Overlooked Mapping Highlights from 2025-Part 2

Here are some more mapping highlights from the last year:

 5. Silk World War II escape maps

This is from an episode of a podcast called What’s Your Map featuring former cartographic researcher in the UK Ministry of Defence Barbara Bond

Top secret British intelligence agency the MI9 produced a series of maps on silk (and later rayon) designed to help soldiers evade or escape from capture. This map is of Danzig (Gdansk), where the Vistula River enters the Baltic Sea.

Escapees used their knowledge of these areas to direct others to Swedish ships where they would be safe to escape to that neutral country. Maps were printed on fabrics such as silk, which could be stitched into clothing or kept in a pocket and did not make any noise when folding or unfolding them. The maps showed where coal is loaded onto Swedish ships, the arc of light to be avoided, ditches where people could hide and the network of railroad tracks that would need to be traversed. More on these maps and on Bond’s career can be heard on the podcast.

6.  Mapping the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole

WhereWiki allows the user to enter any Wikipedia page and see all of its hyperlinked connections in any given area. When I first saw this, the keyboard player for the Cure had just died so I chose the band’s page and the area around Crawley, UK* where they were formed.

A click on any point brings you to the referenced page. The green dots are locations and the blue are people or groups.

*You can choose the default area (where you are now) or just about any other place on earth and you will likely find plenty of geographic links to whatever page you chose. 

-via Maps Mania

 

7. Smell Map of the Minnesota State Fair

Jake Steinberg, a cartographer and journalist for the Minnesota Star Tribune created a map of the smells of the State Fair. You can see the full map and article here but you might hit their paywall

8. Inundation Map of the Town of Guadalupe (1819)

Guadalupe, now part of Mexico City suffered a major flood in 1819. The entire area was in the basin of former Lake Texcoco and floods were a frequent occurrence

-Maps via Pedro Zurita Zaragoza on that great mapping site known as LinkedIn.

The map shows inundated areas in aqua tones. Two waterfalls shown at the bottom are breaches of the Guadalupe River.

Text in the legend describes how canoes were needed in the plaza and a note at the bottom states that the floodwaters receded “by virtue of the wise measures of His Excellency (the viceroy), thus preventing its spread to the capital.” Plans to drain the area took almost a century after this to be implemented and this was largely responsible for drying the entire region.

9. 12 Foot Wool Map Needs a New Home

 A group of up to 18 women in County Wicklow began making a 12 x11 foot knitted and crocheted map of Ireland in 2019. 

As reported by The Journal (Ireland). Most of the project took place at Carnew Community Care, a centre for older people. Now that it is finished they are looking for a place where it can be publicly displayed. This was from July. I have not been able to find any follow up on whether they’ve found a location for it.

 -via The Map Room

 

 

Overlooked Mapping Highlights from 2025-Part 1

Many people are putting together their best of lists for 2025. I don’t have time to stay on top of all map content so rather than a best of, here is a list of inetersting map-related posts I’ve missed this year. Due to content length restrictions, I will break this into two separate posts so here is Part 1.

1. Overthinking about vertical writing of Hangul labels on maps - Here is a wonky problem I have never considered in my cartographic career. Hangul is the Korean alphabet. In a system that can be written vertically or horizontally, how do you orient your text on the vertical (north-south) roads? Author Hanbyul Jo surveyed her Korean friends for a preference. When no clear preference emerged, she turned to Korea’s main map services, who approach the problem differently.

   
   
   I reformatted the maps above from the original post for ease of comparison. It may be a little difficult for westerners to interpret but you can clearly see how the number 12 is written differently. Next, she turned to paper maps with the conclusion that maps that mixed Hangul with Chinese characters tended to label these road vertically, while maps in pure Hangul went horizontal. 

The map above (Seoul City Map -Seongji Publishing, 2024) appears to be in the latter category. Mainly I’m showing it because it’s a nice looking map. While the author remained on the fence she considers maps with the vertical text “a precious example of two writing styles naturally mixed together”.

