A hypothetical express bus route serving commuters around Madison’s ring roads Madison’s Beltline Highway is a high-speed, high-traffic, controlled-access bypass route south and west of the city’s lakes and historic core. Carved out of farmland at what was once the edge of town, the expressway now sits squarely in the midst of the city’s expanding urban footprint, only halfway (as the crow flies) between the State Capitol and the southwest corner of city limits. It’s a vital and increasingly congested transportation corridor for commuters going to and from home, jobs, shopping centers, and oth ..read more

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Critical GIS Workshop at McGill University held in concert with NACIS on October 13, 2017. I will likely try to publish it in modified form, but didn’t want to hold off giving it a little exposure in the mean time or in case it never gets into print. I would appreciate any constructive feedback via the comments section. -C Since the early 1990s, critical GIS has engaged with efforts to support oppressed and Indigenous communities through map-based empowerment—what Denis Wood (2003: 7) might call “offer[ing] professional assistance, on bended knee if nec ..read more

Back when I was in grad school at UW-Madison, I used to daydream a lot about new systems of mass transit that would take advantage of preexisting infrastructure and get people where they want to go efficiently without the need for so much driving. Not only is cutting down on driving an imperative for the Earth’s climate (and no, electric cars will not save us), but our inordinate reliance on cars in the U.S. immobilizes tens of millions, including young people, the elderly, people with disabilities, the poor, and anyone else who for one reason or another can’t or won’t drive. Better mass trans ..read more

Map showing the major waterways and resources that would be impacted by Enbridge Energy’s reroute of its Line 5 oil pipeline The text below is the testimony I had planned to give at the virtual public hearing on the Line 5 Reroute Draft Environmental Impact Statement on Wednesday, February 2, 2022. I was on the hearing for five hours and, being sick and having to work in the morning, gave up and went to bed. The hearing lasted over ten hours total, with 88% of testimony opposed to the project. I have submitted my testimony as a written public comment. Public comments may be submitted through M ..read more

When I decided to become a cartographer, I didn’t just want to make pretty and useful maps. I became a cartographer to make maps that change the world for the better. Right now, no situation needs this kind of map more than the current drama unfolding around the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline’s crossing of the Missouri River. Thousands of Native Americans and their allies have gathered on former Sioux land delimited by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie to try and stand in the way of the “black snake” that could poison the Standing Rock Reservation’s water supply. Many have noted ..read more

I’ve written this post to accompany the talk I gave on August 31 to the UW Cartography Lab’s Education Series special two-day workshop in partnership with Mapbox. I was asked to talk about JavaScript and Turf.js. Give my mixed audience, I thought talking about Turf right away would be putting the cart a bit before the horse—first, I needed to build a simple web GIS app that could use Turf. So this 1-hour talk turned into an as-noob-friendly-as-possible walkthrough of building such an app. To start, here are the slides I used; really, just an outline of my talk. The link on the ..read more

If I had all the time in the world, I would turn the very basic Google My Map above into something a little more complete and polished. But sometimes quick solutions are better than nothing when the need arises. In this case, the data needed to be out there for water protectors and others to see the tar sands Ground Zero in our backyard. Now more than ever, we need to be mapping climate-changing infrastructure and sites of resistance. If you know of anything that you think should be added to the map above, please get in touch by posting a comment on this entry. Things are heating up in Wiscon ..read more

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Nelson Institute Center for Culture, History, and Environment Symposium at UW-Madison on February 11, 2017. Here are the slides from the talk: Last fall I made a map of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s Missouri River crossing that went viral. One part of the map drew especially vigorous discussion in the comments section of the original post: the area labeled “Sioux Territory Under 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie.” Because of that discussion, I changed the label from its initial wording, stripping the word “Unceded” from the beginning. I won’t chang ..read more

The following post contains the transcript and images from a talk I gave at the UW-Madison Geography Symposium a couple days ago. Since I wrote the whole thing out, I thought I would go ahead and share it here.   The Carbon Pollution Emergency Act of 2022 has been heralded by historians as the first bold step against global warming taken in the United States. It implemented a heavy carbon tax on all fossil fuels and progressively restricting the amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas that could be produced or imported each year. The Act made it official federal policy to reach 100% renewab ..read more

Today I gave a talk at the NACIS conference about redesigning the lab curriculum for Geography 575, UW-Madison’s Interactive Cartography and Geovisualization course, to more effectively teach the new Open Web Platform mapping tools that are now the industry standard for web mapping. People seemed to like it. Open Web Mapping: How do we teach this stuff? from Carl Sack But the 20-minute (or, in my case, 23-minute…oops) conference talk/slideshow format presents a tradeoff between conveying lots of necessary information and slides that support the talk without textsploding the vi ..read more