Cartogrammar

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

Andy Woodruff — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:14:14 +0000

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 web that really explains this problem in clear detail. We talk about Mercator choropleth maps often enough, and the idea of them ranges from ill-advised to anathema, but we hardly go beyond simply saying “it’s bad because areas are distorted.”

So, two things. First, we could stand to share knowledge better, cartographers! Everyone is pretty good at sharing code and data these days, but we fall short on sharing the why of things, especially those of us who went to school for this and everything.

Second, an attempt at uncovering the problems with choropleth mapping on the Mercator projection.

Now, perhaps nobody really talks about why small-scale Mercator choropleths are bad because the gist of the reason is intuitive enough: bigger looks like “more,” so any map projection that distorts area (especially as severely as Mercator does) will make some values look exaggerated and will thus be misinterpreted. Size comparison is at the heart of many types of statistical graphics, and obviously relative sizes need to be correct for the whole concept to make any sense at all.

Indeed, this sometimes applies to areal mapping, for example “land-use or similar mapping in which a measure of the area occupied by some distribution is crucial to map interpretation” (Muehrcke and Muehrcke, Map Use 3rd ed.). If you need to compare areas, areas cannot be distorted. (Never mind that humans are terrible at estimating and comparing areas of irregular shapes, from what I hear.)

In the typical choropleth map, however, area is not directly the visual variable of interest, and we are not trying to measure it. Still we assume that relative sizes need to be true in order for the map to work. How do we know that? Well, I’m not sure. I flipped through all my cartography textbooks and to my surprise it’s not that I forgot the evidence for this—it’s that they really don’t cite anything on the subject. We accept it on faith and common sense, apparently, although I’d bet a shiny nickel that someone somewhere has done empirical studies to confirm it, or that somewhere buried in How Maps Work is an explanation. Please, if anybody can point me to some of the research behind all this, it would be appreciated!

It turns out, then, that this is not just an internet problem. A textbook education in cartography will not teach you, in scientific terms, why a choropleth Mercator map is worse than a choropleth sinusoidal map or a proportional symbol map. Interpretation of area in quantitative maps gets no quantitative explanation; instead it gets basically the same treatment as propaganda maps and the whole Peters thing, which paraphrased boils down to “bigger things totally look more prominent and important because they’re bigger.” Semiology of Graphics is the only book I have that really addresses size directly and as matter of fact—noting among other things that “it is not possible to disregard it visually” and “in any map representing areas of unequal size, what is seen is [quantity] multiplied by the size of the area”—but even if he was correct, Bertin was pretty much making things up.

Mentioned more commonly but no more deeply explained is the need to normalize data to account for area in choropleth maps, i.e., not mapping counts. Considering this rule, the projection requirement, and a host of “ideal” enumeration unit characteristics, choropleth mapping just starts to sound like a terrible idea for anything at all. Size variation that is not directly related to numerical variation seems to cause nothing but problems. Danny Dorling’s arguments for cartograms and mapping human phenomena in human space, not geographic space, start to sound appealing.

Too bad cartograms are also kind of awful.

Free as in painstaking cartography labor

Andy Woodruff — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:41:56 +0000

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 piece of advice (which isn’t as obvious as it should be) to aspiring map people: cartography skills are valuable, as in dollar bills.

Hence my—and some peers’—disappointment in the most recent “challenge” from the MBTA, Greater Boston’s transit agency. To summarize a somewhat lengthy description page, they are essentially seeking new design ideas for their standard subway map—in the space of three weeks, for free, and with no rights retained by the cartographer. And if you win this contest? You get… um, fleeting glory, apparently.

I want to like the idea. The MBTA carries crippling debt, and as a somewhat regular user of the system I don’t want to see its service diminished or my fares increased, so I applaud any other funding or savings. But—and I’m looking for some kind of “third rail” wordplay here—this time they strike a nerve with those of us who have mapping jobs.

