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.

African American Homesteaders

Homesteaders are widely thought of as white, but as this map shows there were a large number of black homesteads in the "northwest territories" in the early 1800s.

The map above is from The Bone and Sinew of the Land by Anna-Lisa Cox (image via Atlas Obscura). There are asterixes denoting the places where more valuable land was owned by African Americans. This is not a very clear way of quantifying data, but you can see it in the detail from southwestern Michigan.

Here is the legend.

What the map does clearly show are some interesting clusters of settlements in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. By the late 1800's increasingly restrictive laws and resentment among nearby white settlers had driven many of these settlers away. Cox's book brings to light these forgotten settlements. 

A similar map appears in Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche. You can see it in the "Look Inside" feature on the Amazon link above. The cover is also adorned with some nice mappy details.

Thirty Day Map Challenge - Part 1

 Several years ago Finnish cartographer Topi Tjukanov began the Thirty Day Map Challenge and it has run every November since. The idea is to create a map every day of November based on a theme he posts at the start. These maps are posted to Twitter using the hashtag #30DayMapChallenge. There have been some wonderfully inspiring maps created in this process. I had never participated before this year, correctly assuming it would take up a major part of my time and energy. 

As in other years, I had no plans to do this but on November 1st I suddenly found myself making a map and it took off from there. At the risk of being a self-indulgent show off here are the first 10 maps. As of right now I don't have an online portfolio so here is a place for me to post them. I'm hoping to continue on this challenge but time will tell if I make it to the 30-day mark.

Day 1 - Theme: Points

I'd been working on a general "where I've been" map and I got to thinking about places I've spent the night. I looked at a few states that either didn't seem interesting or had too many uncertainties when I settled on Ohio. I've been working on my weak artistic skills. This was drawn in watercolor pencils by hand while looking at a map of the state.

Day 2 - Theme: Lines

 I don't really like the song "Every Day is a Winding Road" by Sheryl Crow, but somehow it got stuck in my mind and I set out prove it. I used various mapping services such as Google, Bing, Apple and OpenStreetMap to illustrate examples of streets around the world named for the days of the week. One of the tricky parts was finding streets that are in fact "winding."

Day 3 - Theme: Polygons

Points, lines and polygons are the main building blocks of maps so each one gets a day. DC seemed like a good polygon city. I used Opendata DC to get my points. I removed some tiny triangles and it's possible I missed a few circles and squares. There are many rectangular parks that I didn't include because they don't have "square" in their name. I almost forgot about the Ellipse! 

This was a mixed media project. I made and printed a map using QGIS annotated it with pencils and put a little watercolor into the rivers.

Day 4 - Theme: Hexagons

Hexagons are a popular way to represent grids these days. Studies show that certain patterns are easier to detect with a hexagon grid than a square grid. They are particularly popular with election maps but I was looking to do something a little more creative. Not many things in nature are hexagonal. Bee hives use that shape but that kind of map has been done by many others.  While looking for inspiration, I discovered that some of Annie's Snack Crackers are hex shaped, including their saltines and cheddar crackers. I decided to use them as my hexagons.

    So where is a place that has both salt and cheese production? I settled on upstate New York, knowing where some of these places are located. The salt areas are mostly based on an old map I found showing salt deposits, mostly in the southwest. I also know of a couple of salt facilities from my travels so I put those in. I used the term "more likely" to cover the uncertainties but some of those hexagons in the southwest should probably be cheese. The cheese areas were determined by a combination of dairy farm maps and places I know that make cheese.

Day 5 - Theme: Data Challenge 1: OpenStreetMap

For the uninitiated, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is like Wikipedia meets Google Maps. Content is all user generated and it is freely available to use. Despite having contributed to OSM in the past, I don't have a lot of experience using the data so this was definitely a learning exercise. I knew that you can get things like businesses out of it so I tried a query on business names. For some reason, the first word that came to me was "monkey" so I grabbed all businesses with monkey in the name. After seeing an empty South America, I decided to add Spanish and then to make it a bit more objective I grabbed the other three of the world's top languages. In the process this became as much of a linguistic map as anything. 

There are many translation issues here. French and Spanish have different masculine and feminine words and the Spanish words (mona, mono) are contained within many other words and names. My Hindi translation must have been especially off since all my results came from outside of India. Anyway I did what I could here.

Day 6 - Theme: Red

Getting personal here. This is a map of the town where I was born. I was nervously waiting my turn to perform some music on Zoom and parlayed that energy into drawing. Like #1 I tried this completely freehand, while looking at Apple Maps. I've only been through Red Bank as an adult on a train so I don't know the place at all. Someday I hope to visit. The river west of downtown is very wrong and there are other mistakes. Also the map monster and train station were poorly done.

