Putting the real world down on paper

This week's newsletter looks at how we use maps. I review a new book on the subject, interview a mapmaker and show how maps can reshape our assumptions about borders. It's all topped off with what I think is maybe the most effective visualization I've ever made? So stick around.

Chapter 1
What should a map even be?

Speaking with Reuters reporters in the Oval Office in April 2017, President Trump handed over maps of the county-level results from the prior year's election. I don't need to explain any more about the situation for you to understand why he did so: defensive about his popular-vote loss, he compensated by reveling in the amount of red those maps showed.

Even eight years ago, such maps were the subject of a tired, quadrennial debate. There's lots of red, rural land, but it's an imperfect reflection of the contest since land doesn't vote. By sharing a geographically accurate map, Trump was actually distorting what the electorate had said. There were other ways to show the same results, ones in which that distortion was removed — but other distortions were often introduced.

I was thinking about those presidential-election maps as I read "Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World," a newly published book from Yale University's William Rankin. Those 2016 depictions are a familiar manifestation of what Rankin tackles across 200-plus wonderfully illustrated pages: that designing maps for data visualization requires more than simply mapping.

"The default way of doing data maps — which is the kind of jigsaw-puzzle map where you have every area, a crisply bordered, solid colored shape — is often hiding more than it reveals," Rankin said when we spoke on the phone Friday. "I think that we'd be better off finding ways to have fewer of those maps in our lives and to explore other ways of understanding the world."