The T has run contests before. The most successful was a few years ago at the dawn of its open data age, resulting in some cool visualizations and interesting apps using schedule data, which shortly thereafter was supplanted by real-time tracking. These previous contests, though, were very much about openness. Yes, the clever angle was to get the community to create products at no cost to the agency, but at least these products were not owned by the agency. And there totally were prizes.

From the outside it’s easy to mistake modern cartography for a free endeavor driven by some desire to improve the world. Indeed, we do have a few altruistic motives, and the latest trends are all about openness: open data, open source code, etc. But even these things are not always free. Free to use, yes, but often enough someone has paid for them to be made in the first place. And this model doesn’t really apply to design. Good design is a part of any project, open or not, but when the job itself is design, we don’t jump at the chance to do it for someone else without compensation just because it’s fun. Like everyone else in the world, we do this to earn a living.

In short, if you can design a subway map that’s good enough for millions of people to use on a daily basis, you are very good at this. Maps are easy. Good maps are not. Your skills are valuable. Make maps for fun when it’s for your own satisfaction or for the causes you champion, but recognize your worth when it’s for others’ satisfaction. And make them recognize your worth, too.

In any case, while we’re on the subject, do enjoy Cameron Booth’s MBTA map redesign—which the MBTA can’t have for free—and Peter Dunn’s time-based map.

Silence breaker, 2012 edition

Andy Woodruff — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 04:21:19 +0000

I don’t use this blog much at all these days. As far as blogs go, more of my efforts have gone toward the Axis Maps blog and Bostonography. But in the interest of this site having any purpose at all, I figured I’d jot down some of the things I’ve been up to lately.

Hubway trip explorer map: An exploratory tool to see where trips occur in Boston’s bike sharing system. It’s a fairly simple map done in Leaflet that connects to a database of some 550,000 trips and allows the user to filter by a variety of factors of time, demographics, and weather. This was for a contest run by Hubway and MAPC and it won the “Best Data Exploration Tool” award. (Be sure to see the other winners and all the rest!) Finally actually used one of the bikes the other day; pretty convenient!
Hubway infographics: For the same contest I also put together a few infographics. There are some pretty bogus charts in there, but I wanted to try my hand and infographicky things, and it was kind of fun.
“Why Not The Best” map: We (Axis Maps) completely rebuilt a map we had done with IPRO in Flash a year or two before. Kind of an enjoyable project because I learned a lot of JavaScript mapping techniques; it was only my second real js map project. It’s done with Leaflet and does a bunch of canvas and tile stuff: read all about it.
New typographic maps: I didn’t really work on these except for proofreading, but we put out four new typographic map posters this summer: London, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Minneapolis. One that I did work on is a letterpress print of the Boston typographic map.
Crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries: A pretty fascinating project looking at the ill-defined boundaries of Boston’s neighborhoods. We made a simple online survey tool in which people can draw neighborhood boundaries as they see them. I mapped some of the data earlier this year, finding where there is consensus (and how much) in each neighborhood.
NACIS Practical Cartography Day: At the NACIS conference in Portland in October, I gave a Practical Cartography Day presentation with some tips and thoughts on user interface design for interactive maps, a topic not often addressed there for some reason. The link here goes to the accompanying examples and also has the presentation slides. (Also, I’ll be a co-chair of PCD next year; looking forward to working on that!)
“The Aesthetician and the Cartographer”: A rant, sort of, about the superficial view of cartography, and an encouragement to speak more about the why of our maps, not just the how.
Newspaper: I had one essay sort of thing for the Boston Globe this summer. Tim Wallace and I occasionally do little features for the Ideas section, but usually one of us has made a map. This time it was about some old-timey satire. That link may require a subscription; I’m not sure. Here’s the blog post that it’s based on.
On the nature of web cartography: This link is already a year old, but it’s a recurring topic. Last year I spoke to cartography students at Middlebury College about the processes and philosophies we have at Axis Maps, along with a few practical tidbits. This spring I spoke about similar things to cartography students back in good old Science Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Send me your high-tech mapping tutorials! I am the section editor for “On the Horizon” in Cartographic Perspectives. We’re still looking for tutorial submissions to this section, so hook us up!
Atlas of Design plug: This is not my work, but it deserves many plugs! The Atlas of Design, edited by Daniel Huffman and Tim Wallace, came together quite nicely and was launched at the NACIS conference. It features 27 awesome maps selected from the many submissions they received. Actually, you can’t get it now because it’s sold out, but put yourself on a waitlist to encourage a second printing.

