Geography has been part of President Trump’s agenda. His first day at work, he signed an executive order by changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf of America, and Denal, the highest peak in North America, will now return to Mount Mckinley.
Private companies that make maps – analogs or digital – should not follow the lawsuit, but at least one is.
Google said in a post on X that it has long been a practice to apply change of names from official government sources. So, after changing the official federal name database of the naming, it will update Google Maps for people in the SH.BA
Marketplace Tech arrived at Google, Apple and Microsoft for a statement clarifying their access to renaming bodies on their digital maps. Apple and Microsoft did not offer one. Google redirected us to their X.
Stephanie Hughes of Marketplace spoke with, Sterling Quinn Professor of Geography at Central University of Washington, if technology companies generally have standard operating procedures about name changes.
Below is an edited transcription of their conversation.
Sterling Quinn: 10 to 20 years ago, when online maps were newer, we saw these companies making long statements and policies detailed on how the controversial borders and names of places would get, almost like they were a kind of purpose for a single accurate description of the world. And over time, as they received feedback from people who never agree on the boundaries and names of places, I think they realized it was more complicated, but they also wanted to be able to maintain their business operation in the softer way. So their statements changed over time, to talk about how their changes would support the company’s mission or local market expectations, and this was really closer to the truth of what they began to do. So over time, their statements about how they dealt with the disputes have disappeared, and we just see little glances at them now and then, like the posts Google decided on the X last week explaining how to deal with this change.
Stephanie Hughes: And I mean, is it essentially to avoid controversy? That Google doesn’t want to be in the naming place business?
Quinn: I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves the question, why are most the maps we use these days made by big technology companies? These maps were built as part of a business that supports research and advertising. If you can attach search results or advertising in one place, this is very powerful, and also requires many technical resources to build a multi-fold, fast world map, which you can serve billions of people, and Only a few companies have the ability to do all this. And so we end up in this situation when these companies are the ones that show us the geography we start to understand. I remember the days of paper maps, but my students, who are students here, many have grown only with the digital map and the appearance of the world it brings, but this is a view that can sometimes be filtered based on market expectations that these companies and the goals they have in building these map platforms.
Hughes: What alternatives do people have? You know, are there any less well -known company or organization that take different access to digital mapping?
Quinn: A map I have studied a lot, which I think is interesting is the map of the open road, that map is made in a way source of the crowd, and is more like a data base and information from the world used for make the maps. So there are many corporations that contribute data to the open road map, but it has more of a community ethic for it, and is a nonprofit. So this is an interesting case for the study of the map conflict, because contributors to open the road map themselves can have strong disputes of where the boundaries and names should go, it is just that they sometimes play in more transparent ways. There are discussion posts and online forums where people talk about their decisions on the open road map, with what corporations like Google and Microsoft are doing, we often have very little information on how they make their decisions unless they decide to They make some posts like Google did Google on X, explaining this change in the breast of America.
Hughes: And that is interesting, you thought what Google gave us on X was transparency?
Quinn: I’m not sure I would go so far, but they are at least discovering something, and many times we have no idea what is behind that. There was a team in 2016 with some scientists in the northeast and other universities that actually built a tool to read or remove maps from Google from all its localizations so they could try to identify areas where Google was personalizing the boundaries. I mean, what kind of thing is how we know little of what they do. It was almost an attempt to turn an engineer or to see behind the curtain of what is happening. But companies do not actively talk about these map personalizations they make according to the region.
Hughes: You are a professor of college. How do you talk to your students about these issues?
Quinn: I just like to encourage students and others, when they look at the maps, to think about the motives and objectives of those who created the map, and instead of seeing a map as a true objective, scientific or just way for First the world, realize that there are many ways to describe and show the world, and map manufacturers must make decisions all the time on those things that include on the map, how important they give each thing, the labels and the language they use when describing things. And as students learn how to make their maps and read the maps, they think deeper of those topics.
More about that
In addition to thinking about the motifs of the maps, Sterling Quinn told me that it is important for people to look at many different maps and consider the variety of ways they describe the world.
One that Quinn recommends is a wall map called “the essential geography of the United States of America”. In addition to roads and cities, it also has cultural monuments such as Iditarod Trail and Kennedy Space Centers. Quinn says many things become visible after the nearest examination and you can say it is not made by a car.