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Radical Cartography: What Maps Show, What They Hide, and Why It Matters
474 Plays19 hours ago
In this episode, I sit down with Bill Rankin, historian of science at Yale and author of Radical Cartography, to unpack what maps really do beyond simply showing data. We talk about why mapping is an act of representation with real consequences, how common techniques like choropleths and cartograms shape what we see—and what we miss—and why there’s no single “correct” way to visualize the world. Bill shares how his background in architecture influences his approach to mapping as drawing and world-making, not coding or dashboards. We also dig into static versus interactive maps, accessibility, and why starting with questions—not tools—leads to better visualizations. It’s a thoughtful conversation about intention, trade-offs, and responsibility in data visualization.
Keywords: PolicyViz Podcast, Bill Rankin, Radical Cartography, data visualization, maps and mapping, cartography, choropleth maps, cartograms, population maps, map projections, visualizing data, representation in data, ethics of data visualization, static maps, interactive maps, storytelling with data
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Email: jon@policyviz.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Biz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Happy New Year, everybody. Hope you're well. Hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Hope you got a little time to rest and relax with your friends and family at the end of 2025. And I'm hoping
00:00:31
Speaker
is a better year for all of us. And what better way to start the new year than a new podcast
Meet Bill Rankin and His Work
00:00:37
Speaker
episode. Very excited to have, join me on the show, Bill Rankin, author of the new book, Radical Cartography, How Changing Our Maps Can Change the World. I got to tell you this book has moved right up into my top three of all time mapping books for data visualization, not for cartographers or cartography. That's a different field, but for data viz folks, if you are interested in improving how you work with geographic data, how you create maps, my view now is that you need three books.
00:01:10
Speaker
Kenneth Fields book, Cartography, Alan Carroll's book, Telling Stories with Data. And now I'm adding Bill Rankin's book, Radical Cartography. If you have those three books, I think you are going to be a much better map creator and data visualization storyteller. So I was very excited to be able to have Bill on the show to talk about his book, his approach to mapping, different tools, differences between static maps and animated maps, how he thinks about this phrase radical cartography and what it means. All good stuff. We have a really long, great conversation. I think you're going to love this first episode of the new year. Now, of course...
00:01:54
Speaker
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you for a quick favor because it is a podcast. That's what we do on podcasts. We ask for quick favors. Please rate or review the show wherever you get it. iTunes, Spotify, wherever you're listening to the show, please rate or review it. Let me know if you like it. It does help me find other guests. It does help other people know about the show.
The Journey from Architecture to Radical Cartography
00:02:12
Speaker
This show is not supported by specific sponsors. So anything you can do to help me spread the word is very, very much... appreciated And of course, you should also subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. I have a new post that just went out about these three books that I recommend, my three mapping data visualization books that I think you need. Okay, that's it. I'm not gonna ask for any more favors today. Let's get onto this episode. Here is my interview with Bill Rankin from Yale University on his new book, Radical Cartography.
00:02:48
Speaker
Bill, good to meet you. Welcome to the show. John, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. ah Thanks so much, Radical Cartography, as I probably mentioned in the intro to this episode. Sat down, read it cover to cover, New Year's Day, sprinkling in some breaks for Stranger Things, but um really, really enjoyed it. I'm putting it in my top three mapping books for data viz people.
00:03:11
Speaker
I just think it's that like, once you sort of get the understanding of projections and color and all that stuff, like what do we need to broaden our understanding of what maps are and what they can do and what they hide and what what they don't hide. So, well, first off, why don't do this? Why don't we have you maybe talk a little bit about yourself, a little background. Yeah, sure. no And then um then we can go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'm i'm Bill Brankin. I'm a professor in the history and history of science department at Yale.
00:03:40
Speaker
My background though was in architecture. So i originally went to design school um and thought I would be an architect. you know, for a long time. um and And then when I realized I wasn't gonna be architect that my talents lay elsewhere, ah mapping really was like, was a way to kind of keep me, you know, a little bit in that world.
00:04:00
Speaker
yeah um So I went to graduate school for for history of science. um And it was only then that I really started picking up mapping as a way to kind of keep me engaged with that whole world, right?
00:04:13
Speaker
um and And then it was many, many more years after that that I really started to say, oh, how can i you know, not just do this for fun, but really to take it seriously as ah as an intellectual project.
00:04:24
Speaker
So yeah, I think that the the the basic story for me is just that this was a kind of a, you know, a labor of love that I eventually realized like, oh, I can, I want to figure out how to make this you know, really really hit the hit the hit the hit the ground.
00:04:39
Speaker
And so the the people i ask often ask me, like, what's the where's the architecture? Where's the design education in this? um And the easy answer is that so much of architecture is about creating things, you know, imagine creating imagined spaces that don't yet exist. So that was always my kind of in for the mapping as well, seeing mapping really as a powerful way of making worlds, not just describing them.
