General cartography

On practical cartography

Another carto-year has come to a close. A carto-year is measured from October to October, or more specifically, between NACIS conferences. If you’re not a NACIS regular, come to a few meetings and you’ll understand. It’s the New Year’s Eve of cartography—an intellectual, visual, and social celebration of mapping that at once exhausts you and […]

“It’s just a population map!”

Thou shalt not take xkcd 1138 in vain. It’s nice that xkcd provides the occasional popular exposure of cartographic topics, but unfortunate that it makes critics’ jobs easier. The comic linked above has been invoked often since it first appeared, including in response to everyone’s latest favorite map to hate, US GDP Split in Half. […]

Why are choropleth Mercator maps bad? Because we said so.

The other day I was speaking to a non-map person about the problems with choropleth mapping on the Mercator projection and went looking for a link to something that could explain it more clearly than my bumbling self. It became a familiar exercise, because I’ve done this before: there’s hardly anything out there on the […]

Free as in painstaking cartography labor

There are ways in which I think cartography is an under-appreciated and poorly understood field, some of which are enumerated in occasional rants on the Axis Maps blog and elsewhere. But these are usually philosophical or academic matters, and as someone who is making a career of cartography, increasingly I’ve been trying to offer this […]

The end of imagination

Looking dusty here. Tap, tap. Is this blog still on? Here’s an anecdote and a thought. As much as a decade ago, I remember running into amazingly high resolution aerial imagery of Cambridge, Massachusetts. You could see people in this imagery, which was not so common on the web at the time. I explored Cambridge […]

Cartography and NACIS 2011

I’ve recently returned from the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society in my old stomping grounds of Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve mentioned NACIS here in the past. It’s a wonderful organization and it holds the best conference ever. While I will recap some of the conference (which was very good this year), this […]