The end of imagination

Andy Woodruff — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 16:01:06 +0000

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 a bit via the map, as I am wont to do with any map in front of me. I found what looked like some busy spots, identified the famous Harvard University, and so on. It was a strange, unknown place—a city I only knew in person as a collection of buildings glimpsed from highways or from across the river in Boston, where I had been a number of times. It was mostly only a place on a map, and it was up to my imagination to picture what it was like to be there.

Aerial image of Harvard Square, dated 2001 in Google Earth.

Then, some years later, circumstances brought me to Cambridge as a resident. Now a further four years after that, I obviously have a much different image of the city. I love this place, and I’m glad I’ve come to know it well, but there’s no longer any mystique. I kind of miss imaginary Cambridge.

Part of maps’ broad appeal is that they are captivating as canvases for imagination. They can represent lands we’ve never seen, offering a simple lattice of information but requiring us to fill in the gaps in our minds. We can explore maps and “know” places to be as fantastic as our minds will allow. Ultimately, I think, it leads us to explore the places in reality, and it can be shocking when reality doesn’t match our imagined expectations. The shock is not necessarily bad and may even be pleasant (except when, say, imaginary beauty turns out to be a trash-strewn real world); but if you’re like me, you lament the demise of the place your mind invented, even if the reality that supplanted it is better.

As web reference maps move toward less and less abstracted representations of the world, some observers have begun to wonder whether people are losing the interest or need to go to explore real places and experience them in real life, because Street View can show you exactly what a place looks like, or Twitter maps can tell you exactly what people are talking about there, and so forth. I remain optimistic that modern maps will not be a substitute for reality, but rather will draw people in to experience what they know is happening in different places. The maps of old may have tantalized people with their sea monsters and blank spaces, but people didn’t stop climbing mountains when someone else had mapped their slopes with precision, and I didn’t avoid walking around town because I had already seen people-level aerial photos. Knowing what’s out there is as much of a draw as not knowing.

No, the victim in the march toward realistic maps is not real-world experience; the victim is imagination and a bit of the fun of reading maps. I don’t cease to imagine places when looking at a map. It’s just that my imagination is increasingly accurate. It used to be that for every place in the world there were actually two places: one in my mind and one on the ground. Soon, perhaps, there will be only one.

RIP, the last imaginary place on Earth.

Submit to the Atlas of Design

Andy Woodruff — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:09:28 +0000

This is a quick plug for a new publication being put together by NACIS (the North American Cartographic Information Society, also known as the most awesome bunch of cartographers anywhere): the Atlas of Design, which will feature “cartography at its most beautiful, its cleverest, its sharpest, and its most intriguing.” It’ll be the best coffee table book ever!

A couple of our favorite cartographers are out there now rounding up work from all of our other favorite cartographers. If you’ve got a map to show off, submit it for consideration! If you know people who have maps to show off, encourage them to submit! The deadline is February 24; see all the instructions on the Atlas site.

Do it!

Things I hope you want: this year’s typographic maps

Andy Woodruff — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:13:52 +0000

Permit me one avaricious advertisement of a blog post this holiday season. We at Axis Maps have several new typographic city maps that have come out since the summer, and, well, we think they make super gifts. Here are the ones I haven’t mentioned on the blog before.

Chicago letterpress: Two-color prints of the downtown area, with a light blue background on the lake and rivers and either blue or black ink for the text. An addition from the poster prints is the inclusion of the ‘L’ transit lines.

San Francisco letterpress (2nd edition): In either blue or black ink, this one features a waterline effect around the city.