00:05:04
Speaker
right um So that was really the origin of the project. So I have i have this, ah maybe unfair, but this image of of architects of like big rolled up pieces of paper with the blue background. and like um and and And I have an image of them drafting with pen and paper. And I know there's the computer side of it. Was your architecture background a lot of drafting and drawing? And then did you transfer that into into mapping of like starting in the physical world before really like...
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, of our core computer style some. I think that my so it it really comes from drawing. Yes. But I think that when I went to architecture school was kind of the last death throes of pen and and and paper. yeah yeah we I did some of that, but most of it was learning to to draw with software.
00:05:49
Speaker
um So but when I'm doing the mapping, I'm approaching it often as a as
Exploring Radical Cartography
00:05:55
Speaker
drawing. um So using Illustrator rather you know rather than just ArcGIS, things like that. right right I use a whole bunch of different software, but in the end, I see it as ah a task of drawing rather than a task say of coding or things like that. so that's where so i think you see that in the sense that I'm not coming at this from the from the point of view of coding or creating dashboards or interactives or things like that, I'm coming at it from the point of view of seeing, I want to create a drawing.
00:06:23
Speaker
And often that means, especially at the last step, coming in there with my actual hand um and and moving things around and adding the final touches. Right, right. um And I want to come back to the tools because I'm sure people will be will be, are curious about the tools that you use, but I want to get to the book. So um can you start by just like, what do you mean by this by this term radical cartography?
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, so but I think maybe first I'll say what I don't mean by it, which is to say I don't mean ah let's make a bunch of maps on left wing topics um or let's use mapping as part of a radical political project. um There are people who do those things.
00:07:06
Speaker
In general, i'm and yeah i'm not and I'm not against that approach, but it's not what I mean. um i mean more how do we take the active representation itself, the translation of data or world into MAP, how do we see that as something which ah has a politics to it?
00:07:24
Speaker
the choices we make about whether represents something with shapes or dots or lines, what colors we use, those things themselves, not just the topics, um not just what the data shows, but those choices about the graphics are themselves political and have real meaning.
00:07:40
Speaker
And if we ignore those things, we often make not just crummy maps, but maps that can kind of undermine some of the the goals we have for what we're actually trying to show. So it's really about trying to make the process of representation more intentional to try to think about how do we align that more with our values, what we're actually trying to show, the meaning that's actually created in the maps, not just showing the data in the most sort of you know transparent, honest sort of way.
00:08:07
Speaker
um But it's about the act of of of cartography itself rather than the topics of cartography. Right, right. and And you talk a lot about in the book about different ways to approach.
00:08:19
Speaker
um I'm going to kind of ah kind of showing what tends to not be seen in cartography, right? Like small areas. You mentioned the U.S. territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands that tend to just be thrown off to the side. um Can you talk a little bit about how you think through, um i don't want to call them outliers, but the things that are not as sort of like standard and easy for people to just throw on a map. There are all these like other things to consider.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a good example. So ah you know if you take the the default way of showing something like population density, where you shade different areas, different colors based on you know people per square mile or whatever, um that small little areas, whether they're you know Manhattan or islands or whatever, you just won't be able to see them at all on a large map.
00:09:10
Speaker
um And so there's nothing like no one's made a mistake in like no one's lying. No one's trying to hide anything. But by just doing it the usual way, one of the unintended consequences is that small areas, cities, islands and so forth are completely invisible.
00:09:27
Speaker
And so, you know, once you realize that you're like, oh, gosh, I really shouldn't do that. And that isn't necessarily about having an agenda, you know, about these places, but about saying, like, if I actually want to show the world in the way that I i know it, I need to rethink the the buttons I'm pushing.
00:09:46
Speaker
um And just doing it the default way ah really is is not right. Yeah. And so that's, that's i think it's yeah i think I think it's a good example of how a lot of the kind of easiest ways of mapping do have these consequences of flattening what you could call outliers. um And a lot of what I try to do is to say, how do we make sure that everything, either in the data or or in the in the world, is actually on this map in a way that we can see and we can actually consider?
00:10:14
Speaker
Or another way I think about it is, if I'm making a map that has ah people or landscapes, whatever, how how can I be confident that the people I'm mapping will be able to see themselves on this map?
00:10:27
Speaker
um So if you're making a map, say, of I have an example in the book of Hispanic, Latino Americans, and you're just doing it the standard way of you know percent of of total by county or zip code whatever, there's lots of places where the answer will be close to zero.
00:10:44
Speaker
right And those people won't be able to find themselves on the map at all. right um So i think, yeah, there's it's not so much about a fascination with outliers. It's more trying to say, okay, if I do it the usual way, i want to make sure that i ah I'm catching the things that would be we erased.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah. So I think there could be people who listen to this podcast, this episode, and hear you say, oh, this is not from a left-wing perspective. It's not a political perspective. But also at the same time say, oh, this just sounds like...