Day 7 - Theme: Green 

Staying in the realm of the personal, Rittenhouse Square is around the corner from my grandmother's former building. As a child I enjoyed playing here, especially with the goat statue. I also lived in the area briefly as an adult. I'd been thinking about how the same places look in different map services so I made an animation of the square using Apple, Google, Bing, Mapbox, Carto, Esri, Stamen, Mapquest, OSM and the philly.gov web site.

Day 8 - Theme: Blue

I started out trying to get a list of blueberry names using the Day 5 OSM theme but the results were not great. Next, I tried using the Google Maps API but also had issues with that. Finally, I found an embedded Google Map from travel-mi.com. I wasn't planning on a Michigan focus but because the data set was there I went with it. I already had a blueberry symbol from my What They Drop on New Years Eve map so I was good to go!

Day 9 - Theme: Monochrome

I thought one of those solar potential maps would look good in monochrome but I'm not sure it works. I also thought that light should be more sun but usually darker means more so this ends up being a bit counterintuitive. I also was not really able to get the subtle gradations of grays with a watercolor pencil. I probably should have tried charcoal instead. I don't trust my drawing abilities to do a complicated outline like this freehand. I traced it right off the computer screen. The rest was done freehand, making it "charmingly inaccurate". 
 

Day 10 - Theme: Raster

I made a very low resolution version of a satellite image of Australia. Then I made a fuzzy version. I couldn't decide which I liked better so I made an animation: blocky vs fuzzy

Though this challenge has taken up way too much of my time and thinking process, it has also been a creative inspiration and a great learning experience so far. I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming challenges with a touch of dread but also excited to take them on.

More Cross Stitch Maps

 One of the talks I enjoyed at this month's North American Cartographic Information Society Conference was from Kara Prior, who uses maps to create cross stitch pattern designs - on sale on her Etsy shop.

She details the process in her talk - now available on YouTube. The idea is to take a map and make it as low resolution as possible while still conveying information. That way you see the individual squares. Here is a screen shot from the video illustrating this.

One of my favorites is the bedrock geology of Arizona. The colors really jump out - some of them look like they were taken from the state's flag.

 

She also has bathymetry and watersheds as well as several other, non-map patterns. The watersheds can be quite simple such as New Jersey,

or much more complicated.

I'll end with some bathymetry examples

Michigan Map Mania

 Maps are ubiquitous but I've never seen so many as on my recent trip to northern Michigan. They love their state's shape. It appears on everything (with or without the Upper Peninsula) from jewelry to buses to chairs

to lamps

to the obvious oven mitt.

There is even a Handmap Brewing Company.

Arriving at the airport in Traverse City you see these nice artistic map tiles of the surrounding bays and peninsulas on the bathroom walls.

The stores are full of map-centric merchandise. Here is a shelf of coasters at My Secret Stash.

Here are a couple of map themed glasses.

I bought this Tolkien themed shirt there.

The company TeeSeeTee -nice logo! -
has all kinds of great map themes including Dr. Suess,

and PacMan.

Another store. Momentum Outfitters has an impressive collection of woodcut maps of seemingly every lake, bay and island within a 500-mile radius. The underwater depths are kind of fascinating - to me anyway.

They also have these nautical chart bags.

There were many good maps along the way including this in the Mission Point Lighthouse,

and this nice map showing the past and present of Glen Haven in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore.

Part of this larger sign.

Even the ice cream place (Moomers) has maps you can pin.

One of my final stops was at 45th Parallel Park in Sutton's Bay, just for the geographic novelty of it.

The Map that Claimed the West

In 1816 mapmaker John Melish drew the first coast to coast map of the United States.

Map courtesy of the Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla

By extending this map all the way to the Pacific, he implicitly laid claim to these lands for the United States. At the time there were competing claims in the west between the United States, Great Britain and Spain. In his own words "part of this territory unquestionably belongs to the United States." Map it and it is yours. The power of the map's claim was such that it was used in future treaty negotiations between the United States and the European powers.

I had a chance to look at and photograph this map up close at the Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla.

Melish had the benefit of information from Lewis and Clark's recent expedition to fill in many details. Here rivers with fancy names like Philosophy (Willow Creek) and Philanthropy (Ruby River) make their way to the Jefferson and eventually Missouri Rivers.

Photo taken at the Map &Atlas Museum of La Jolla

Sometimes the details are a bit exaggerated.

Photo taken at the Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla

Here are some very detailed annotations along the Illinois-Iowa (Missouri Territory at the time) section of the Mississippi River.

Photo taken at the Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla

In addition to the map's historical significance there are various other cartographic curiosities such as the incorrectly angled Lake Michigan, missing Illinois completely and putting Michigan on a diet.

Chicago's there, just in the wrong state.

Here is another curiosity

A theorized link to San Francisco Bay via the Rio Buenaventura (Green River in Utah) - here is a zoomed out look.

The entire map can be browsed at World Digital Library