Nice NYTimes article on open mapping and volunteer cartography.

This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.

via @cubitplanning

Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo’s neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack—Bongo was late for dinner again. Between mother and son lay the hazards —labeled angry dogs, roving gang of hooligans, girl with a crush on bongo—of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.

See also: my posts on worldbuilding and maps of fictional worlds.

Fantastic blog of resources and ideas for making maps, updated by John Krygier, a geography professor at Ohio Wesleyan. Supplement to the book MAKING MAPS: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS.

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

A long, meaty post about comics, time, and cartography — hits all the good targets: McCloud, Ware, Huizenga, Horrocks, Larson, Kochalka…good stuff. Well worth reading.

Great article. Claims that websites are like memory palaces, engaging our spatial imaginations.

My wife, the architect, tells me that a good building isn’t some artistic vision: it’s a structure that’s made so that it can change over time to accompany the needs of the occupants. In that sense, if a good website is good architecture, it has good bones, but it can change along with the needs of the users… (see: HOW BUILDINGS LEARN)

Some excerpts:

Information architecture vs. cartography: “an architect begins with an abstraction—a blueprint—and creates from that abstraction a concrete structure existing in physical space. The cartographer, on the other hand, starts with concrete structures existing in physical space and creates from that an abstraction: a map.”

Henri Lefebvre: “A building, in Lefebvre’s reading, is a map of the interactions of the people who inhabit it; an architect is not a builder in an otherwise empty wilderness, but an observer, chronicler, and shaper of the networks that exist around her—in short, a map maker.”