Manhattan letterpress: Two sections, upper and lower Manhattan. Available individually or as a set; with careful cutting you could splice them together and everything will properly line up.

Madison, Wisconsin: The old Axis Maps stomping grounds and home of our graduate institution, the University of Wisconsin. This one is a regular offset print and covers the isthmus and university areas.

Besides those we’ve got our old standard posters: Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

So there it is. Get in any orders by this Friday to ensure delivery by Christmas!

Cartogrammar is stupid

Andy Woodruff — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 03:49:36 +0000

Three or four years in, I’m sick of that “Cartogrammar” name. I’m abandoning it and using my own name instead: andywoodruff.com.

Back in 2007, or maybe 2008, I agonized over choosing a domain name. Those were wild days, a time when we all had to try to compete with the more badass names of our friends’ websites (e.g., or really i.e., indiemaps). Eventually I settled on Cartogrammar for its mild wordplay. It was about the grammar of cartography or some such nonsense. It never was a cool name and I never did invent a meaning for it, but even worse is that it sounds like it has to do with cartograms, which I kind of hate. And why try to give myself branding, anyway? I’m already part of a company that has a name. Using my own name for a domain name seemed dull a few years ago, but now dot-comming myself just seems to make sense.

No bookmarks or anything are dying here. The new domain simply points to the same place as cartogrammar.com, so everything continues to work as usual. Just wanted to note that I’m dropping the Cartogrammar name from the site and that from now on I prefer to link to andywoodruff.com instead. (While I was at these changes, by the way, I made some updates to my portfolio page.)

See you in hell, Cartogrammar!

Cartography and NACIS 2011

Andy Woodruff — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:11:06 +0000

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 time I’ve been thinking about it as a good representation of the state of American cartography. Even if you don’t care about the conference, bear with me as I hit on a few of its points and contemplate their significance to the field.

How does design make a difference?
This was the tagline of the conference, and I’m not sure there was much of an answer. It’s not an easy question, really. We all agree that good design can make a difference over bad design, but what is design? Can we make maps with an absence of design, and if so what difference does design make over non-design?

Let’s assume there is some agreed-upon definition of “design” and think about what it means that this was the theme of the conference. In an era when it’s not always clear what a “cartographer” is, here is a core group self-identified cartographers identifying themselves as designers. I’m among them and have encountered surprise when describing cartography to the uninitiated as by and large a design practice. Maybe now that anyone is a mapmaker, this attitude is what defines cartography. Maybe that’s how design makes a difference. Cartography isn’t making a map; it’s designing a map.

Art in cartography
Or maybe a cartographer is an artist. Tim Wallace organized a session on art in modern cartography, a topic that has come up many times over the years but this time stemmed from a series of blog posts that Tim instigated this past spring.

It continues to be an interesting debate because of its technological facets. Daniel Huffman argued for the art in “human cartography,” lamenting computer automation, which to be honest I see as a bit of a straw man. Aaron Straup Cope, if I am not misinterpreting his points, noted that newfangled ubiquitous, easy mapping creates more room for artistic cartography now that we don’t need to put all our efforts toward painstakingly accurate maps for navigation and the like.

Practical Cartography Day
The main NACIS conference is preceded by a day of more workshoppy talks, which this time I think comprised a representative slice of modern cartography. There was some of the usual fare, tips for traditional print or desktop cartography such as Alex Tait’s top ten reference cheat sheets. But nearly half the talks dealt with web cartography, with several hot shots covering hot topics. They included Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso of Stamen, AJ Ashton of Development Seed (I mean, have you read anything about web cartography lately that doesn’t mention TileMill?), Adam DuVander of the Map Scripting book, and my good pals Jeremy White of the New York Times and (with a presentation that alone was worth the price of admission) Zachary Forest Johnson of GeoIQ and other fame.

Thanks to cool guys Tim Wallace and Sam Pepple for crafting this session so well!

