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Membership Drive

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
13 / 22

We interrupt The Map Room for a pledge break.

As you may know, I’ve wanted The Map Room to go ad-free for some time. But much as I’d like to get rid of them, Google ads represent something like 60 percent of my website revenue. I launched a Patreon page last year, and I’m deeply gratified by the support I’ve received from my subscribers, but to replace my ad revenue I need there to be more of you.

So I’m launching a campaign this month. Here’s what’s happening:

I’m deactivating Google ads for the entire month of March. If enough new people join my Patreon as paid members by the end of the month, the ads will stay off for good. The goal is to reach a total of 22 paid members by March 31—The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. That number would represent roughly what I’ve been making, on average, from Google ads in recent years—an admittedly modest amount, but it would enable me to walk away from the ad ecosystem completely and still pay the bills.

Continue reading “Membership Drive” →

Multispectral Imaging Comes to a 15th-Century Mappamundi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Leardo mappamundi, 1452.

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is bringing in the Lazarus Project to carry out multispectral imaging on a 1452 mappamundi by Giovanni Leardo. This is the oldest map in the collection of the American Geographical Society Library, which is housed at UWM. The Lazarus Project is a portable laboratory that brings multispectral imaging to the artifact, rather than the other way around (artifacts being fragile and all, and the Leardo mappamundi is no exception).

“It’s fascinating to watch for the first 10 minutes,” [Lazarus Project board member Chet] Van Duzer said. “After that, it’s like watching paint dry.” The map will be scanned with at least a dozen frequencies of light, and probably more, ranging from infrared through visible light up to ultraviolet. But in the months after taking the original images, “the real magic is in processing,” Van Duzer said. Different combinations of images at different strengths may reveal faded writing that used various pigments of ink.

Previously: Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart.

Google Maps Has a Lot of User-Contributed Imagery in the Wrong Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geography Now was poking around northern Chad in Google Maps and came across a bunch of user-contributed 360-degree images of business interiors that had nothing to do with Chad: they were associated with businesses in Brazil, India, Hungary and so forth. I’m inclined to think these were geocoding glitches or user errors, since the Gulf of Guinea (home of Null Island) seems to have a particularly bountiful crop of them, but I’m spotting shop and schoolroom interiors in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean too.

FEMA Risk Maps Purged

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The current U.S. administration’s map vandalism isn’t limited to a certain international body of water. Maps Mania reports that FEMA’s online flood and risk maps have gone offline as part of the ongoing purge of everything related to climate change. One map, the Future Risk Index, has been salvaged by independent engineers.

New Research on the Tabula Peutingeriana

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A portion of the Tabula Peutingeriana focusing on southern Italy, I think.
A portion of the Tabula Peutingeriana

A conference next month on current research on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 13th-century copy of what is supposed to be a 4th- or 5th-century diagram of the Roman road network. That research includes UV imaging to draw out inscriptions that may have faded over the centuries (another example) and linguistic analyses to determine the provenance of the inscriptions (are they copied from the original or contemporary to the copy)? Page in German, conference in Germany.

Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

There’s talk of ads coming to Apple Maps—at least, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility—which, online consternation notwithstanding, is something Google has had forever—when you get right down to it, Google Maps was a way to provide location based search results, and search results were always monetized with ads. Apple started out using its services as loss leaders for its pricey hardware products; now those services are expected to make money themselves.

Google Maps: Rounded Corners and Live Updates

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

When not getting into trouble over which name of a certain international body of water to show to which users, Google continues to turn out smaller updates around the corners of their map services. No seriously, the corners: they’re more rounded in the Google Maps app now. Also, Google Maps supports Android’s Live Updates, viz., your ETA shows up in the status bar (which I admit is neat).

‘Gulf of America’ Update: AP Sues White House Officials

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On Friday the Associated Press sued three White House officials on First and Fifth Amendment grounds, calling the White House’s barring of AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One for refusing to adopt the “Gulf of America” moniker for the Gulf of Mexico. The AP is calling the White House’s action an unconstitutional retaliation against protected free speech: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.” I spotted a copy of the complaint (PDF) on PetaPixel.