00:11:16
Speaker
you know, woke, you know, we want people to be seen. So, and, you know, I'm doing similar work in and and another vein. And I'd just like to ask you to talk about how,
00:11:27
Speaker
um from your perspective, enabling people to see themselves in the data, in a map, in a visual is not some sort of left wing or right wing, you know, ideology. It's not, ah it's not woke. It's not, you know so if someone came to you and said, ah, this stuff, this book is just woke. It's just, it's just trying to like, you know, whatever, like what would your,
00:11:49
Speaker
measured response to that be? Yeah. Well, I think a couple things. I think that um I do think that I'm but happy to stand up for the value of making sure that people are seen and heard. Definitely.
00:11:59
Speaker
i definite definitely right yeah um and but you know ah I hope that's not just a left wing value, but it might be. I guess to the core of the point, I feel like there is this like, oh, you need to make everybody feel seen is this sort of like soft thing. I mean, I'll let you answer. But like, from my perspective, it's just it's if people see themselves, it's more likely that they're going to use it. I mean, I, I, for me, it's a very simple, you know, but I want to hear your, yeah. yeah So I, here's a good example. Um, so cartograms, um, which I'm sure this audience knows well, uh, yeah, I, I, I see them all the time. I like them. But I don't really use them myself. um
00:12:44
Speaker
And what happens with a so standard ah map of, you like let's say, an election, right, where shading ah red or blue by counties, the cities are going to be almost invisible, right, in exactly the way I was just talking about. And so a standard election map with no, ah you know, geographic distortion is going to overrepresent Rural areas, it's you know it's a map of land rather than people, all these kinds of things.
00:13:09
Speaker
But the opposite, to the alternative of the cartogram where you deform based on population, where the cities become huge, like rural areas now become almost invisible, right? They become stretched these thin little spaghetti strands where you can't even figure out where on the map you are. So all you know all of Wyoming becomes a kind of weird little thing in the corner, right? yeah um yeah I don't think that's good either.
00:13:31
Speaker
Yeah. So I don't think so. It's not just that I want to hold up the voices of people who are, you know, marginalized in the way that the woke community would want to ah valorize. But to say that like cartograms, for example, that that show city population pretty well, but completely obliterate rural areas, that's also not a good solution. And so what I'm trying to to do in the book is to try to find some ways to say, how do we keep all these things kind of in play at the same time?
00:13:59
Speaker
find some strategic strategic compromises rather than to to say the only one correct way to do it is to only show cities or to only show rural areas, to try to push back against the ice this sense that ah there can be a single correct way to show everything. but just And I think that that's that's also a little different than the, ah you know, let's find maps that,
00:14:21
Speaker
highlight the people who have been traditionally obscured, but rather to say, how do we find ways doing maps that that keep our thinking flexible and to say, okay, when we do it this way, we're making a trade-off between showing more of this or less of this and to kind of keep ourselves in those trade-offs rather than trying to say, i want to find the one final map that shows the world the way that I think it should be found
Mapping Representation and Inclusion
00:14:44
Speaker
or should be seen. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole section um on on cartograms in the book, and you you describe them as corrective, the word corrective, rather than maps that stand on on their own. So when you think about, i think the election examples is perfect. When you think about a good ah platform that's showing your election results,
00:15:04
Speaker
um do you think that sort of the the better way to communicate the data is to give people opportunities to see the geographies in different ways?
00:15:16
Speaker
I think that's certainly better than just here's the one map for sure. yeah um And I think that, ah but i ah i don't I don't love the the strategy of just here's the you know the the map of land area and here's the cartogram and you can go back and forth because they're so difficult to keep those two yeah in your head, right? Cause they're just so different.
00:15:35
Speaker
um So what I come up with in the book, and I'm not the first person to ah to do these kinds of things, is how do i you know ah use things like scale circles, ah but to keep them in their geographic place so we know where people are, how many people they are, how they're voting, like just keep track of the questions we're asking.
00:15:57
Speaker
and then to try to find a map that does those things pretty well, even if it doesn't do everything perfectly, rather than saying, here are the to two or three different ways you can visualize the same data, and I'm not going to help you figure out how to integrate them.
00:16:11
Speaker
Right, right. So we kind of sped right to cartograms. want to come back a second to sort of the standard color shaded map, the choropleth map. I really found it interesting. um you never you I don't think you ever use the word choropleth map in the book. You call them jigsaw puzzle maps, which I love.
00:16:31
Speaker
and And it never really occurred to me until like there's like a part in the book in the very beginning where you sort of like the map looks exactly like a jigsaw puzzle the way it' just the the diagram. I'm curious, I'm assuming that was a conscious decision on your part to not use terms like choropleth. And I'm curious how ah you know how you came to that decision.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah. So I think I think Korplev might have snuck into a footnote or two, but you're right. I don't use it. OK, maybe I didn't go through all the footnotes. The point is, like, it was, in fact, a conscious choice. Right. Yeah. yeah well it's ah It's certainly a word that that I've used. that I think about and i've in in my with my academic work, I've actually done some some research on where that term came from and why it was used, why it was you know coined in the nineteen thirty s um And in the book, there's, I think it's two reasons.
