Jake Coolidge
Jake Coolidge Cartography
This talk will reflect upon recent experiences drawing large, geographically complex regions by hand, a practice that brings into sharp relief the many decisions at the core of the cartographer's craft--generalization and abstraction, label placement, the symbolization of features, among others--in an era where geographic information systems can automate many of these tasks and obscure the process from the map designer. I use hand-drawn map-making to reconnect with these processes in a tangible way, while invoking pre-digital maps made in the mid-20th century. I argue that reclaiming these practices in a contemporary context allows us to augment how we imagine places and to rediscover a broader set of tools for graphically expressing geographic phenomena.
NACIS 2014