraped Waffle House’s website to build a map tracking restaurant closures last fall, he got a cease-and-desist from Waffle House over trademark issues. It got resolved more-or-less amiably in the end, but the website stayed down all the same. A different map, Riley Walz’s Waffle House Index map, which I covered last fall, also appears to be offline now, for what I presume are the same reasons.

NOAA Cuts Threaten Spatial Reference System Update

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wired reports that Trump administration cuts to NOAA are threatening an already-delayed update to the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), which was supposed to replace NAD 83 and NAVD 88 in 2022 with corrected spatial measurements more in line with satellite data. (See this 2020 post on the difference in elevation data.) “According to former staff, NGS was sitting at 174 employees at the start of the year, with staff looking to fill an additional 15 positions to help with rolling out the new datums and educating federal agencies and local governments on their use. Since January 20, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and has had to freeze planned hiring.” Wired situates this in the context of the U.S. falling further behind in geodesy research.

The Osher Map Library’s 2025 Illustrated Mapmaking Contest for Maine Elementary Students

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Osher Map Library’s illustrated mapmaking contest for elementary school students has been a thing since 2016. For the 2025 contest, some 350 entries from Maine fourth, fifth and sixth graders were received. They’ve been narrowed down to twelve finalists; the winners, who get prizes, will be determined by public vote—which ends tomorrow, so go have a look.

Exploring GPS Alternatives

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In March the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry to explore GPS alternatives, citing increasing threats to the resiliency of the existing GPS network. GPS World worries that the U.S. may limit domestic access to non-U.S. navigation systems (Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS), which many devices support, for security reasons.

Breathless coverage in TechCrunch for one such alternative, Tern AI, a startup that promises GPS-free navigation. From what I can gather, it relies on a combination of car sensors, onboard maps and dead reckoning, helped along with a liberal sprinkling of AI fairy dust, to arrive at a fix within a few minutes. Now, I’m reflexively skeptical of all things AI, so I’m not holding my breath; this sounds like a modern-day Etak Navigator with machine learning.

A joint project between Australia and India, involving RMIT University and space firm SkyKraft, is exploring setting up a regional navigation system based on low-earth orbit satellites.

GPS on the Moon: I’ve reported previously on the idea that Earth-orbiting GNSS satellites could be used for lunar navigation. The tech company GMV announced results of field testing for the LUPIN project, which aims to bring navigation to the moon based on lunar-orbiting satellites. Neither the press release nor the coverage (Engadget, Reuters) is particularly revealing, though.

My, that’s a lot of vague press releases.

Map of the Month Club Launches

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A series of thumbnails showing various map products available from the Map of the Month Club. Nicked from Daniel Huffman’s page.
Daniel Huffman

On behalf of the Independent Map Artists (previously), Daniel Huffman is launching an experiment: a map of the month club.

For a one-time subscription fee of $200, folks can get new mappy goods sent to them each month for five months (so, $40 per month). People can explore items from multiple artists, and I hope it will help bring new attention to my colleagues—support that these individual mappers might not otherwise get if they were not part of a group. Picking out individual interesting maps can be hard, so we’re making it easy for people to receive an assortment.

That fee includes shipping. The product page lists some of what the subscription is likely to include. It’s a one-time deal, a single five-month package, for now, but may continue if it proves successful. Signups close on June 15.

A Hand-drawn Map of the British Isles

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Mark Esper

Mark Esper spent one and a half years drawing a map of Great Britain, Ireland and the dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands). He describes how he did it in this blog post. “In its finished form, this map contains over 280 cities, as well as a countless number of castles, ruins, and other buildings scattered over the map.  All 21 National Parks are labeled, 12 different languages are present: English, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, French, Auregnais, Serquiais, Cornish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and all major bodies of water are labeled.” He’s selling it as a 24×36-inch print. “In the future, I plan on continuing to draw countries, states, continents and other regions of the world in a similar level of detail.”

Adventures in Unpreparedness

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Two recent cautionary tales about the risks of going forth without proper navigational tools. First, I’m a bit confused about this BBC News report, which cites what3words as coming through when a boat broke down in the Channel Islands area:

[The rescue service] said although the vessel had no working on board GPS and an inoperative VHS radio, crews were able to establish a position using the location app “what3words”. […]

The coastguard said an operator was able to translate the vessel’s what3words location from a mobile phone into latitude and longitude.

