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Data Creep

October 28, 2013, 10:14 am
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The relative onslaught of poor data visualizations so plaguing much of the news media may derive from a hope to attract new audiences as budgets shrink and bureaus decline:  by boiling down a “story” by dispensing with those bothersome words, they … Continue reading →
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D3 Maps the Filling-Up World

October 31, 2013, 10:17 am
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D3 images, or data-driven maps, provide tools of spatial analysis unlike static maps or terrestrial projections:  rather than reflecting data, such maps reveal the changing data that drives their design.  They serve to chart a changeable terrain–or shifting configuration of a … Continue reading →
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The Map is Dead–Long Live the Map!

November 2, 2013, 3:30 pm
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Participants at the symposium Mapping and Its Discontents debated the benefits of the near-ubiquity of uniform mapping systems sponsored and orchestrated by Google in our lives.  Many of the wonderful papers tried to suggest the benefits that mapping served as alternate ways … Continue reading →
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Encoding Narratives in Maps

November 8, 2013, 2:46 pm
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In surveying artists’ maps at the recent symposium “Mapping and its Discontents,” Katherine Harmon celebrated how “creative cartographies” oriented viewers to a narrative about place.  If most of the presentations made viewers re-think the nature of map making as an art … Continue reading →
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Green Urbanism? Blue Urbanism?

November 14, 2013, 10:19 am
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Maps provide unique ways both for entering an image of the natural world and relating places to the broader geographic context in which it lies.  The entomologist and biologist E.O. Wilson coined “biophilia” to express an “innately emotional affiliation of … Continue reading →
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Urban Modernity, RIP: Mapping Marshall Berman Mapping Modernism

November 22, 2013, 4:02 pm
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During his life, Marshall Berman (1940-2013), long-time New York City resident, provided animated and rich maps of literary modernism that rhapsodized cities as privileged sites.  Berman, a native New York resident, wrote from committed engagement in New York’s space and shifting fluidity, but … Continue reading →
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Commemorating Kennedy, Each Place, Everywhere

November 22, 2013, 10:20 pm
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In the rush of commemoration and remembering of President John F. Kennedy‘s death some fifty years ago, it is fitting to remember how widely inscribed his name is in the land–as well as across much of the world.  While we … Continue reading →
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Mapping the Cancer Corridor along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast

December 4, 2013, 8:26 am
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“Cancer Alley” does not itself appear on maps.  But this eighty-five mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, into which are packed some one hundred and fifty factories of petroleum refining or chemical production, merits … Continue reading →
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Sacred Toponymy Matters: the Territory and the Map

December 7, 2013, 12:14 pm
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There few cases of toponymical associations so powerfully pregnant with meaning or resonant across time as those that derive from biblical frames of reference.  Specific toponymy is rarely–if every–so richly evocative of a narrative in the collective memory as in maps … Continue reading →
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Sacred Toponymy Matters: Framing Canaan, between Sacred Site and Jurisdiction

December 8, 2013, 10:50 am
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Symbolic maps of the Holy Land are unlike the local maps created for establishing territorial boundary lines or land-ownership that set.  But they have come to enshrine shared precedents and common recognized grounds of law, defining property lands of cultivated … Continue reading →
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Variations on Our Fragile Union: Small Stores across 40,000 Zip Codes

December 12, 2013, 11:16 am
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Maps create quite powerful tools to knitting together what come to be coherently cohesive units, fabricating a synthetic whole from its parts in their harmonious form–one can visualize unity where it might not be found, in other words, or, conversely, … Continue reading →
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Empire of All You Can Survey

December 17, 2013, 9:58 am
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In writing on Google Maps’ ambitions to map the world, Adam Fisher invokes Jorge Luis Borges‘ one-paragraph fable of how the Cartographers Guild “struck a Map of the Empire” at a 1:1 scale with its entirety, “On Exactitude in Science.”   Fisher … Continue reading →
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Mapping Ancient Ruins

December 24, 2013, 10:10 am
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Few precedents of mapping historic ruins are as striking as the curious radial map for which Leon Battista Alberti provided instructions in the middle of the 1430s:  by plotting ancient ruins in Rome, the paradigmatic city of ruins, the Renaissance … Continue reading →
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The Infographic Pontiff?

December 26, 2013, 12:18 pm
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The geographically broad purview of Pope Francis’ recent Urbi et orbi Christmas benediction, delivered to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square as a greeting to the world and the city, and to all Christians in the city and throughout the world, newly … Continue reading →
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Discovering Leonardo’s Lost Globe?

December 31, 2013, 10:46 am
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When travel to a New World was first imagined in maps, the mapping of coastlines and shores were more relevant to many viewers than the mapping of its interior.  Indeed, the construction of the shore of the New World was a … Continue reading →
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On Curtailing the Circulation of Paper Charts

January 4, 2014, 1:53 pm
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We have long depended on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Coast Survey for authoritative charts of the nation’s coastal waters:  from this coming April 13, the office of the Dept. of Commerce will cease to print the gloriously detailed lithographic … Continue reading →
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Landscape/Image/Map: Neolithic Çatalhöyük

January 10, 2014, 1:34 pm
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The subject-matter of the Neolithic wall-painting is unclear, although it recalls a majestic panorama that befits its length of some three meters.  What the subject of has been contested since it was discovered in Abauntz cave in Central Anatolia.  The … Continue reading →
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The Loosely-Sketched World

January 15, 2014, 11:32 pm
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We’re familiar with considering “art” as a way to further or accentuate the representational qualities of cartography, and treating the map as if it were a system of perception–rather than viewing each as separate but analogous representational systems.  This shifts, … Continue reading →
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Mapping Water’s Presence and Absence Across Land: Maps of Aridity and Drought

January 24, 2014, 6:09 pm
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Maps provide quite supple tools to draw the distribution of a variegated space, and to reflect on the differences it represents.  But the syntax of terrestrial mapping does not lend itself easily to the mapping of drought, or indeed to mapping … Continue reading →
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Internet Maps for Geeks Only?

February 1, 2014, 1:26 pm
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The routes of travel and communication that are woven on-line on the world wide web challenge the limits of human comprehension of space or of an inter-related network:  links created by on-line communication provide compelling bases for surveilling individual locations by … Continue reading →
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