00:17:19
Speaker
The, this the simplest is I want this book to speak to people who haven't really thought about maps that much, not just to speak to people who've already thought them out about them a lot. Uh, and I've always found the the term choropleth kind of clunky, uh, people, you know, often mispronounce it. They think, you know you know, chloropleth, like, like chloroform or whatever, right. Right.
00:17:38
Speaker
Um, it's just not a great, not a great term. Um, So that would be a way of kind of you know ah closing off the ah the the windows rather than than opening them up. um But I think that beyond that, though, when choropleth was coined in the 30s, it was part of a moment of really trying to systematize cartography.
00:17:58
Speaker
To say we can have some specific vocabulary for different kinds of techniques. There's three ways to show this kind of data. There's four ways to show these kinds of ratios, right? And that to have a sort of an overall, to make cardiography more technical, more systematic, a bit more abstract, right? So it's not about how do you show...
00:18:18
Speaker
you know say population or elections or landformers, but how do you show quantitative data in general, yeah right? Or qualitative data, or how do you know, those kinds of things. and And I feel like that's not great. I feel like there's something really important about having mapping be in touch with the actual meaning of what you're showing.
00:18:38
Speaker
And I think that the jigsaw puzzle as a kind of metaphor does do more to sort of you know, get a sense of what's at stake with representing the world that way. Right.
00:18:49
Speaker
And you have this idea they like, oh, that means you can take certain pieces out, maybe, you know, throw them on the floor. They're independent sorts of things. Each piece is a kind of independent thing, you know, that just happens to slot and next to others, but doesn't really interact with them. yeah i think that the the term gives, ah it conjures more about what's at stake with that form representation rather than just slotting it into a kind of, you know, technical vocabulary.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, it also, for me, when I got to that section, i think it also, i want to say in some ways, opened view to thinking about maps as, you know, not everything has to be adjacent. To your point, you can take things out and you can put things in. And there's a freedom there where you're not bound by just using the, you know,
00:19:36
Speaker
whatever projection, um, that you can start to play around with moving things around to tell the story as effectively as possible. Um, yeah, I think that that seems, I, I, I I'm, I'm in favor of that. I think that the, yeah, I think the main thing really is how is the map giving us a kind of take on the world, right?
00:19:59
Speaker
Which is different than how are we going to represent our data set? Um, And so to say, yeah there might be other techniques that are a bit unorthodox that might mean, you know, cutting and pasting and rearranging or whatever. They're going to give ah an account of the world that I can stand behind. Yeah. um And so i'm I'm definitely in favor of of that kind of giving yourselves a license for that kind of freedom.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah. um And to say, i'm going to do things a little differently because I i feel like this is the the the way to represent the the things that I, as I understand them. Yeah, I mean, the the other part of the book that i really liked throughout all the examples and and what I found kind of funny is that there were so many in here that I recognized but didn't know they were yours. So that was kind of entertaining for me. How...
00:20:48
Speaker
how in a lot of your work, you layer things together. You layer sort of different perspectives on data together. So one example that I really like is you have this map of the world in sort of a rectangular box.
00:21:01
Speaker
And then along the the horizontal axis is the distribution, basically histogram of population. um Can you talk a little bit how, you know, in this discussion of, in this discussion, how you think about presenting data, you layer different,
00:21:15
Speaker
sort of views together within a single, I'll call it a map, but it's really sort of like ah a bigger visual. Yeah, I think that the ah the the the main thing I try to resist is let's make the the final map that shows everything perfectly.
00:21:35
Speaker
um And I think if you're trying to say, how do I show the population of the world perfectly, You're never going to come up with that kind of histogram approach, right? Because the histogram of by latitude and longitude, obviously, leaves a lot of stuff out, right? yeah um but ah So I think that I like being more intentional about what are my actual questions,
00:21:57
Speaker
And then how do I answer each of those questions, perhaps individually? And I might have more than one. And so I might have more than one thing in the same project. So if I have a question, like, I'm actually kind of curious how the distribution of, you know, human population varies by latitude.
00:22:13
Speaker
I can ask that question independently of, ah you know, how are people distributed within Asia or whatever, right? Right. and But I'm also interested in ah how are people distributed within Asia.
00:22:24
Speaker
And so I can have a have a separate question about that. So I think that having saying, being really conscious for myself, um yes, for my audience, my readers, um but even just for myself as the map maker, what are my questions and how do I make sure that I'm getting clear answers to those questions rather than just saying I'm trying to do mapping?
00:22:44
Speaker
oh Yeah. Right. So starting with a question rather than a kind of a thought of what a final product is. Yeah. um or Or a thought of this is the way we do it.
00:22:55
Speaker
Right? Yeah. So ah there's, you know, if you look at the history of population mapping, 100 years or more of in atlases and online everywhere, it's like, okay, you make, ah you know, you you you shade based on ah kind of ah a color scale that goes from a kind of pale buff to a darker, you know, reddish brown.