2. A North Korean Atlas

While on the subject of Korea, Miguel from A Cartographer’s Tale acquired an electronic copy of a North Korean atlas from the early 2000’s. It is fascinating. The narrative is that the Communists won the Korean War and the country is united, as in this physical map of Korea.

Maps of other countries are shown in various colors but they chose gray for “enemy” countries such as the United States and Japan. Here is the United States, because it’s the country I know best. What are the red lines? Roads, railroads or just random lines connecting cities? They appear to loosely follow rail lines. Also, the city locations are odd. Note the major city in central Oregon, Perhaps that’s Portland but if so the location is way off. Is the furthest Northeast dot also Portland? The text is different.

The ocean current maps are nice though a bit hard to follow.

You can see many more of these maps at A Cartographers’s Tale.

3. A Sketch of Isle Royale

Daniel Huffman, who has always been generous about sharing his mapmaking techniques, made his first National Park map. It is a beautiful sketch of Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

The map uses a plan-oblique view, a hybrid between a bird’s-eye style view and an overhead (typical of most maps) view. If you’re interested in technique or want to buy a copy you can do so here.

4. The Sahara Desert and its Lakes

From that well known map site, Instagram comes this map showing northern Africa when it was a much more humid place, full of rivers and lakes. Aside from a few oasis towns, Lake Chad is about the only surviving water body and it is drying up.

This map came from Alex Vicente Conde who posts “bizarre maps” under @egm_bizarros. Translated into English from the author’s text: “This is what North Africa and the Sahara looked like 8,000 years ago at the height of the African Humid Period. 🙂 Subfossils of fish and other creatures that inhabited these lakes can still be found there today.”

More highlights to come, probably next week.

The Battle of Trenton

 249 years ago today, at a low ebb of the Revolutionary War for the Americans, George Washington set out a plan to turn the tide of the war by making a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers in Trenton. On Christmas night the general, 2,400 soldiers and 18 cannons crossed the icy Delaware River by moonlight. The troops approached Trenton from two directions and surrounded the Hessians.

image via American Battlefield Trust

The resounding victory helped save the Revolutionary cause and create momentum towards winning the Battle of Princeton a week later. As a child in Bucks County Pennsylvania, I have vague memories of getting up early on a cold day to watch the Reenactment at nearby Washington’s Crossing on Christmas Day. 

More on the battle and video content can be seen here on the PBS American Revolution’s web site.

Mood of the USA Heading into 2026

 Well. it’s been quite a 2025 here in the U S of A. America sure is great again. I have surveyed the mood of the country as we head into a new year and created this map. It is based on robust data sources such as: 

• Anecdotes

• Conversations with random people

• Stuff seen on the internet

  and most importantly…

• my own personal prejudices

  
  Have a great holiday season!
   

While I was busy with the 30 Day Map Challenge last month, two new books from Belt Publishing's 50 Maps series were released. This two-city release reminded me that I also missed some other releases since I last covered this series. Thanks to the generosity of cartographer Andy Woodruff most of this post will feature Cincinnati.  

“editor Nick Swartsell and cartographer Andy Woodruff present over fifty ways of looking at the Queen City, from its early roadways and Indigenous earthworks to its shifting neighborhood borders. A visualization of relative population density can tell one story, and one showing where jobs are clustered tells another. New maps with up-to-date data sit beside historical maps that show things like exactly how communities were razed to make room for highways.“ You are invited to “find every place you can get Cincinnati chili, the location of every public stairway, and where the infamous Cincy traffic is worst.“ Here are some maps courtesy of Andy.

Above are the city’s inclines, and a beautiful representation of the area’s topography that gave rise to them. The numbers show hills with scenic views of the city.

This map shows the city’s municipal islands with a nice legend. Columbus has even more of these.

In addition to these inholdings are the city’s “other” downtowns; the neighborhood business districts. Here are some of them.

Columbus in 50 Maps has also just been released.

“Columbus is a place perpetually in search of an identity. Once called a “cow town,” it is now a sprawling metropolitan area and home to the behemoth Ohio State University. How can one best represent the city, in all its complications and contradictions?”

