Follow up on the U.S. Africa Map Fiasco

I recently highlighted the embarrassingly bad map shown by the U.S. State Department in a post. The American Geographical Society just posted their response with the title State Department Africa Map Fiasco: Geography Matters. So Does Africa.The article was written by Dr. Lee Schwarz, former Geographer of the U.S. Department of State - a position also know as the GOTUS (Geographer of the United States). This position has been empty for a while. I just want to highlight a few quotes and this map from the BBC, that I had not seen before. It does a good job of showing exactly where the mistakes are.

The article states that while maps occasionally have errors “the fact that this map made it to the light of day may be more reflective of failures and shortcomings in our institutions charged with representing U.S. foreign policy than a cartographer’s slip of the pen.” Continuing “It points to a breakdown in basic oversight and, more troublingly, an assumption that no one would notice—or that it wouldn’t matter if they did.“ While Africa’s well known problems may be the first impressions westerners have it is also “home to over 1.5 billion people, thousands of languages, critical mineral resources, and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. It is a continent central to global supply chains, climate policy, technological innovation, public health, migration, and international security. Africans are pioneering digital financial services, producing globally recognized entrepreneurs, expanding renewable energy, negotiating free-trade agreements, and flexing their muscles in international institutions.” 

There’s much more to read in the article plus a call for posters for their upcoming National Geography Awareness Week symposium Geography 2050: Africa Shaping Tomorrow.

An American Mosaic

Yesterday’s New York Times showed a big map on the front cover with several pages of other maps from U.S. census data. An American Mosaic shows how people identify their ancestry. 

Image via New York Times - I’ve manipulated it to add the legend. 

There are maps that accompany the article as well as an interactive map where you can find dig deeply into any area of the country. Here is greater Atlanta with a census tract in the southeast part of the city highlighted.

Here is the colorful southern California mosaic with a “Mexican” Santa Catalina Island.

One interesting aspect of the interactive algorithm is how when you’re zoomed way out the less common ethnicities show up,

but then disappear as you zoom in favoring the more common ones.

I have not fully taken the time to appreciate all of these yet. I would like to point out the map that annoys me though.

How do descendants of the British Isles get to be called “American”? Perhaps they self identify as such but so do I. My ancestors came here to escape persecution in Eastern Europe and were happy to shed their Russian or Ukrainian or Polish identities to consider themselves American. People from the British Isles were not the first ones here if anyone need reminding of that. Anyway I’ll get off my soapbox and end with this map from the article showing the national origins as they were in 1776. Enjoy exploring here.

U.S. Map Mislabels Every African Country

 At a global AIDS conference the U.S. State Department showed this map of Africa. 

-map via Reuters, reformatted to better fit the page.

Every country is incorrectly located and indicated with ridiculous shapes. Nigeria, where the US has troops deployed is shown in the middle of the Sahara desert and about twice its actual size. 

The Reuters article mentions a visible artificial intelligence watermark indicating it was made with OpenAI. It does bear similarities with other AI-generated maps, particularly the bulbous Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire mashup that points to southwestern Africa and the Cameroon dot going nowhere. The color scheme is awful too. A perfect example of bad AI meeting geographic illiteracy in an incompetent, uncaring government. 

Where is Jimothy?

At a recent meeting, it came up that someone was looking at mapping Jimothy. As someone who is blissfully unaware of most social media trends, my first question was who? Obviously the next question was, is there a map? Of course there is!

For those as unaware as I was Jimothy is a raccoon with an unverified spinal condition who roams around Seattle and stares back at people until they’re uncomfortable. He’s had songs, tattoos and memes in his honor. Next week he will be celebrated at a Seattle Mariners game. Here he is napping in the Ballard area.

The problem with this site is that there are only 4 sightings reported and all on the same week. However, you can add your own.

I have an additional sighting; at the weather desk.

Finally here is an updated Seattle neighborhood map from Jill Avey on LinkedIn.

