My friend and colleague Warren Davison posted a map this week which he made after a canoe trip with friends. I described it as so good, it’s naughty. Another (the other?) friend and colleague John Nelson referred to it as charming…which led to a few of us on Twitter rehashing the lyrics to The Smiths’ […]
Author: Kenneth Field
Maps ARE ads
I have a few upcoming conference talks and one of the themes I’m going to explore is the idea of ethics in cartography. The long held, and often repeated, ideal of what cartography constitutes is based on the notion that cartographers are a wholly objective breed who use clean and unequivocal data to tell the […]
Get vaccinated
A map can only ever reveal what the data exhibits, but a great map can really make the message clear and unequivocal. My map of the week is from an article in the Washington Post where Zach Levitt and Dan Keating posit the relationship between Covid-19 vaccination rates and hospitalization among the US population. The […]
Fashionable cartography
Schitt’s Creek co-creator Dan Levy stumped up to the Met Gala this week in an outfit that screamed maps. I’ve got a lot of map clothing myself but I’ve never been this brave, though to be fair I’ve never been invited to the Met Gala which is an annual fundraising ball for the benefit of […]
For a friend
I’m not sure if it’s something peculiar to cartography folks, or it’s just the people I tend to spend more of my time with but they tend to be very thoughtful, giving, and compassionate. In thinking about my map of the week for this week there were some really great examples on topics such as […]
My difficult second album
Sometime after my first book was published in 2018 I began to think I had another one in me. Thematic Mapping: 101 inspiring ways to visualise empirical data was published this week by Esri Press. Written mostly in 2019 and during the early part of working at home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, […]
London maps in the wild
It’s been a long wait but I finally managed to get back home to the UK this last week to see family and friends. This week’s map of the week is therefore a personal collection of maps of the week – just a selection of some of the maps I came across on my travels. […]
Ethical cartography
All maps have the power to lie. With such power comes great responsibility on the part of the map-maker. Understanding how to remain objective, be thorough, and be able to justify decisions is a vital aspect of good cartographic practice. Discussions, debates, and statements on the value and purpose of maintaining an ethical approach to […]
Streamflow
This week’s map of the week is Streamflow, by the USGS Data Science for Water Resources team. You can check out the original here. It’s a type of regular, non-contiguous cartogram. It’s also referred to as a tiled or gridded map. I like to refer to these sorts of representations as chartmaps, because it uses […]
Mapping climate change
My map of the week was going to be the interactive map on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) web site. It’s a pretty solid example of where we’re at in terms of designing online maps as a portal for exploring data, and I felt it important to highlight it. And then James Cheshire […]