Now hold on: if you’re able to use what3words on a mobile phone to get a fix on your location, it’s because your phone has a built-in GPS, so it’s not like they didn’t have access to GPS. More likely is that they couldn’t figure out how to get lat/long coordinates to rescue services in any other way. (It’s a long press on your location in either Apple Maps and Google Maps, but to be fair, that might not be obvious or easy to figure out for the first time in the middle of a crisis.)

Meanwhile, an unprepared hiker without a map who got lost in New Hampshire will likely be billed for the cost of his rescue.

Trump’s ‘Cartographic Compulsion’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Politico looks at what they call Donald Trump’s “cartographic compulsion”—the ways that maps have turned up in his political career over and over, from his use of election maps to Sharpie-gate in his first term, to his musings on Canada, Greenland and Gaza, plus his propensity to rename things, in the early days of his second. That his obsession with Canada and Greenland might be chalked up to how big they appear on a map—especially a Mercator projection of the world—comes as little surprise. Kenneth Field covered much of the same territory, at least as far as his first term is concerned, in this 2019 piece; for my previous coverage of this nonsense see posts tagged Trump.

A Globe Safety Tip from xkcd

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe, “Globe Safety,” xkcd, 7 May 2025.

In Wednesday’s xkcd comic, Replogle has apparently been taken over by mad scientists. I’m having a hard time resisting the urge to explain the joke (I doubt many of my readers are physicists, but then I’m not one either). But in a weird Einsteinian way Randall is doing with globes and mass what Carroll, Borges and Eco did with maps and space: assume a 1:1 ratio between the map and the mapped.

No Gulf Is Safe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

One consolation to all this “Gulf of America” nonsense was that, as something done by executive order, it would be just as easy to undo when all of this is over. Was. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would codify the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” into law—not only requiring federal agencies to comply with the change, but once signed into law it would take another statute to undo the change. The bill is now off to the Senate. CNN, Guardian.

Meanwhile, another gulf is in Donald Trump’s sights. He’s apparently planning to announce that the U.S. will refer to the Persian Gulf as the Gulf of Arabia or Arabian Gulf during his trip to the Middle East next week: CNN, Guardian. The move is guaranteed (and possibly intended) to piss off the Iranians, who have been touchy about any attempts to use Arabian Gulf instead of Persian Gulf for decades (previously: 1, 2).

Which one’s next, do you think? Or will he go full nuclear and take sides on the Sea of Japan/East Sea dispute?

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?; ‘Gulf of America’: Compliance and Resistance; A ‘Gulf of America’ Roundup; ‘Gulf of America’ Update: AP Sues White House Officials; If You Thought There Would Be Nothing More to Report About the ‘Gulf of America’ Nonsense, You Were Mistaken.

Empty Land Doesn’t Vote (and Neither Do Kangaroos): What Australian and Canadian Election Maps Do (and Don’t Do) About It

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Both Australia and Canada had federal elections last week. Both countries have overwhelmingly urban populations (Australia 87%, Canada 82%) and vast tracts of sparsely populated territory, which means that strictly geographical election maps of both countries suffer from the “empty land doesn’t vote” problem. But that doesn’t seem to stop such maps from being used.

As I posted about the maps of the last Canadian federal election in 2019 (1, 2, 3), most static election maps in Canada use the Lambert projection, whereas online maps generally use Web Mercator; cartograms and such aren’t really a thing. I suspect that this is a combination of the Lambert being very familiar to Canadians (it’s pretty much the default projection for static maps) whereas a cartogram isn’t: it’s easier and less disorienting to use the Lambert with inset maps, or zoom in on Web Mercator. Canadians aren’t dumb: we know that there are lots of seats in and around Toronto and Montreal, and that hardly anyone lives in Nunavut, and even zooming all the way out in Web Mercator won’t fool us. Besides, with four parties capable of winning expansive rural or northern seats, the urban-rural split isn’t quite as binary as it is elsewhere, so the urgency of correcting the map by showing votes or seats—the need to say land doesn’t vote—isn’t quite there.

