It was a curious little book. When a few copies began resurfacing, in the 18th century, nobody knew what to make of it. One hundred and three pages long and written in Latin, it announced itself on ...

Explore the Sunderland Collection’s stunning maps and atlases, spanning European mapmakers from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Historical maps, like this world map from the Portolan Atlas by ...

<br>In 150 AD, the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy wrote a textbook entitled the <i>Geography, </i>which earned him the title ‘The Father of Geography’. Drawing on nearly a thousand years of classical ...

Back when mapmaking was still a fledgling profession in the U.S., cartographers had a trick up their sleeves: they would insert fake towns into the maps they drew. Not to screw up travelers trying to ...

Most common world maps are highly size distorted, with any land masses located toward the poles tending to look much bigger than they really are, which, in some ways, makes this weird-looking ...

Using open data, MapBox is taking on the big players in online maps. Now they want to fix satellite view. In February 2013, imagery specialist Charlie Loyd was looking for a job. He'd been working on ...

It's a problem that has plagued cartographers for centuries: How do you accurately represent a round world on a flat map? The most common world map used today, designed almost 450 years ago, is highly ...

I gave a presentation recently over one of those Zoom group calls. When I asked for questions at the end, I was hit with an unexpected doozy: "Why is your world map upside down?" While online meetings ...

It's no secret that I love maps. I love looking at them, studying them, using them and teaching from them. I love current maps, outdated maps, beautiful maps, historical maps and, well, any kind of ...

In the summer of 1914, Americans began reading news accounts of a conflict that would soon be called the Great War—and that would draw the United States in three years later. (See also: The United ...

Of the 7000-odd languages still spoken today, 2560 are represented in The World Atlas of Language Structures—even if the average number per map is "only" 400. This stems from the fact that only ...