The new crowd
Speaking of those guys, in the six years that I’ve known NACIS I’ve been pleased to see how the membership has evolved to better reflect the reality of modern cartography. At the 2006 NACIS meeting, which was also in Madison and was the first one I attended, Schuyler Erle was invited to give a keynote address. He spoke, as was his wont, about the democratized cartography afforded by things like the still young Google Maps. Listening to the murmurs around the room, one could hear that many of the old school cartographers—the core constituency of NACIS—were appalled by the idea of amateur non-cartographers making maps. But now we seem to welcome these types, as it’s been proven that some of the best cartography is coming from people without cartography backgrounds but rather, often, web backgrounds. It is excellent to see, for instance, Messrs. Cope (who is “from the Internet”) and Migurski (who gave the keynote two years ago) from Stamen showing up among the “mainstream” cartographers, if that’s the right word. Even almighty Google now has a presence.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing how my generation of bona fide cartographers helps shape the community. We’re the ones who are trained in cartography but during this explosive period of web mapping, which perhaps gives us a different perspective on the field from that of the more established cartographers. NACIS meetings are attended by a fair number of students as well as people like me who are only a few years out of school, and some of them already have pretty strong and active voices.

Teaching cartography
So far in this post I’ve mostly ignored the academic side of cartography, and I should mention that NACIS comprises a mix of professionals and academics. For me the most fascinating session at this year’s conference was one that brought together both types: a panel discussion on teaching cartography. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never had such an easy time staying awake at a conference session. Many topics and challenges were discussed, like teaching software versus teaching concepts and thematic versus reference mapping. (Also, glad that panelist, Harvard scholar, and new local carto/drinking buddy Kirk Goldsberry was dragged to the conference for this.) But at a week’s removal, what’s really fascinating is my fascination itself. I sat there, engrossed in the discussions, kind of wondering why I, not being a cartography teacher, was so interested. Perhaps it’s just reflection on my own roots and where my education was good and where it was lacking. But more likely it’s that cartography is—and I don’t care if this sounds pathetic—my essence, and I care a lot about how it is taught or otherwise instilled in others. It matters to all of us who make maps in this time when, as I noted before, we’re not even sure what a cartographer is. However we arrived at map-making, let’s think about what people need to learn to practice the craft and how it can be taught.

Best week of the year
One of my happiest days a couple of years ago was when the top search term directing people to my website was “drinking in a bathtub,” which brought visitors to a post about a previous NACIS conference. I have certainly been much more serious this time, but don’t let that distract from the fact hat NACIS is simply the best time you will ever have at a conference, especially if it’s in Madison. NACIS truly is a community, where the people you meet are more like friends than professional contacts. The conference organizers do an amazing job of establishing a productive but fun environment. (I want to thank them profusely but don’t want to list names for fear of leaving someone out. If you’re a current or future NACIS attendee you’ll know them.) The schmoozing is easy, and there is a healthy drinking culture among cartographers (I’d like to think that we at UW-Madison were pioneers in that area).

Consider it plugged. NACIS is awesome. Cartography is awesome.

Mapping Flickr colors again. Better late than never.

Andy Woodruff — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:33:11 +0000

About two years ago I picked up small side project that involved messing with geotagged Flickr photos to generate maps of the photographed colors of a landscape, and I liked the idea so much that I vowed to keep it up. So I did. With a short two year break in the middle.

I came back to it for the above map, which was done as a feature in the Ideas section of this past Sunday’s Boston Globe. I’d post a link, but after a day or so external links are redirected to some stupid archived text-only version. It’s the second newspaper map to come from the Bostonography blog that Tim Wallace and I write. (See Tim’s Radio Rivalry map.) That’s enough plugging, and I’ll leave the map interpretation talk for my post on Bostonography. Instead let’s get nerdy here.

To recap, the idea in a nutshell is to map the dominant colors of Flickr photos located in places across the map. I had hoped to come up with better ways of doing this than last time, but although I got a bit smarter about the data collection, the overall methods didn’t change much. I’m very interested in any ideas for this sort of map (you know, for when I do it again in 2013), so allow me to explain what I did and where some questions lie, in two stages.

