Also! With some friendly help, I have succeeded in finally setting up an RSS feed for those who would like notification when new things are added to the site. There should be an RSS link in your browser’s address bar, or you can just click here to subscribe. And feel free to contact me with any questions, suggestions, or problems! (I’m still learning how this works.)


03-23-08
Continuing the fun I had with histograms, I made a series of graphs showing how the U.S. population is distributed by density, according to race and ethnicity, age, income, gender and family, and land area. For the most part these graphs just offer quantitative confirmation of some patterns that I’ve always assumed to be true, but they make it possible to pinpoint exactly which densities are inflection points. They also avoid the problem of trying to decide where, for example, "New York City" ends and something else begins; by looking at all fifty states together, the edges of the city become an demographic question, not a political one.

Given infinite time, I would love to do similar analysis for different regions, or compare the U.S. to other countries. Time, however, is not infinite, and I must set these questions aside for now. But if you know of others who have done similar work, definitely let me know!


03-15-08
It’s springtime! An assortment of new offerings:

I expanded upon my earlier map of nuclear explosions, adding maps of nuclear reactors and uranium.

I’ve also been having fun with geographic histograms. I’ve made some of land, population, and elevation.

For a while I’ve been making things for Wikipedia, but never really felt they had a good place here. So I made some simple galleries for maps of physical geography, American history, and census demographics.

I added poster versions of the American Indian and my cities maps, for your downloading enjoyment, and fixed some little problems with the suicide maps.

Finally, perhaps you will appreciate some of my dry humor.

More news and additions coming soon! Stay tuned.


11-10-07
I’ve had some fun recently using my terrestrial software to map the stars. Mostly I’ve just been playing around, but I made a quick series comparing the various ways that Chinese, Greek, and modern Western astronomers have carved up the sky. I’m continuing to play with other systems from Indian (really, Vedic), Egyptian, and Islamic astronomy; perhaps I’ll be able to add to the series.

One thing I’m not yet satisfied with: a better solution for the Greek sky would be to show the outline drawings from the Farnese, Mainz, or Kugel globes (the only ancient Greek graphics that survive), since connect-the-dot line patterns weren’t used in the West until the nineteenth century (the earliest I’ve found so far is 1831). But there don’t seem to be the right kinds of photos available, and using images from an early modern atlas seems problematic. Alas.

Oh, and I also found a place for J. Paul Goode.


09-02-07
And voilà! A new wall map of the territory of the United States, equal parts a presentation of territories and a meditation on the idea of “territory.” It’s a wall map. I’ve been making wall maps lately, and finding the information density quite satisfying. I decided not to retool this map for easy web viewing, since that would be another project.


08-21-07
It’s been a long hiatus, but my cartography lately has been diverted elsewhere — to print, to wikipedia, to my walls. But here's a trio of new maps in time for the new school year: a campus map of Boston, air pollution in the US, and nuclear explosions since 1945. Let me know what you think!

I also posted a fun new version of the US–Europe scale comparison, fixed some problems with my maps of income donuts and toponymy in the Americas, and put the polyconic projection where it belongs in the table of projections.

As for my other life as a wikipedian, here are links to my maps of world drainage basins, antipodes, the geoid, the Adams-Onís Treaty, and the National Road. They're meant as relatively straightforward infographics; they're more illustrative than radical, but hopefully useful nonetheless.

Hopefully soon I'll have more to share, some of which will probably be in paper form.


08-29-06
Having returned from their wedding, I feel it's now safe to post the wall map of Chicagoland I made for my friends Robin and John, who are moving there as I type.

Also added some lovely old maps of rail lines in Berlin, infrastructure in Potzdamer Platz, and the course of the Truelove River.

And why not a reference table of common map projections? There are plenty of sites out there that give good explanations of all manner of projections; my table is meant mostly as a cheat-sheet to see what can be done with ArcGIS.

And speaking of fun projections....


08-24-06
And voilà! Here's the Statistical Atlas of the Ninth Census, mirrored from the Library of Congress in a more user-friendly format. Enjoy!


08-21-06
Added a couple of quick maps to the series on empire: a map of various currency pegs circa 2002, and a fun map of all the currency symbols in use today. If you know more about international finance than I do, I'd love it if you'd drop me a line and let me know if I've missed something about the significance of pegs and managed floats. Enjoy!

And thanks to Neil for provoking a new version of the "US Empire" map, with a lot more data on military installations. I threw in a little mouseover as well, just for kicks. There are definitely still a lot of bases not on the map (the US has something like 800 overseas installations), but it now shows everything over 10 acres or a budget of $10m — the DOD's own cut-off for line-item inventory. Bases and operations in the Middle East may be a bit inaccurate, but authoritative data is probably going to be a wee bit classified. Same is true for things like anti-drug radar stations in South America.