Mapping Illegal Dump Sites

Way back in 1990 I went to Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) to volunteer for a mapping project. We mapped illegal dump sites in the Krka River valley. Unfortunately I don’t have any of those maps now, but here in Philadelphia they are doing a similar citizen mapping initiative as documented in the Inquirer.

Participants gathered at an event last week to mark up paper maps just like we did 36 years ago. Here is a better look at one of the maps.

-via Philadelphia Inquirer

The event was organized by the Trash Academy who also keep an interactive digital map of these sites with clickable content.

Here’s the citywide picture.

From their web page:

“Earning it the title of ‘Filthadelphia’, the trash and litter that defaces the streets of our city is an apt metaphor for the systematic devaluation of underserved communities.”

Illustrated Mapmaking Contest - 2026

 The Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine recently posted their 2026 Illustrated Mapmaking Competition results. These are maps made by school children in Maine in the 4th-6th grade range. First prize went to The Broken Islands by Jacob S., a 6th grader at Brunswick Junior High School.

Most of these maps are of fantasy lands, some from literature and other purely made up. I don’t have a strong familiarity with today’s children’s literature or movies so I am probably missing some of the references. Here are some of my favorites from the honorable mentions.

Rough Ridge Mountain Bike Trails by Foster B. of Montville.

Ipad Isles by Aster B. of Brunswick

I love how apps such as the weather and health are classified as boring.

The Land of Three Colors by Erin Q. of Brunswick (a town very well represented here)

This is really three color palettes but I’m not going to get too uptight about that.

Pine Tree State by Darcy Q. also of Brunswick.

An actual place! Nicely done!

Finally, just in time for lunch, Pizza Island by Katie Cahoon of York.

You can see all of the maps here.

Cancer Maps

Dr. Jospeh Fraumeni, a pioneering researcher of epidemiology, died a couple of weeks ago. Among his achievements were the first maps of cancer deaths in the United States. Here are two early maps.

These maps eventually became an atlas of cancer mortality published by the National Cancer Institute. You can see the entire atlas here but be warned, it’s huge and may take a long time to load.

The atlas maps begin with overall maps, broken down by race and gender before breaking them down further by types of cancer.

There is a bias in that there are many more maps showing white people than black and no other races (or genders) are accounted for. Anyway it is interesting to see the male/female contrasts here-above is white male, below white female.

One difference that really stands out is “cancer alley” in Louisiana. Are males contracting cancer at work, where presumably there are fewer females employed in these chemical industries? Similar disparities appear in coastal parts of Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas. Here are the maps for blacks. Notice the they do not have the finer county breakdown, nor is there data for the earlier 1950-69 time period.

All of these maps show a similar pattern of lower rates in the southeast and southwest. You can see more, including interactive and story maps at gis.cancer.gov. Here is a sample from the urban-rural disparity story map. I manipulated this image slightly so the legend and map appear together.

This quote from the gis.cancer site summarizes Dr Fraumeni's ideas that led to developing these maps. “The spatial context in which people live is an important factor in cancer etiology and outcomes influencing a person’s risk of developing cancer, accessibility and quality of preventive and treatment services, and quality of life after surviving cancer.“

Skpe a Scientist

Skype a Scientist is an organization that matches scientists with classrooms across the United States. Their annual United States of Science Challenge seeks to fill a certain number of classrooms in each state with donations. This map is a bit, ummm, unscientific maybe but it shows empty bubbles as classrooms waiting to be matched (?)

I’m not sure what the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty is doing inside two of the three Wyoming bubbles, or for that matter why Wyoming only has three bubbles. He’s also hiding in small bubbles in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Also, the colors only seem to exist as some kind of regional differentiation. Most states appear to be full but there are still opportunities within most regions of the country. 

Maps for the U.S. Semiquincentennial

Semiquincentennial is a mouthful. So much that my spell check doesn’t believe it’s a word. The Bicentennial, which I’m old enough to remember well was easier to pronounce, and celebrate. I won’t make any grand statements, instead here are some fun, interesting or alternative maps of the United States to celebrate its 250th birthday.

