Cartographic Perspectives

Counter-GIS Experiments in Distance Interpolation with the Relational Reprojection Platform

2023-12-12T10:50:17+00:00

In this paper, we discuss the cartographic genealogy and prospective uses of the Relational Reprojection Platform (RRP), an interactive tool that we built to create custom azimuthal reprojections of spatial datasets with non-linear distance transformations. Building on prior examples of analytically rescaled azimuthal projections in the history of cartography and quantitative geography (from mid-twentieth-century efforts by Torsten Hägerstrand, Waldo Tobler, and William Bunge to more recent digital experiments), we show how our tool brings what were formerly custom artisanal projects into the reach of non-specialist cartographers. In order to illustrate the utility of this method, we highlight recent use cases for the RRP across multiple disciplines and subject areas. These use cases show the myriad ways in which a counter-GIS tool can enable new kinds of cartographic thinking, from visualizing relational spaces within a single context to other kinds of provocation, like presenting changes over time and bringing different relational spaces into dialogue with each other. We conclude with a rallying cry to digital geographers to create more experimental tools to challenge our established notions of visual spatial vernacular while still remaining committed to rigorous, reproducible data analysis.

Mapping Up

2024-10-29T10:43:03+00:00

This article considers the methodological stance of critical cartography, proposing “mapping up” as a form of critical cartographic practice. Beginning with reflections on cartography in the first issue of Antipode and the posthumous work of Howard Fisher, we consider how cartography has figured the relationship between colonizer and colonized, the colony and the metropole, the ground and the surface. Building on these reflections, we respond to a recent resurgence of interest in the work of the anthropologist Laura Nader, thinking through how her arguments for “studying up” pertain to persistent debates in both critical cartography and the social sciences more broadly. We argue that critical cartography has often taken an epistemic shortcut to a positional question: who is the mapmaker to the mapped? By too consistently focusing on the power of the map (and assuming the power of the mapmaker), we have narrowed our methodological focus and developed few resources for theorizing mappings of relative elites by mapmakers in relatively less powerful positions. We examine this contention in the context of work that “maps up”: tenant solidarity projects by Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and JustFix.nyc, as well as High Country News’s “Land Grab U.” Finally, we share recent work on a cartographic R package, unknownpleasur, that is indebted to the work of Fisher, but also oriented towards the simultaneous representation of systems of oppression alongside their effects.

Review of Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, Fourth Edition

2025-11-12T09:10:31+00:00

Review of The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities

2025-12-19T15:30:12+00:00

Review of Telling Stories with Maps: Lessons from a Lifetime of Creating Place-Based Narratives

2025-12-31T13:31:27+00:00

Review of The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress

2026-01-26T09:57:50+00:00

Review of Great Lakes in 50 Maps

2026-01-26T10:00:39+00:00

Review of Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine

2026-03-11T10:30:16+00:00

The Map Making Game

2025-12-12T12:56:00+00:00

One of the most familiar postmodern strategies for bringing a fresh perspective to a familiar situation is that of “making strange.” Making strange strips off the veneer of familiarity readers have come to expect, and presents those readers with something they have to discover anew outside of whatever context they would, hitherto, have relied upon to provide pat answers.

This paper proposes that other well-documented avenues for this type of strange making exist and deserve examination. Specifically, there exists a body of interpersonal psychobiology studies describing human society in game structure terms that remain largely unexplored in the cartographic literature. This paper introduces this psychedelic analysis, and proposes its application to contemporary explorations of the nature of maps and cartographic practice.

What is proposed is a strategy and toolbox of tactics that can, properly employed, take any or all existing conceptualizations of maps, map making, map use, or the informed practice of cartography and “make them strange” so they can be dispassionately examined and evaluated.

Maker Maps

2026-02-13T12:17:56+00:00

Using MapWeaver to Make Tiled and Woven Maps of Multivariate Thematic Data

2026-02-25T14:31:20+00:00

Instructions to Authors

2026-06-10T23:02:59+00:00

About the Cover

2026-06-10T23:07:25+00:00

Masthead

2026-06-10T23:09:28+00:00

Letter from the Editor

2026-06-11T16:26:29+00:00

“Counter-GIS” as Collaborative Practice: Grounded Experiments in Digital Mapping

2026-06-11T16:32:00+00:00