On July 3rd, I delivered the closing keynote at #CampDigital 2025, a conference at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester organized by Nexer Digital. I’ve now put together my companion page for this talk (which uses the world map to drive home points about deception and bias in design). The web page is chock-full with notes and references, linking to articles, papers, videos, podcasts and books.
And yes, all the slides are there as well. You can flip through them on the page or download them in PDF format.
The Spectacular Lies of Maps – keynote companion page:
** https://axbom.com/cdmaps/ **
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Per Axbom standing on stage at Camp Digital at the Royal Northern College of Music.
His slides are on a screen above him, with the title slide being displayed: “The Spectacular Lies of Maps” and a background photo featuring the Earth rising beyond the Moon's horizon (taken by William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968).
A speech bubble points towards an Earth-like sphere behind Per and contains the text “I brought a beach ball with the appearance of Earth”.
Per is wearing a beige overshirt over a blue shirt and blue trousers. He has his hands on his back. The backs of a few audience members' heads are visible in the foreground.
This photo of Per was originally taken by James Winstone and is slightly modified and cropped in this post to reduce photo height – with the added speech bubble.