Professor James Cheshire talks about maps from his book "Atlas of the invisible". Operation Menu was a covert United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) tactical bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia from 18 March 1969 to 26 May 1970 as part of both the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. An official United States Air Force record of US bombing activity over Indochina from 1964 to 1973 was declassified by US President Bill Clinton in 2000. The report gives details of the extent of the bombing of Cambodia, as well as of Laos and Vietnam. Roughly one in four cluster bomblets failed to detonate on impact. To date, unexploded ordnance (UXO) - including landmines from the subsequent Cambodian Civil War - have killed twenty thousand and injured forty-five thousand more. The bombing sites are marked in one of the Atlas of the Invisible maps.

James Cheshire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in the UCL Department of Geography and Director of the UCL Q-Step Centre. He is co-author of the critically acclaimed books London: The Information Capital and Where the Animals Go. James is the recipient of a number of major awards from the Royal Geographical Society, The North American Cartographic Information Society and British Cartographic Society. He was President of the Society of Cartographers between 2017 and 2019. His research focuses on the use of “big” and open datasets for the study of social science. He has published in a range of journals on a variety of topics including the use of cycle hire schemes, the spatial analysis of surnames and new ways to visualize population data.

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