Andy Woodruff  · Cartographer | Blog

General cartography

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

12 April 2013 tagged choropleth, map projections, mercator with 2 comments

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

10 April 2013 with 6 comments

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

1 July 2012 tagged exploration, imagination, place with 2 comments

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

23 October 2011 tagged nacis with 3 comments

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 [...]

Calling all tutorials

1 August 2011 tagged cartographic perspectives, nacis, tutorials with 6 comments

Hello, internet. Are you doing mapping work with marvelous newfangled technology? Cartographic Perspectives (CP), the journal of NACIS, wants you! I am seeking how-to articles for a new regular section called On the Horizon, wherein cartographers can learn from one another about a variety innovative, new, or just plain useful implementations of current mapping technologies. [...]

Web Cartography, or Putting Things on Top of Other Things

8 June 2011 tagged google maps, mashup, monty python, web cartography with 3 comments

Here is an inconsequential post of what’s on my mind at this moment. Remember red dot fever? That epidemic was back in the early days of web mapping APIs, when most of what was possible (and what was popular) was to throw a bunch of points on top of Google Maps and the like. Now [...]