My maps

For the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, I've completed a collection of maps of 650 downtown historic buildings. The main product of my cartography for DLANC, a Google Earth map of historic resources, includes photos and data on each building. The maps are also available in PDF format for easy printing. The goal of this project is to make information about the downtown's historic buildings more easily accessible to residents and developers.

I wrote about my impressions of Google mapping products for Visual Studies, the article is due out in April 2008.

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For the Department of Geography's Downtown Los Angeles Walking Tour website, I've produced a series of maps with landmarks of downtown on them. You can navigate the walking tour here.

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For my Sustainable Cities seminar, I created a series of maps visualizing the urban/rural fringe of Los Angeles. These maps combine traditional definitions of the fringe (urban/non-urban) with theoretical ideas about edge cities and commuting zones. I also consider what practical boundaries should be included, such as conservation and military areas. Together, these maps suggest particular areas where fringe development is likely to occur.

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For my thesis, "Hating to Love the Big-box," I made a variety of maps. I wanted to document the history of the upper Hudson Valley through its waterways, railroads, trolley system, and finally through its system of highways. Because I was interested in the retail landscape, I mapped the region's current grocery stores. I also mapped the changing location of grocery stores in the city of Saratoga Springs from 1900-2005. Also included in my thesis were handdrawn maps of my study sites in upstate New York: Cambridge, Schuylerville, and Warrensburg.
           

Regional history
(series)

       Regional grocers     Saratoga stores     Cambridge   Schuylerville     Warrensburg    
                   
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For The Saratogian, my hometown newspaper, I was the unofficial cartographer from 2001 to 2003. Newspapers need maps far more often than they use them, something I tried to fix, at least in my two-year tenure at The Saratogian and Community News. I documented everything from planned development to water use to murder locations. Here are some of the maps I saved:
                         
Changing assembly districts       Saratoga National Historical Park     Parking in downtown Top water users                  
                                                                 
       
New traffic lights   Poverty in Saratoga County (series) Connections in murder case

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I've also created maps for publication in books. I digitalized handdrawn maps for Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. I also created a map of Arabia for Reuven Firestone's forthcoming book on the history of Islam.

      
Maps by others
   

I am currently working on an article about Los Angeles's relationship with maps between 1850 and 1950, and how these maps contributed to and depicted sprawl. You can see many of these maps at the Library of Congress's American Memory Project website. Click on the maps below to see larger versions from my collection of maps.

   
     
Pacific Electric Railway, 1912
Aero map of railroads and roads (in red), 1914   Los Angeles River and railroads, 1918   Prospective railroad routes, 1855      
               

 

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For a more ecclectic collection of maps, see the Strange Maps blog.

There's census data galore at Neighboroo, and other cool stuff like cloudy vs. sunny days. Meanwhile, the LAPD will make a crime map of your neighborhood for the past week, and Cartifact offers up a map of where the homeless are sleeping in downtown LA. A new map using Google Maps technology, analyzes walkability of any address you choose.

Making your own maps, Google-style? Get some help from Platial, GIS Visualizer,

Chitchat and get valuable advice on your maps from fellow cartographers at Cartotalk.

I am keeping an eye on recent attempts to incorporate new technologies with improved visualization. Danny Dorling's work, in particular.

I enjoy collections of good maps as well as bad maps. Eric Richardson of Blogdowntown collects bad maps of Los Angeles by Market Lofts and an architecture book. My favorite bad map is by Jetblue, where they put Burlington, VT in Watertown, NY; Rochester in Buffalo; and Syracuse in Geneseo.* Also, Bermuda seems to have migrated northward. Their positioning reminds me of the SUNY Plattsburg student newspaper which (back in the 1990s) ran maps with cities in New York located wherever the heck they pleased. They said they didn't think anyone would notice.

*Update: Burlington has been moved to its correct location, but Western New York remains in a funk. They moved around Florida locations, too. But they also added "Map not to scale," so that covers them for any mistakes.

** Further update: They have, believe it or not, moved Burlington back to its wrong location.

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