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‘Every map is political': Can we trust them?

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Advertisement Pindell: When you pull maps out, they feel real. Are they trustworthy or it a living political document? Nelson: Because we use maps so often, we expect them to tell the truth. But every map has a perspective. It could be the perspective of the politician. The only real depiction of the world is the whole world itself. There's an old joke that the only accurate map covers the entire earth, but it's a 1 to 1 scale. Every other map has some perspective built into it. So, for that reason, every map is political in some way. Pindell: I think when Donald Trump first said we should make the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, the first question was can he do that? It there some sort of big authority or is it up to every map maker to come up what they're going to do? How does it work? Nelson: So, unlike some of Trump's other actions, he's technically within his legal rights as presidents to issue an executive order about place names. The United States actually has a board on geographic names that makes decisions about what the official names of places in the United States will be. Technically, the board can be overruled by executive orders. Advertisement Pindell: What do we call that body of water? What do mapmakers say? Nelson: What it's called is a very different question from what is the official federal government name of something. Pindell: Have maps historically been this political? Nelson: Naming is a very charged topic. When European colonists came to North America, they generally wiped the names of indigenous communities that had been here before off the name, replacing them with European names. Boston is a European name. No one before the 1620s called this place Boston. So yes, names have always been switching in and out of maps. Sometimes that comes from grassroots efforts to rename something to match what people are calling it in their everyday lives. Sometimes, in the case of the Gulf of America, it comes from a very explicit top down political command. Pindell: I can't help but think that when we talk about the Gulf of America about the role of technology right now. Google can just flip a switch. If President Eisenhower decided he wanted to rename it the Gulf of America, the map masters would be like, 'Well, in six months when our new edition comes out maybe we'll give it a look.' How has technology changed the conversation around mapmaking? Nelson: Google is constantly feeding new data into your maps, or Apple or MapQuest other sources of digital map information. Sometimes that's a good thing. We want to know, 'Did the store down the street close or did it change its hours?' We want this constant refreshing, and those improve our digital maps in a lot of ways. Advertisement But it also means that map makers have to make choices about how they'll respond to changes like this. For instance, Google can't send out its own team to keep track of the millions of names across the United States, so they rely on data produced by the federal government. They quite literally capture that data and pipe it into their maps, because they're not going to check 'What's this mountain called? What's this hill called?' They have to rely on a source like the federal government. When the federal government changes their information, suddenly, it's on Google Maps. It's on your phone. It's on your computer right away. Boston Globe Today airs Monday through Thursday at 5 p.m. on NESN and is available to stream on-demand at . Segment produced by . Edited by Mike Gemme.