Also added a mouseover to the "Economic Footprint" map showing US aid money as a percentage of GDP.


07-25-06
A surprising email from an old friend brings a splendid map of the rail lines in Chicago circa 1955, and the authors have graciously agreed to let it join the rest of the site. Thanks folks! Keep 'em coming.

I also massaged some text sizes and column widths for better readability. Thoughts? Let me know.


07-18-06
Some more fun with income distribution, this time as scale comparisons of cities' income hinterlands. My primary goal was to compare "donut" cities with "wedge" cities, though perhaps only urban theorists will be surprised to learn that not all cities are the same. But I'm also interested in the relative sizes of the "donuts" and the "wedges." I have no solid numbers, but it looks like poverty donuts all tend to have about a five-mile radius, regardless of the size of the city. Perhaps this is the practical limit for commuting without a car?


05-26-06
Did a big update to the Boston wall map showing income distribution. The idea being to make it look as much as possible like a "real" map, which only upon inspection reveals atypical information about the city. It's also very useful for cycling, planning beach outings, and exploring Old New England. Perhaps it even fills the need for a reasonable wall map of the city? If you'd like a full-size copy (36"x42"), let me know and I'll see what I can do.


05-21-06
I was a guest this afternoon on BBC Radio 4, talking about the history of time zones and the time-zone map. Have a listen! It's about 15 mintues long.


04-25-06
Thanks to Spencer Blackman, I've added a couple grainy photos of a lovely catalog from a skater-culture collective showing the world as seen by swedish skaters.


04-03-06
I've added one more map to my Manhattan series, this time showing development with respect to zoning instead of the purely theoretical "perfect market" metric of my earlier "underdevelopment" map. A special thanks to Josh Jackson for provoking the map!

Having received some complaints about a wonky interface, I've also redone all the code for the site. Everything should work better now. Let me know if something doesn't seem right.

As a follow-up to some of my thoughts about how to map minority population distributions, I did a quick series for Wikipedia showing the distribution of (self-reported) whites, blacks, asians, hispanics, American indians and Alaska natives, and native Hawaiians and other Pacific islanders. You can find them on my wikipedia user page.


03-17-06
Another great map of driving around North America, this time contributed by Erik Botsford. Thanks Erik! If you have your own version, let me know and I'll find a place for it.


02-27-06
Another loose end: added a mouseover for the American Indian Reservations page showing the actual population distribution of American Indians and Alaska Natives from the 2000 Census. Only around one-eighth live on reservations (about 538,300 of 4.4m - see this fact sheet from 2005). The map is meant as a critique of the Census Bureau's maps that show minority population as percentage of total population by county, which are good for estimating local political influence but make it difficult to understand where people actually live.

Also added a similar mouseover to the county-boundary page, and a nifty link to an animation of county formation in the US. Too bad the animation is too fast, with no running dates or graphical key.


02-19-06
Tying up a loose end by adding a series showing all the annexations to the city of Boston, from the addition of South Boston in 1804 to Hyde Park in 1912. Even though this makes the "Boston Figure/Ground" page much more about expansion that figure and ground, that's how it will remain for now.


02-14-06
For Valentine's Day I'm posting an incredible collection of maps from our academic friends in cultural geography, a two-volume set of Scratch Atlases for an atlas of North American culture in the 1970s. The atlases are posted here with the permission of some of the orginal editors (all those I could locate who responded to my inquiry), under the assumption that they will not be used for commercial purposes.

I'm also putting up a map of roads in vancouver, color-coded by naming convention. And here's a shout-out to Nola, for whom I made the map.


01-31-06
Manhattan! I'm not sure I've got quite the right metric, but I'm trying to evaluate the real estate market and see the effect of government intervention, both through zoning and through publicly financed projects (everything from city hall to housing projects). So a three-map series: Building Heights, Land Value, and what I'm calling Underdevelopment. I know tax assessment data is funny business, and doesn't actually measure "value" in the typical sense, but hopefully the general patterns are still valid. If you're an economist and know something I don't, e-mail me.


01-30-06
Another fun map of travels through North America, this time thanks to the peripatetic Jake Day. Thanks, Jake!


01-25-06
The art collective "placekraft" has contributed a bunch of great maps of countless anonymous non-places: malls, airports, stores, and museums.

Added as well a quick map of my travels through North America. Almost all in the same car, no less.. a car which by now has certainly seen better days.

And a big thanks to gothamist for posting a couple of my Manhattan maps!


11-14-05
Thanks to Metafilter for listing radicalcartography! And thanks for all your e-mail!


10-27-05
Heh! Looks like radicalcartography was picked as the Cool Site of the Day today by the non-commercial-web hunters at Coolstop.com. Nifty!


