Category Archives: Geography
Crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries, Part One: Consensus
As you may recall, we’re running an ongoing project soliciting opinions on Boston’s neighborhood boundaries via an interactive map. We want to keep collecting data, but we’ve already received excellent responses that we’re itching to start mapping, and when we … Continue reading
Thirteen neighborhoods: one city
If there’s one thing everybody knows about neighborhood boundaries in Boston, it’s that nobody knows where they are. But they’ll tell you you’re wrong if you try to draw lines. That’s fair enough, really—any line drawn will divide neighbor from … Continue reading
Booze
Ah, The Super Bowl. Whether the home team is in the game or not (ahem… ours is), we can’t help but use the occasion as an excuse to hit up the local watering hole and have a few drinks with … Continue reading
Density
One of the things that quickly struck me—and that, I think, becomes apparent to most newcomers and visitors—after moving to the Boston area is how small it is for a “big city” in the United States. It is of course … Continue reading
A Cartographic Year in the Life of Boston
In early December, we Tweeted the following: Bostonographers—Tweet your favorite Boston-based news story of 2011. Boston is a place where things happen. What happened this year & where? We received one response . . . and that’s only if you count … Continue reading
Shaking the municipal Etch A Sketch
Fair warning: some day I am going to post long, questionably logical rants and ramblings about boundaries. I have a thing for—actually, against—boundaries invented by humans and what they do and don’t, and should and shouldn’t mean. This is not … Continue reading
Boston: Fair and Square
Whether you blame it on cows, humans, or nature, Boston’s street network is very confusing to visitors and unseasoned newcomers. We cartographers can do nothing but delight in how lost you are going to get. Thence spring my two minimal, … Continue reading
Footprints of Boston
We mapmakers earn our keep by somehow adding value to raw geographic data; that is, the craft requires more than just plotting the location of objects on the Earth’s surface. But sometimes it’s hard to compete with the simple elegance … Continue reading
Light Drawing Massachusetts
There’s a debate—at least in academic cartography—about what constitutes a map. The first lecture in the introductory course at UW-Madison starts with a slideshow challenging students to determine which images are maps and which are not. Among the “traps” designed … Continue reading
Posted in Geography, Photography, Unusual Medium
Tagged light drawing, light mapping, light painting, massachusetts map, meaninglessmaps, photography, picasso
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Bostovalentinography
9,872 smoots. That’s how far I walked to make this deformed heart map for Valentine’s Day. That’s a GPS track of my path around Boston and Cambridge (and a bit of Somerville) to trace something like a heart shape. Over … Continue reading
Posted in Geography, Holiday, Photography, Seasonal
Tagged Boston, cambridge, gps, somerville, valentine
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