00:23:14
Speaker
Population density, people per square mile around the world. That's how we do it. Right? um and i've seen i've just i've seen once you go looking for that kind of map you see it so many times again and again it's just a cut and paste right um and we've already touched on a couple of reasons that that i think is not good you know you can't see cities you can't see islands i think the color scale again like once you step back bit obviously conjuring skin color um in a way that's like not even accurate Right, right, right. yeah right it's like
00:23:46
Speaker
i mean yeah i mean yeah It's not accurate not accurate for a few different reasons, right? Not everyone in the same place has the same skin color, yeah but also the most densely populated areas are not the places where the people have the darkest skin color. There's all sorts of problems with that, right?
00:23:58
Speaker
um and So, so yeah, then so I would say over the last you know many years, i've I've taken that same, literally the same data set and ask so many different questions of it.
00:24:09
Speaker
So the latitude and longitude is one of them. One that didn't make it in the book is just how does population distribution by altitude? um So I have a, you know, histogram of where people live in terms of, you know, sea level.
00:24:22
Speaker
One that is in the book is trying to think about how, you know, oh If you divide the world into two hemispheres, which is the hemisphere that has the most people? Um, and you can pick a hemisphere that has 97, 93% of all population.
Static vs Animated Maps: A Debate
00:24:37
Speaker
And the other side of the earth has 7%.
00:24:40
Speaker
Um, that was another, just a separate little question, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so I think that's the thing is kind of question focused, uh, rather than I need to show my entire data set.
00:24:51
Speaker
in the way that we've kind of inherited, right? So, but are you thinking of it as, let's take population, so you have some big data set of population by all these different elements.
00:25:05
Speaker
Are you thinking, ah it sounds to me, I'll put it this way. It sounds to me that you are sort of asking questions of the data um and sort of like the visual comes last. I mean, this is a book on mapping. You do a lot of mapping, but it doesn't sound to me that you are coming to asking a question about the distribution of population. How am I going to make a different kind of map out of that? You're just asking questions. And then what is the way to effectively visualize it?
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, I say i mean i think that's that's right. I think that it's also iterative. The more time I spend with the data set, the more I'm like, oh, there's a question I didn't think to ask. yeah Or ah like the map of elevation, like just the single data set of population around the world won't answer that. i have to you know I have to combine that with ah ah the DEM for elevation. um so ah So, yeah, it's not just it's not just ah i I know all the questions before I look at the data. yeah Often I don't know any real good questions before i look at the data. But in the end, I want to make sure I'm not just trying to say, i think like a lot of the standard um kind of cliched advice is about trying to find the truth in your data as if it's already there, right? right um But here's the data set.
00:26:27
Speaker
explore it and and figure out what the the patterns are. Right. Yeah. yeah um And the idea is, you know different people will come across the same data set and and reach the same conclusions, find the same patterns, represent it the same sort of way.
00:26:38
Speaker
And we know that's not true. Different people will find different interesting things going on. And so I think the more we can be kind of honest with ourselves, that's what's going on. that this is about my own somewhat idiosyncratic way of exploring this particular data. And i'm going to always kind of keep myself to the the questions I want to ask and then make sure that what I'm coming up with is answering those questions pretty well.
00:27:01
Speaker
That's the idea. Yeah. yeah Which is really different, I think, than just I download the the population data set and now need to represent it because that's my job. Right, right, right, right. I did want to ask, you mentioned the the elevation, the altitude map. um I don't think I saw a lot of mention of maps that are done in three, in a third third dimension. um Do you have...
00:27:26
Speaker
Strong feelings. I know there's the race shader package, which I know people have been using a lot the last year or two to like make more of the, you know, three three dimensional maps, but do you have a strong feelings in either direction about making maps or a i You're right. I don't do that. i mean i thinking i assume you're thinking about the ones there's of an oblique view from yeah an airplane or something like that. Yeah, exactly. um i I think that there's um some of that is because i feel like those are sometimes harder to like there's lots of confounding things.
00:27:58
Speaker
the things that can happen when you're sos having the the bar charts you know erupting off of the three-dimensional surface and that kind of stuff. um you know ah How are you taking perspective into account when you're trying to show the the data at the same time you're showing the view, that kind of thing. um Some of that, I think, is that I ah think i've just I just had my plate full with three-dimensional stuff.
00:28:20
Speaker
And what it makes me think about more than the 3D stuff is the kind of animations and things like that. um okay I've done less with animations. I've done some. um I know how to do it, but I don't i don't do it really.
00:28:34
Speaker
and I think that the the reason is because doing the animations or the interactives often means that you're making a real compromise on the kinds of questions you can ask and the clarity of the of what you can come up with.
00:28:47
Speaker
So i think of some really fantastic examples of maps from the past that could never be animations at all. This one that i was thinking about, this is from the 1940s, showed um September as hurricane month.