Update, 25 Feb: A federal judge denied the AP’s request for emergency relief on Monday, citing the lack of irreparable harm, and set a hearing for March 20. The judge, a Trump appointee, did describe the ban as “discriminatory” and “problematic.” BBC News, CNN.

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.

A ‘Gulf of America’ Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Two long reads on Apple, Google and the Gulf of America nonsense. Miguel García looks the history of places with multiple names, and how Google Maps in particular has handled them, using the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin, Monte Cervino) as an uncontentious example. John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog has covered the Apple side of the tech world for more than two decades, has a bracing, no-punches-pulled take that covers the utter lunacy of the name change, Google’s and Apple’s history of obeisance to autocratic regimes and the excessive compliance involved in showing “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, even Fox News and Newsmax are among the 40 news organizations who’ve signed on to a White House Correspondents Association letter protesting the White House’s blacklisting of the Associated Press for refusing to comply with the “Gulf of America” edict.

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.

‘Gulf of America’: Compliance and Resistance

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from Apple Maps, showing how the Gulf of Mexico is labelled as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).
Apple Maps (screenshot)

Compliance

While it was reported that Apple would comply with the “Gulf of America” renaming, I wasn’t sure what Apple would do outside the U.S.; now it appears that it will follow Google’s lead and show both names. Above is what I see in Canada; I wonder what Apple is showing Mexican users.

Meanwhile, Axios, citing its mainly U.S. audience, is adopting “Gulf of America” (HuffPost, The Hill, The Wrap) but had this to say about the White House blacklisting the Associated Press: “At the same time, the government should never dictate how any news organization makes editorial decisions. The AP and all news organizations should be free to report as they see fit. This is a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy.”

Resistance

The name change is broadly unpopular and people are finding ways to resist it. If “Gulf of America” becomes a way to signal compliance with the regime, it looks like “Gulf of Mexico,” even on a t-shirt (which I’ve seen already), will signal noncompliance.

Bryce Bostwick has released a Chrome extension that restores “Gulf of Mexico” to Google Maps. As he says, “There are a lot of scary executive orders being issued right now. This is not one of the most important ones. But it might be the easiest to defy.” This apparently took some reverse engineering, as he explains in a 24-minute video.

MapQuest—remember MapQuest?—has not as yet complied with the Trump executive order; in fact, they’ve decided to have some fun with it, with a tongue-in-cheek tool that allows you to rename the Gulf yourself.

A user-generated map of the Gulf of Mexico from Mapquest’s gulfof.mapquest.com tool, labelling the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Compliance in Advance.
MapQuest (gulfof.mapquest.com)

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?

Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Associated Press is now banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One indefinitely for refusing to toe the Trump line on “Gulf of America.” The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple thinks this is a hill worth dying on: “On this particular hill, we have the freedom to make editorial choices without government intervention and manipulation.” On the other hand, The Atlantic’s Gilad Edelman thinks this was the wrong fight to pick: “A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from ‘legally questionable’ to ‘plainly unconstitutional.’ The ‘Gulf of America’ rebrand is not one of them.”

Making you make me shows everyone who you are. There’s something to be said for that.

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.

GeoFeeds

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Nearly 20 years ago, James Fee launched Planet Geospatial, which aggregated all the GIS, geospatial and map blogs into a single feed. It’s been gone for a while, and recently Bill Dollings messaged James about bringing something like it back. As Bill writes,

Blogs (and I’ll lump Substack into that category) are where the good stuff happens, but they are so scattered in 2025. The simple act of aggregating a bunch of blogs into a single feed that I could point an RSS reader to was incredible informative during my early/mid career. James doesn’t get enough credit for the multi-year labor of love that was Planet Geospatial.

Enter GeoFeeds, “a single, unified feed-of-feeds from geo-related/adjacent blogs, acting as a one-stop shop of content.” There are both HTML and RSS versions, plus a list of included blogs (yrs trly included).

Update 15 Feb: New URL at geofeeds.me. Links updated.