I’ll start with the original inhabitants of this land. This is one of the maps of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, previously featured here in this post.

Tribal Map 2000

You can see the whole map here.

License Plate Map (one of many)

-via Photowall

If the states were based on watersheds: The United Watershed States of America

-via Next City

The United States drawn as Fifty States with Equal Population

This is an attempt from Neil Freeman to make the Electoral College more fair - good luck either way that! More here.

Speculative fiction - USA in the Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle is a 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II. Map from Wikimedia Commons. It looks like Long Island might be safe. I’m not sure where some of these oddly specific boundary jogs come from.

A less depressing speculative map (unless you hate rail) - Sci fi coast to coast high speed rail network. 

-via Greater Greater Washington

Finally, for dessert here is the Most Popular Pie by State

-via Holiday Calendar

Cool Spaces

Europe has been very hot lately. The City of London created a cool spaces map last year highlighting indoor spaces, water fountains (the small blue dots), shade, and cooler areas of the city. 

The interactive map lets you choose what you want to see, filter for only air conditioned spaces and click points for more information. 

If you have your own venue, you can register it with the city to be on the map.

Here is a striking heat map from The Evening Standard, showing London’s hottest and coolest spots, from 2022 data. They are remarkably close together. Stay cool!

Atlanta Soccer Map

Veazy Studio, previously featured here for the ATL Rap Map, has a new Atlanta Soccer Map just in time for that city’s World Cup hosting duties. 

The map took “just under 100 hours to create” and he does a convincing job of selling Atlanta as a soccer destination. Here is a detail of the east downtown area showing stores, fields and bars where people go to watch games - assuming FIFA allows them to be shown.

There’s also a list of Atlanta’s soccer “culture makers“

Bonus map section (!!!!!!!!) - my sister alerted me to Veazy’s Barbecue Map, which is how I discovered the soccer map.

The above image is not very readable but here is a detail from the Costco Connection.

The Mysterious "Frenchman's Map" of Williamsburg

While visiting family in Virginia this week, we made a trip to Colonial Williamsburg (CW), a good place to go during the 250th anniversary of the United States. While there I came across a cartographic mystery. The “Frenchman’s Map” was said to be instrumental in the restoration of the colonial village. The black and white version above is from Wikimedia commons. 

Here is a piece of a colorized version of the map that is for sale at the CW bookstore. 

There is a lot of detail but very little explanatory text, leading many to believe that this is merely a draft version with the final version yet undiscovered. This and the following conjectures are largely from In Search of the Frenchman’s Map, as well as the book The Mysteries of the “Frenchman’s Map” of Williamsburg, Virginia by Alan Simpson. Yes, there is an entire book dedicated to this map! It is speculated that the map was drawn for French troops who set up their winter quarters in Williamsburg in 1781-82. The map is similar to ones of nearby Yorktown and Hampton drawn by the Berthier brothers of France, but those maps are more complete. It is also likely that it was traced from another version given a series of pinholes in it. 

It is also a mystery as to who the “Frenchman” was. There is no signature on the map and the caption is not in the same handwriting as the rest of the text. Finally, the date on the caption is May 11, 1782, which would have been well after it was needed. 

While visiting the engravers shop in the village, I saw a tray she had been working on with the map etched into it. 

The map has some remarkable details, though described as “impressionistic“ in the article referenced above. It shows building outlines, fences and in some cases even indicating specific trees with dots. Here is the map followed by a detail from the tray’s engraving. 

The folded paper map they hand out to visitors has many nice details too and the building coloring is useful. This is most of the map, trimmed to fit the page better. You can see entire map and guide here. 

By contrast here’s the Frenchman’s version. 

The article on the CW site (the first one listed above) is an interesting short read. It goes into a lot more depth about these mysteries including details of how it was obtained after being lost for a century.