00:29:01
Speaker
And so it showed all the hurricanes, the tracks of all the hurricanes that had hit the Eastern United States in any September ever. um And it's really interesting to see like, oh yeah, I never thought about September as the most hurricane-y month.
00:29:14
Speaker
And here are all the different September hurricanes that have ever hit the East Coast. And it wouldn't work as an animation, right? no An animation that showed storm after storm after storm wouldn't get that sense of, oh, September. There's something going on September. I want to know more about September, right? um And just that way of showing time, i think more in a more sophisticated way, when you have it as a static graphic,
00:29:37
Speaker
um or flow maps or things like that. There's things you can do with static graphs that are just harder to do with animations. And so I think maybe with a three-dimensional thing, it's it's a similar sort of thing. that like There's something fun about the three-dimensional views, there's fun about the animations, um but it actually really limits the kinds of ah kind of analytic graphics we can make. Right.
00:29:59
Speaker
um On this animation or interactive versus static, it's a question I ask a lot of people, which is... ignoring the complexity of the tools.
00:30:10
Speaker
Do you think generally speaking, static maps are harder to create than interactive or animated maps? Uh, I think i don't i don't I don't know that it's about harder or easier.
00:30:22
Speaker
Certainly from a technical point of view, you know making animated maps is hard. Right. there and you Extract from the the tool, the code. ah so ah you know In some ways, the static map, you kind of have to pick a story. Exactly. active And animation or interactivity allows the user to do that. yeah But maybe that's not right for maps, I don't know. i think that i think it is is is basically right. So i think that that having the static map gives you the the both the i say the the option and the opportunity, maybe the obligation as the map maker to figure out what I'm actually trying to show here. yeah yeah And there's no cop out of just, I'm going to show all my data.
00:31:02
Speaker
yeah um And i'm going to let the user figure out what's going on. um And I think there's a larger ethic there too, where there's a lot of projects that are really about trying to get data in the hands of users.
00:31:13
Speaker
um And I think that's generally good i've certainly benefited that a lot from from ah that a lot myself where i can go and just get the data myself rather than having to go through some clunky um government website or whatever um but i think that that can uh that that itself isn't enough right i think that there is something really important about saying i also need to figure out what's in this data set and to try to present that to my audience i can't just dump the data on them and say yeah okay i have you know
00:31:45
Speaker
several advanced degrees and a lot of technical skills, but I'm going to expect that you're going to go through this data better than I can.
Challenges in Map Accessibility and Publication
00:31:51
Speaker
Right. um So for me, it's not, it's not, it's a both and thing, which is like, yes, share the data. Absolutely.
00:31:56
Speaker
um But also I think that there's, I feel obliged actually to say, I'm going to figure out what I think is important here. yeah and to try to then put it together in a way that makes the questions clear, the answers clear and say, I think this is what's important.
00:32:10
Speaker
And this is what I want you to know about it um without then without without also shutting down their ability to to to you know explore themselves. yeah So things like animations, I think that there's, um it's harder to i think it is harder to do that. It's harder to say,
00:32:25
Speaker
this is the thing that I want to focus on because so much of the the bandwidth on the on the screen um is really about just showing this this this flow of information, right? Yeah. I also worry, especially for maps,
00:32:41
Speaker
because they can be so data dense that when you put up an animated or interactive map that requires a lot of bandwidth, that there's a lot of people who don't have the broadband access or they don't have the phone or computer that allows them to sort of see the full the full richness of the project that the person, that the creator sort of intended them to see. And so I worry a little bit, i mean, to the earlier,
00:33:09
Speaker
point you made about the rural urban divide. I mean, you've got a lot of people in rural areas, at least in the United States who don't have good access to the internet. And so if you create this really heavy thing that requires a lot of bandwidth, they're not going to be able to interact with it.
00:33:23
Speaker
I think that's not just true for like literal bandwidth questions. I find it true for myself. Like when I come across, ah you know, even a really cool project, I'm on my laptop.
00:33:34
Speaker
ah It's a nice laptop, um but it's not the huge screen that I think it was probably designed on. Right. um And ah so a lot of times these, you know, dashboardy things, like in the end, it's like a, you know, three by four inch of the screen is what I actually have to deal with. Right. yeah and And it's clunky. It's not, you know, it's it's slow. I don't, I don't, i'm I'm on a good connection. I don't know what the problem is.
00:33:56
Speaker
um But I think some of it is even just the design. Like I think it's designed on a huge screen. yeah um And yeah even on a slightly smaller screen, like my laptop, it just doesn't really work.
00:34:07
Speaker
and And it's a real shame because clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into that. But yeah, I think that my my approach has been to have things that work on the size that I think that they're going to be seen.
00:34:19
Speaker
And then to be able to download a big version of it, again, kind of bit just a big PNGA, you know, a static thing. yeah People can save it. That's a big problem I think with a lot of interactives is that they work for a year or two on the web, something breaks and then they never, and you can't you can't do anything with them.
