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Data Creep
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”...
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D3 Maps the Filling-Up World
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...
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The Map is Dead–Long Live the Map!
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...
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Encoding Narratives in Maps
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...
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Green Urbanism? Blue Urbanism?
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...
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Urban Modernity, RIP: Mapping Marshall Berman Mapping Modernism
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...
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Commemorating Kennedy, Each Place, Everywhere
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...
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Mapping the Cancer Corridor along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast
“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...
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Sacred Toponymy Matters: the Territory and the Map
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...
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Sacred Toponymy Matters: Framing Canaan, between Sacred Site and Jurisdiction
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...
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Variations on Our Fragile Union: Small Stores across 40,000 Zip Codes
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...
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Empire of All You Can Survey
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...
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Mapping Ancient Ruins
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,...
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The Infographic Pontiff?
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...
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Discovering Leonardo’s Lost Globe?
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...
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On Curtailing the Circulation of Paper Charts
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...
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Landscape/Image/Map: Neolithic Çatalhöyük
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...
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The Loosely-Sketched World
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...
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Mapping Water’s Presence and Absence Across Land: Maps of Aridity and Drought
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...
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Internet Maps for Geeks Only?
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...
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