Edited by Brent Warren with cartography from Vicky Johnson-Dahl, it shows “things that are inherently Columbus, from ComFest to the present and former locations of the city’s iconic arches.“ It also offers “maps that offer surprising ways of looking at the city“. Unfortunately there’s not much I can share with you as Belt and Arcadia Publishing don’t share images of what’s inside. Without stealing from the book, all I have are these low resolution images from Amazon. The first one shows Columbus’s municipal islands.

Two other books briefly reached my attention but I never got around to buying or reviewing them. For now I will just mention Pittsburgh, “one of America’s most consistently surprising cities“, 

and the Great Lakes, the only regional, non-urban map in this series.

“The largest freshwater system on Earth, like you’ve never seen it before.“

Again, not much in the way of maps I can show but I found this nice map of the cryptids (lake monsters) of the Great Lakes, via the Milwaukee Record.

 

Biomes for Kids

This lovely map of the earth’s biomes is part of the Maps for Kids poster series by R J Andrews and Robert Simmon.

In this blog post, Andrews discusses the process of making this poster from the inspiration of an Erwin Raisz atlas to the full production details. There’s even a flow chart showing the steps, software, and file formats used. While the above image is not very high resolution he provides this nice detailed image.

The authors do a great job making distinguishable colors from a limited green to brown palette. I also love how the legend uses temperature and humidity symbols to indicate each biome’s characteristics.

They also did a very nice job of giving life to the oceans with a low contrast bathymetry gradient. The original Raisz atlas only had two globes. This made Antarctica, New Zealand and much of Australia invisible so they added a third one to complete the picture*. I also like how they rotated the final three globes a bit to avoid them looking like “Mickey Mouse ears”.

*though if you’re Senegalese, you might not feel well represented.

30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 26-30

Here lies the final installment of this year’s 30 Day Map Challenge. November was busy with the last 3 weekends out of town, a brief illness at the end and a new (dog) family member. I was not sure I would be able to finish and while I did this last batch of maps are ones that could use more work.

Day 26 - Transport

This unsatisfying map took several forms before arriving at its current state. The railroads, ports and airports came from the Natural Earth dataset that was the subject of Day 22. I tried just showing railroads with no other context but the result was dull. The most used shipping lanes were added from Marine Vessel Traffic. I wanted to represent them in a way that was clear, but also fuzzy enough to show the many variations of the routes. It’s interesting how the ship traffic largely bypasses Cuba. This map was revisited for Day 30 but without much more success.

Day 27 - Boundaries

Boundaries were drawn from Encyclopedia Brittanica. The flag idea was fun but ultimately does not add much. I’m not sure how those two areas of international waters came to be. They almost mimic the 200 mile exclusive economic zones but the distance is much further.

Day 28 - Black

A black theme for Black Friday. This was fun to make and came out nicely but after seeing what others posted for this theme, I may have been able to do something more interesting.

Day 29 - Raster

These last two days were particularly difficult as I was ill and also traveling. The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone appears every summer when nutrient rich water, mainly from agriculture enters the Gulf depleting aquatic life of oxygen. The zone’s size varies from year to year but it is always large. The raster image was taken from NASA and only the land part was altered to make it stand out more.

Day 30 - Makeover

I almost didn't get this one done. In fact it really isn’t done. I had the idea to take the map from Day 26, and make it antique style like my Day 24 Portolan Chart map (from this post). I removed airports and thinned out the railroads. Unfortunately it looks too much like the portolan chart map. Time constraints left me unable to improve it.

Well, it’s been fun and I’ve learned at least a few things about the Gulf of Mexico and maybe you did too. Thanks for tuning in to my obsessive compulsions for a full month. Ultimately my tiny protest against the weak “obey in advance” stance of most map companies will be meaningless but it felt good to get it out there. I will never use that other stupid name, if I can help it. Maybe others will join me in that at least.

How does Gulf of Cuba sound? Not great either.