00:34:38
Speaker
And I think that then even comes back a little bit to architecture and drawing where I'm always reminding myself, reminding students that I work with, ah you gotta check in with the actual you know, dimensions of the thing you're going to be creating.
00:34:55
Speaker
yeah um Instead of saying, I'm going to make, make a kind of a map that works. If you're in this immersive world where you can zoom in and out forever, or I'm going to have a huge 24 by 36 inch screen whatever. Like what about when it's printed in a, in a, on a six by nine inch page yeah mount or it's on a laptop or a, or a phone or whatever. um Yeah. I think that there's a, I see a lot of people making maps that are,
00:35:20
Speaker
kind of require this constant zooming in and out because you can't actually, nothing really works at the at a single zoom level. um I'm curious now that you mentioned that, were there maps or images in the book that you either had to get rid of or you had to go back and recreate so that they would work in the the physical book space?
00:35:41
Speaker
and the size of the page. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So there's definitely maps that didn't get in the book at all because I had designed them as big posters. yeah I had exhibited them as posters. And when you shrink them down, they just, yeah it didn't work, right? yeah um And then there's plenty of maps where I had to go back and redo you know the the the text, the line work, all that kind of stuff to make them work. I can just imagine how fun that was for you. Oh, it was... Back to old code. Oh, my God. um
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, but you're right. It was necessary, right? And there's a few times when I couldn't do and I just said, okay, this is going to be two-point font, and one's going to be able to read it. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. There's times when I would share the whole thing and then I would show a detail in large.
00:36:27
Speaker
ah But yeah, no, I had to really think this is a book with certain dimensions. It's on paper or maybe it's an ebook, but still it's, you know, you shouldn't have to zoom in on the on the on the PDF when you're reading it.
00:36:39
Speaker
um And that meant really going back and and doing a lot of lot of work on old projects for sure. Yeah. um The other question I wanted to ask specifically about the book was on um the stories in here. So like there are, the I think this is why it was kind of easy for me to read it cover to cover because there are stories sort of almost kind of throughout. It's not like every chapter leads with a story, then you get into the content. It's like that story is the through line throughout the the whole book. And there's a really interesting story about um maybe Robinson, I think. of the rock robinsonship Yeah, Yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker
Was there, or is there a story that you still really like? Like, is there one that really like for you is the, is the one that, you know, is your favorite?
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah. i feel your and you know yeah yeah well I think that the mapping of Northern Canada is probably my favorite. Yeah. um So you're right that there's, there's some that kind of ah come come and go throughout the book. or Robinson is a character that appears in many chapters. Um,
00:37:42
Speaker
And the the Inuit mapping in northern Canada, that's a more self-contained thing. um But i I really like it for a few reasons. One, I think that there's there's a lot of scholarship about indigenous mapping.
00:37:56
Speaker
um And when I zoom into the particularities of that rather famous case, at the conclusions I reach, I think, are are pretty different. than if I think about indigenous mapping in a kind of abstract sense. um I also think just the maps are super cool in a way that wasn't, as I say in the book, was not actually like intentional. I think the people who made, I know the people who made the maps kind of didn't like them.
00:38:19
Speaker
and They were kind of apologetic about, you know, oh, it didn't quite work. It's about, And but I think that the way that it didn't work is really interesting. So they were mapping, they did all these interviews with Inuit hunters about where they had found certain species of a wildlife in their in their life as a hunter.
00:38:36
Speaker
And then they combined all those interviews to make little blobs of, you know here's where the Inuit have hunted caribou or ptarmigan or whatever it is. And then they layered them on a map and they to show you know areas that had been used by the Inuit in recorded memory or in lived memory.
00:38:56
Speaker
And what i find so interesting was that the maps are ah completely completely make a hash of the the the boundary between land and water. yeah It's really hard to sit like,
00:39:08
Speaker
it's so it's a it's ah it's kind of unnerving in a kind of nice way, right? Like it doesn't work as a map that shows here are the, you know, here's the recognizable map and i'm going to shade it in based on where Inuit have found certain species. the The data kind of obliterates the background.
00:39:26
Speaker
yeah um And I found it so interesting how important that was politically in the negotiations that the Inuit had with the Canadian government for actually... creating different kinds of wildlife management agencies for having a different understanding of territory that included ice and water, not just land.
00:39:43
Speaker
um So there was a way in which the the mapping really made a real difference. Not because, ah again, not because of the topics, not because of the sort of conviction of the map makers, but because the graphics themselves made it easier to see the world in a certain way and harder to see the world in the more traditional way. And that that really had ah a lot of a lot of traction. um But in the end, I also just think like, I think the maps in that is list are really interesting and really cool.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Because because they're not, they they don't do the thing that you, might you know, maps like that would usually do. yeah Right, right. They they blur the the the border, I mean, literally the border between land and water.
