General cartography

City ≠ city

City ≠ city. Place ≠ place. You know when you’re two thousand miles from home and somebody asks where you’re from and you just name the nearby major city even though you actually live in an adjacent suburb, because who the hell would know where that suburb is? I wish we’d think of cities that [...]

Zombie psychogeography

I’m very weary of the hipster obsession with zombies by now. Cut it out, hipsters. So I felt shame the other night as my friend and I sprinted through the dark along treacherously uneven brick sidewalks, running from zombies and loving it. Not real zombies, or even hipsters—we were responding to an awesome app for [...]

Value-by-alpha maps

The latest issue of the The Cartographic Journal (of the British Cartographic Society) contains a paper written by Robert Roth, me, and Zachary Johnson entitled “Value-by-alpha Maps: An Alternative Technique to the Cartogram.” The value-by-alpha map is something I have touched on here several times over the past year and a half (as has Zach [...]

Norumbega, New England’s lost city of riches and Vikings

“Here, at modern Watertown, was the ancient CITY OF NORUMBEGA.” While preparing data for another spare time local interest map (forthcoming), I ran across a tiny bit of information (“Horsford’s Norse exploration theory”) that ended up captivating me for the weekend. It is the story of Norumbega, at various points a regional name applied to [...]

Footprints

In spite of everything that maps can do, the ones I enjoy most are the simplest of all, those that reveal geography by stripping away all but some particular phenomenon and showing little or nothing more than where it exists. It’s the challenge of interpretation, or the self-satisfaction of recognizing something, or the imagining of [...]

Obligatory Valentine’s Day map

Even while under the knife as we do some final development work, indiemapper sends its love. Remember, the sweetest sentiment today and forever is: