As we bundle ourselves up here in Toronto, let's take a moment to appreciate the wintry beauty of glaciers and snow-capped peaks, captured below in gorgeous mid-century Swiss topographic maps.
We are fortunate to have a complete 1964 set of maps of… Read more.
Maps
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The Map & Data Library's collection of fire insurance plans and atlases provides a wealth of information about the history of Toronto's built environment. These maps go back as far as 1880 and show details such as streets & railroads,… Read more.
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Celebrating GIS Day: Mapping for Everyone
Every November, we celebrate GIS Day - a global event that highlights the power of spatial thinking. Since 1999, it's been a day to share maps, tell stories, and invite others to explore the layers of… Read more.
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Researchers working with spatial data increasingly rely on authoritative basemaps, curated thematic layers and accessible climate information. Three Esri-affiliated resources—the Community Map of Canada, the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, and the… Read more.
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Did you really want to attend a Map & Data Library workshop, but it conflicted with your schedule?
Did you attend a workshop, but wish you could go back and review one section?
Are you someone who prefers to work through workshop… Read more.
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Long before GPS told us where to turn, John George Bartholomew was showing the world where to go. Known as “the Prince of Cartography,” this Edinburgh-born mapmaker (1860–1920) transformed not only how we see the world but how we understand it. His… Read more.
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It's National Forest Week and National Tree Day! To celebrate, we're highlighting a geospatial dataset representing Southern Ontario's historic (pre-European settlement) forest landcover.
Our featured dataset (depicted above) was created by… Read more.
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We have just received the latest (2024) City of Toronto orthoimagery files, available to current U of T students, staff, and faculty.
Key features:
High-resolution images (TIFFs)
Ready to use in GIS
Mostly leaf-off imagery
4-band imagery, with a… Read more.
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Map projections have been in the news lately: representatives of the African Union and advocacy groups are calling for a replacement of the Mercator projection (used frequently online, like in Google Maps) with the Equal Earth map. But you may well… Read more.
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On June 12, 2025, I delivered a conference paper based on my doctoral research on archaeological maps of the Silk Road.1 I tried to answer two cartographic questions:
First, what were routes from an archaeologist's maps doing in a confidential… Read more.