The Guardian (screenshot)

Maps Mania has a roundup of some media maps of the Canadian election results. Jens von Bergmann crunches the riding-by-riding results with some maps and visualizations—including an animation that morphs between a geographic map and a Dorling cartogram.

Geographic maps also tend to be used for Australian election results, to the point that in 2022 ABC News (the Australian one) ran a piece saying that the election map was lying to you (previously). Once again, Maps Mania has a roundup of Australian election maps this time around: ABC goes full cartogram, using British-style hex maps showing results and vote swing; The Australian sticks with geographical maps; and The Guardian toggles between geographical and “exaggerated” maps that enlarge urban constituencies while maintaining Australia’s overall shape, which I find an interesting compromise.

Fantasy Mapmaking Tools

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve been making note of procedural fantasy map generators for a while now. These are tools that generate a map of an imaginary landscape, town or dungeon, mostly (but not necessarily exclusively) for the purposes of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The latest to come to my attention is Watabou’s Procgen Arcana, a set of free-to-use map generators by Oleg Dolya.

Meanwhile, for those who draw their fantasy maps digitally, but without a procedural map generator, there has been more than one project to extract symbols and signs from real old maps for use as stamps and brushes in, say, Illustrator or Photoshop. I mentioned David Stark’s library of map elements, taken from a 17th-century map, last year. The author K. M. Alexander (previously) has put together a number of brush sets based on old maps, allowing users to “create fantasy maps that can add a touch of historical authenticity to any project.” The latest is based on an 18th-century map of Bohemia. He also has packs of compass roses, sea monsters and other cartouches, as well as typefaces. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. Free for personal and commercial use.

I have notes on an article about fantasy maps in the digital age, in which I’d discuss the development of maps from entirely hand-drawn to digital to algorithmic. I’ve been meaning to write it since before the pandemic. I wonder if it’s all out of date by now. Possibly not.

Preserving the Maps of Karen Wynn Fonstad

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wisconsin Public Radio takes up the story of fantasy cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad (1945–2005), best known for her Atlas of Middle Earth and other fantasy-world atlases. “Fonstad passed away 20 years ago. Now, her husband and her son—both geographers themselves—have embarked on a new quest: to digitize her original maps and find an archive to house them.” Her son spent his spring break week getting as many of her maps as possible scanned at the Robinson Map Library, a task he described as barely scratching the surface.

This follows her belated obituary in the New York Times earlier this year (previously): she may be, finally, having a posthumous moment.

Daniel Huffman’s Asymmetric Monstrosity

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Daniel Huffman’s map of the world using his 'asymmetric monstrosity' composite map projection.
Daniel Huffman

Foreshadowed on Mastodon in January, the horror that Daniel Huffman has created is now upon us. Behold the Asymmetric Monstrosity projection, an equal-area—yes! every part of it—projection that grafts together pieces of the Equal Earth, cylindrical equal-area, three pieces of Mollweide and five sinusoidals (each on different central meridians) into a patchwork atrocity with an uneven graticule and interrupted labels. Stop twitching long enough to read Daniel’s explanation as to why this was perpetrated:

First off, it was fun and interesting for me to think about how projections can be glued together. This map is a Frankenstein’s Monster–like creation, but it doesn’t leave anything out, nor does it have mismatches at the joints. Landmasses fit together seamlessly at the boundaries of any given transition zone between projections, because with a little math and the right tools, you can make two projections (of the right variety) match each other at a given location.

The other goal is to educate, through entertainment. It looks funny, thus drawing attention; and in doing so I hope it will jar people into realizing how distorted all projections are. This projection is just as valid as any other, in terms of how faithfully it represents the earth. It’s equal-area, showing everything in proper size proportion. It has interruptions, sure, but so do many others. It is a composite, yes, but so are other projections.

I think it’s in the same vein as those “south-up” world maps that you can buy, or ones centered on the Pacific. Many audiences would find them unfamiliar, but the maps use their uniqueness to make people realize that there’s really no right way to portray the world, and that our conventions are frequently arbitrary.

It’s available for free download at pretty high resolution, or you can buy it as a print, and while Daniel doesn’t actually expect anyone to do it, honestly, why not?