‘Radical Cartography’: Shaping new narratives through maps

Is it possible to create the “perfect” expression of data on a map?

William Rankin doesn’t think so. While most mainstream maps that use a jigsaw-puzzle-like format — solid color shapes separated by crisp boundaries — may be accurate enough for what they seek to represent, there are countless other ways to represent the same geography and tell very different stories. 

“A skeptical regard for precision goes hand in hand with a skepticism toward some of the most common features of everyday maps: sharp borders, highly aggregated statistics, a neutral background of roads or topography, a willful disregard for temporal change, and so on,” Rankin writes in his new book, “Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World” (Viking). “Radical cartography instead shows a geography that’s messier and lumpier, with more overlaps and internal diversity, burdened by the weight of history, and defined as much by personal involvement as arm’s-length detachment.”

“At its best,” he continues, “radical cartography shows a world that matches our understanding and our experience — not just our expectations of what a map should look like.”

An associate professor of history and chair of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rankin says radical cartography attempts to “shake up” mapping by focusing on three values: uncertainty, multiplicity, and subjectivity. Centering mapmaking around those values results in cartography that shows the world as a human creation, recognizes that our knowledge of the world is imperfect, and allows that there is more than one narrative to tell, he says.

His book explores these values in their relation to seven basic features of maps today: boundaries, layers, people, projections, color, scale, and time. A website Rankin maintains also includes many of his mapping projects over the years, in the U.S. and abroad.

He is also the author of After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a history of the 20th-century mapping sciences. 

Rankin sat down with Yale News to offer his commentary on some of the maps included in his book. 

William Rankin: The map on the left is the standard approach to defining a region: there’s a particular jigsaw-puzzle shape, and we just need to figure out what the correct shape is. This one comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, and it’s probably the most common definition of the Midwest. But when you look at a variety of definitions from lots of different organizations, they don’t all look the same. The idea for the map on the right is to overlay 100 different definitions that I found online that are being used today. The darker the pink, the more overlap there is. You can see that there’s some real disagreement and some fuzziness. Another thing I find interesting is that there is in fact no place that’s in all the maps. Illinois appears on most of the maps, but not all of them. 

Rankin: The map that inspired this is the famous map of American slavery from the 1860 census that Abraham Lincoln used during the Civil War. That map shaded every county to show the percent of the population that was enslaved. It compared the enslaved to the total population, but it was impossible to know how many people lived in each county. On this map, I instead use circles to represent the population in each 250-square-mile area. This is what I call a bubble grid. You can see state boundaries, but no county boundaries. And you see a different pattern. On Lincoln’s map, showing the enslaved as a percent of the total population, the distribution skews more southern, whereas showing population and percent together, the distribution skews more northern. You see more emphasis on the border states. The idea is not to find the perfect map, but to say, how do I understand both of these things together? How do I understand the overall geography of slavery? And likewise, to move away from the idea that what matters is the precise numerical value in each county. 

Rankin: If you plot shipping routes and railway lines on a regular world map, with north at the top and maybe London in the center, you’ll see a horizontal line going across the map. That would show a lot of shipping between Europe and Asia, and Asia and the United States, across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. The only difference between that kind of map and this one is the projection, where instead of having the north-up map, it’s a polar-centered map. The shipping routes now create a ring, a circuit, around the North Pole, in a way that makes the sense of global connection feel much stronger. There’s this clear sense of all these places connected together in a single global system. The poetry of the map shifts quite dramatically with just this one relatively simple move. 

Rankin: There are cartographers who have said that color is so complex they don’t even want to use it. Their complaint is that the meaning of color is so shifty, it can mean so many different things at once, it’s too hard to control. And on maps in particular, color carries even more meaning because we’re always going to be judging it against standard conventions like blue water or green land. I use this 1950 map of leading religious denominations in my undergraduate cartography seminar because it has a clear argumentative punch that comes from the colors. When I ask students to analyze the map, they always wonder if the cartographer might have had some hidden agenda, since the colors appear abstract but also clearly carry other meanings. They ask, is the red, which shows Baptist areas, meant to make some comment about Baptism? And the pinkish color that’s very similar is Methodist. Why are they so similar? Together, the Baptists and Methodists appear as a strong regional bloc in the southern states. Over the course of the conversation, they notice how the map reproduces a certain narrative about the history of the United States — the South versus the rest of the country. That’s the minefield of color — its multiple layers of meaning.

Rankin: These are six cities that I lived in during the first quarter-century of my life. I just mapped the places I went, the roads that I used, whether I drove, biked, or took the train. This is personal mapping of a very literal sort — these are the cities as I experienced them. And every person in every city will have their own personal geography. What I like about this is, yes, it’s about the particularities of my life, but it also immediately gets people thinking about their own lives. “What would my map look like?” Or it can help us think about how somebody with a different background living in the same city might have a totally different map. This kind of mapping is quite different from how architects or urban planners usually look at these cities. Instead of just thinking about the built environment, I’m interested in how the cities are inhabited.