Finding dominant colors

This is tricky, and I have yet to track down easy solutions. There are two obvious tracks at first:

Calculate the average color by going over every pixel to come up with average red, green, and blue values, then combining the average of those channels to get the result. I tried this in 2009 when I was young and naïve, and quickly learned that the average color of an ordinary photograph almost always turns out to be something slightly brown, dull, and unsaturated. Unless the photo is almost entirely one color, the average color is not representative of the photo.
Find the most common color of a photograph, which is even easier. This is usually a little better but still isn’t great. The most common color is often not the one that sticks out; rather it’s probably something dark and shadowy. Below is a comparison of this and the previous method, in an example from the old blog post.

In the original maps, as you can see above, I ended up deciding to discard all saturation and brightness information and only look at color hue. It was the best way I found to get something that was sort of representative but wasn’t consistently dull and dark. The drawbacks are that colors are exaggerated and it misses out entirely on something like a white, snowy scene. In the old maps I calculated the average color and then mapped its hue at full saturation and brightness. In the new map I looked only at hue to begin with and went with the mode, calculating the most common hue for a given photo or location. I took it a step further by ignoring any especially light or dark and unsaturated pixels.

There have got to be better ways to do this! Any wisdom, internet?

Displaying colors on a map

Last time I simply plotted each photo on the map as a colored point, then “blurred the crap out of it” to get something surface-like. It was quick and dirty, not accounting for overlapping points that obscure one another and excessively interpolating areas on the map. This time I kept it a little more accurate by doing everything based on a grid. For each grid cell I found the most common hue of pixels in photos contained in the cell. Each dot represents one of those cells. I show circles rather than solid squares because, well, it ended up looking a lot nicer. So there’s no interpolation this time, only generalizations due to aggregation. And I think I prefer the results aesthetically.

I’d love to find a clever way to do two things here:

Show proportions of many colors, not just the one most common color. The supposed dominant color is interesting, but it isn’t the whole story of the colors of the photo-landscape. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg did this brilliantly with Flickr Flow, but that can’t show any spatial variation. Is there a way to apply that concept to a map?
Show temporal variation, something also covered by Viégas and Wattenberg. Assuming that many photos are taken outdoors, predominant colors are going to change over the course of a year in a place like Boston which has four distinct seasons. There are some obvious answers to this challenge, but it would be great to come up with something novel and interesting.

The conceptually easy answer to both of those is interactivity, although it would mean a lot of data and/or on-the-fly number crunching. But I don’t know… sometimes interactivity feels like the easy way out. Hit me with some ingenious ideas!

Calling all tutorials

Andy Woodruff — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:59:58 +0000

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.

You’ve probably noticed that it’s hard to keep up with latest and greatest ways to do things like web and mobile mapping, even if that’s your line of work. Self-contained tutorials and examples of solid cartography with new technologies can be scattered and hard to track down, and everything looks intimidating to a non-developer. Let’s help CP establish a reliable, cartography-oriented repository of useful and accessible tutorial articles.

The scope is fairly wide here. It needn’t be something on the bleeding edge. Recent issues have contained tutorials on choropleth mapping with Google Maps, event animation with Google Maps, programming panning and zooming in ActionScript, and building mapping apps for the iPhone (if these links don’t work, try copying and pasting the URLs). There’s a big world out there of code libraries, techniques, and so on; if you can contribute your expertise in any of this to the cartography community, please do!

Any students out there? This is a good way to help get your name out there among a great community of cartography people. CP and NACIS represent a good mix of academic and practicing map people—a group that any cartography student will enjoy and benefit from knowing. Non-students, get in on this too! You can learn from CP, and we can all learn from you.

If you have something to submit or are interested in writing something, or if you have questions, I’d love to hear from you. Find me at andy@axismaps.com, in a comment here, by beating down my door, or however you wish. Let’s keep this digital cartography party going.