08-08-05
Here's a quick figure/ground map of Boston; a pretty version and an informative version in mouseover relation (i'll let you decide which is which). They still need a bit of work, but I don't quite know where to take them just yet. And here's a quick map of the British Empire in 1921.



08-01-05
I freely admit that I fetishize the subways. (She is a porno, after all.) So here's a scale comparison of all the systems in North America, all drawn at the same scale and with the same criteria.



07-10-05
Added maps of greater Boston's income distribution and Megalopolises in the United States. Bigger maps mean more big files and high-res TIFs, but hopefully everyone has broadband by now anyway? I don't know how I feel about all these GIS-inflected maps just yet.. it seems that too many decisions are already made. But there's no other way to get shloads of data onto a small area of your screen. Alas.



06-05-05
I'm on a roll.. here's a look at the concentration and increasing transnational quality of the North American rail network.



06-01-05
Finally done with exams, and trying once again to come up with ideas of my own. But not without a little help from my newfound econometrics and GIS skillz. So here's a map of the US Economic Footprint in 2003, some purely qualitative maps on crop and animal production, and a look at suicide by geography and gender, with a shout-out to my brother.



10-08-04
Changed the "Interstates" map to a marginally more interesting overlay of the interstates and the Amtrak system.



10-04-04
Added a map of my Berlin as I lived it this summer. A couple of my big bikerides go outside the limits of the 18-mile square, but it doesn't seem worth rethinking the series all over again, especially since there's the nagging issue of Houston "Bush" Intercontinental Airport, which I visited pretty regularly in Houston, but is like 30 miles from the rest of the map. Right now it's a big purple arrow. And such it will stay.



4-17-04
AHAH! Work has kept me away for quite a while, but it is time for an update. First, and most exciting, I finally changed the domain name from the discordant www.radicalcartography.org to the more appropriate www.radicalcartography.net! How exciting.

And I've added a thing or two:

· Some more citations.
· And a lot more links, including:
· A link to MapJunction and their layered mapping of Boston (for which we should thank Chris W.).
· Finally, a quick map of the US Empire.




11-14-03
Added a link to a logarithmic "map" of the universe made by some physics pholks at Princeton.



12-19-03
Posted Jacob Shell's thoughts and proposal for the future of the Boston T. The question is one of density, and of what a mass transit system is for (and what the difference is between train, bus, car, commuter rail..). No doubt there's more to be done.. stay tuned.

Also added a link to the EPA's Hazardous Waste Mapping (thank Chris for the link).




11-14-03
And lo! The show got some ink. Scroll to the bottom.



11-9-03
There will be a RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY show this week at the Adams House Artspace at Harvard. Come one come all! Thursday, November 13th, 7-9 pm. Here is a map to the space. Email me with questions.



9-14-03
Added a link to a Starbucks Avoidance Map, by Ian Dallas. And Emily is now gratefully acknowledged for providing it.

Also added a link to a map of the noise level of every outdoor space in Paris, an incredible feat of obsession and 3D visualization. Thanks to Alex for forwarding the link.



9-13-03
Okay, so I think I'm going to keep my anality at bay and keep the existing domain, perhaps changing it when this one expires. It's only like eight dollars, I know, but the line must be drawn somewhere, no?



9-12-03
Did a major update of the site. Will soon have a new, less problematic domain name (thank Alex), transfered the files to my own webspace (so there will be more frequent updating), added a "favicon" for us loyal netscapers (without paying their silly $75), and fiddled a fair amount with the javascript. You probably won't see much difference, but it's now possible to link directly to each page (before you always had to navigate from index.html, due to the frames). Whether this will prove useful is debatable, but I feel better about it. Still haven't figured out a way to have a useful address appear in the location bar (right now you have to click on "RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY" first).. any ideas would be welcome, but I'm beginning to think it's not possible without reloading the whole page (which kind of defeats the purpose of these frames).

Perhaps I was also being too optimistic about the whole "other people besides me will have things to contribute" aspect of the site.. I think I'm becoming more comfortable with it just as my site, and not trying to make it into some warm fuzzy e-commune.

I also added a bunch of content. Namely:

· The entire "Yummy" section. Hopefully this will nudge the content a bit more towards the "radical" instead of just "obsessive" (especially since "analysis" definitely wasn't going anywhere). Email me if you want to add something! (or if you have a better idea for the name of this section)
· A better take on the Native American Reservations
· A new series of Personal Maps
· An attempt to investigate the Squares vs. the T in Boston
· The evolution of Area Codes since 1947
· I also animated my Friends
· And researched American Place-Name Etymologies



4-21-03
Well, yeah. I made the site.