00:40:23
Speaker
yeah Yeah, exactly. and mean Exactly. Yeah. um And, ah and there's a few other examples of like, like that in the book of there's the one I'm particularly I'm thinking of this NASA data set of cloud cover um with this just a, you know, you take cloud cover, think it was October, 2009, whatever it was.
00:40:42
Speaker
um And it's really interesting how certain ah boundaries between continents and oceans are really crisp and really clear. and You see them in the data and others completely are are blurred. um And it's just like, i think it's actually a really interesting way of thinking about the world in a different way. Right? Yeah. yeah So it's not like I'm,
00:41:01
Speaker
only making maps where the the you know coastlines are invisible. But I do think that that's it's really interesting to see maps that work really well, even when they obliterate certain taken for granted ideas about you know background legibility. We have to have the coastlines because every map has to have coastlines. Right.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tools of the Trade and Final Thoughts
00:41:21
Speaker
I would end there, but I do have one more question for you because I think, I think listeners are interested on the tool sets that you use. You already mentioned illustrator and, and ArcGIS, but what is your toolkit and how does your toolkit maybe differ for like, I've just got to make this map for, you know, this academic journal versus I'm going to go in and make a poster and installation or something. Yeah, sure. So I, I don't think I'm alone and in, in, in, uh, you know towering the virtues of using lots of different programs each for what they're good for rather than going all in for for one thing. I think I made ah i've made one map ever that was just in ArcGIS and it was terrible.
00:42:03
Speaker
It was terrible. like I'm never doing this again. it was so hard and it looks like crap. um So yeah I use text editors. I have a couple different text editors actually. There's one that I haven't used in a while, but it's called JujuEdit, where it doesn't actually load the file into memory. um So you can open like a co two gigabyte file and just you know ah just deal with the headers, for example. And I have other text files that are more traditional. They load the whole thing into memory um i use ah spreadsheets for lots of different things, not just for spreadsheet stuff, but um as I was saying to before we started recording, I've used the spreadsheets sometimes to cobble together Python code. And then I cut and paste from the spreadsheet into the Python box. I use ArcGIS. I use Illustrator. I use Photoshop.
00:42:50
Speaker
And then putting putting a stuff on the web, yeah I wouldn't say I'm an expert on JavaScript or D3, but I've done enough of those kinds of things. Back in the day, I used Flash. So it's a whole bunch of different things. I would say it's pretty typical to say, you know i'll i'll tell I'll start with a text editor.
00:43:05
Speaker
I'll do some stuff with spreadsheet. I'll take it to into ArcGIS. um I think the thing, though, is I try to get it out of ArcGIS as quickly as I can. um because it's just not a graphics program in the end. um And so i will I will take things, if I'm going to do layering or transparency, that goes into Photoshop.
00:43:23
Speaker
Final colors happen usually in Photoshop because the color pickers are just better. I can see the real-time adjustments. And then I take it from Photoshop into Illustrator where i do the text, the line work. that kind of thing. okay um But there's plenty of projects um where I don't use ArcGIS at all and I'm just drawing it. um So I will bring in an existing map, ah trace over it in Illustrator and then you know delete the background, um things like that. So ah yeah, i i think ArcGIS is super powerful, super helpful. i use it all the time. There's things that I could not do without it.
00:43:56
Speaker
um But I think people are often surprised by how the the kinds of maps I've made without it at all and how I really, that the less I can use it, I think the happier I am with the results because then I'm really thinking about what am I trying to to to show rather than how am I wrestling with the the data? Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, great. um Well, before I let you go, um obviously people should read the book. If they have questions for you, if they want you to come give a talk or teach class or consult where, um or they just want to ask you question, where can they, where can they find or Where can they get ahold of Yeah. So, you know, most of these maps are on my website, radicalcartography.net. But I, I, I'm, I'm, I teach at Yale. You can Google me.
00:44:39
Speaker
I've got a faculty bio, there's my email address is there, my inbox is is open. so I'm a very Google-led person. and yeah i love I love hearing from people. and Actually, one of the things that I think ah you can see in the in the book um is a lot of the the mapping projects started by people emailing me saying, I'm interested in this, can you show me this? Can you give me a different version of that? so I think that's really helpful and really generative. and I think I've gotten as much from those kinds of interactions as I have just some stuff on my own.
00:45:08
Speaker
So yeah, I totally welcome it. Awesome. Bill, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. I really love the book and congrats on it. And thanks again for coming on. Well, thanks, John, for having me.
00:45:19
Speaker
This was great. Thanks for tuning in everybody. Hope enjoyed that episode. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Bill Rankin. Please check out his book, Radical Cartography, wherever you get books. It's really a great read. Like I said, I read it cover to cover on New Year's Day.
00:45:35
Speaker
Flipped a little back and forth between reading a couple chapters, watching the end of Stranger Things, back to the book, back to Stranger Things. I think it's a great book, a must add to your data visualization library.
00:45:48
Speaker
That's all I got for you. No more things for me to ask of you. You know what I mean by that. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.