Posts Categorized: Journal

Even if you’re not a cartographer, when you first see a map there’s almost always a gut feel for whether you like a map or whether you don’t. Critiquing a map is a deeply subjective thing. You may not know why you like a map but you can tell whether the map’s cartography works or… Read more »

Imagine for a moment you’re in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there’s shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven’t yet come across. Or maybe you’re in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old… Read more »

The geo industry has always been a fairly vaguely and nebulously defined industry and it takes a brave conference organiser to try and cover everything that’s geo related in a single conference. But that’s what GeoBusiness tries to do and it almost succeeds. This year’s conference agenda and trade booth sideshow managed to cover the… Read more »

Last month, in response to the news that Uber had acquired LBS platform provider deCarta, Marc Prioleau penned an article asking is this the start of a mapping war? A few days ago, Bloomberg announced news that Nokia is looking to sell off HERE, the maps business forged from the, sometimes unwilling, union of NAVTEQ… Read more »

When I first made the Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it’s gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still… Read more »

So farewell Sir Terry Pratchett. Since I first read The Colour Of Magic in 1983 you made me smile, you made me laugh out loud and above all, you always made me think. In 2004’s Going Postal, Terry wrote about the clacks, a series of semaphore towers that were the Discworld equivalent of the old… Read more »

Somewhere around 1510 what is now known as the Lenox Globe was made. Apart from being either the second or third oldest globe in existence, the Lenox Globe is infamous for the first appearance of the Latin Phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, which is today loosely translated as here be dragons. This is probably not a… Read more »

When I was a lot younger than I am now I learned the address of where I was growing up. More about that in a moment. First I want to mention what I didn’t learn. I didn’t learn that I was at TQ 23210 65789. Nor did I learn that I lived at 51.377792, -0.23107184…. Read more »

CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends… Read more »

Quick, take a look at this map. There’s something wrong with it. It’s a map of the coast of West Africa dating from 1839. Compared with modern maps, a few things have changed. Senegambia was the French controlled Senegal and the British controlled Gambia, Soudan is today’s Sudan and Upper Guinea is part of today’s… Read more »