The Map Center, Pawtucket Rhode Island

06/18/2026

I had so much fun teaching mapmaking and geography at Yale last week. Students from the architecture program and visiting scholars from Morgan State University who were learning how to apply GIS to their projects both joined me for a fun activity I call "A Map for a Cat." It's an activity I invented a few years ago and I delight in facilitating it every time but especially with such creative and sharp participants. For some reason it always works better for people who aren't already geospatial professionals. Go figure.
The objective is to start seeing past the conventions of a map and into the symbols that make it up. Who are maps for? How would they look different for someone who experiences the world differently from me? It's a good practice of empathetic design but it's also just... design.

Photo credit to Andrew Gillreath-Brown PhD

06/18/2026

Last week I was invited to Yale University to teach about map making and geography to a group of Yale architecture students and Morgan State University students in an accelerated GIS program.

This was a fantastic group of students with a great mixture of experiences, education and backgrounds who were all approaching GIS together for the first time. We started with a fun activity that I affectionately call "A Map For Cat" that invites participants to think about who maps are for. I love the creative energy these students threw at it!

Afterwards we talked about all the different kinds of information and stories that a map can encode. When we make assumptions about what maps look like and what they can do, we don't push ourselves to do more and support our audiences fully. GIS isn't a single program or software package- it's an ecosystem and way of thinking about the world and I know that the students had fun diving in!
Photo credit to Andrew Gillreath-Brown PhD

06/11/2026

Welcome to Providence!

🏆🇮🇳❣️

06/11/2026

Take your favorite father figure to the Map Center next weekend for Fathers Day!

06/06/2026

Enjoy this web application that shows the difference between what people of one place call themselves vs what everyone else calls them.
https://exonym-atlas.pages.dev/
Via com

A linguistic atlas for country names and exonym families.

06/05/2026

Congratulations to the team at the Technical University of Munich on the hashtag hashtag hashtag - global coverage, raster and polygon data, building heights and 3d models.

And finally, I am chipping in with a quick look into the data in hashtag :

𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥: https://lnkd.in/dEWM3geh

𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐞: https://lnkd.in/dA8_Tp3F

Fossbytes feature: https://lnkd.in/dg97zfmQ

Paper: https://lnkd.in/dYwagBc4

06/05/2026

Rob Simmon, a very talented data visualization professional, put this together last year. I helped a little with editing. It's always fun to see it circulate again!

Australian kids grow up staring at a world map where we live at the bottom. Flip the map upside down and suddenly Europe looks like it’s about to fall off the planet. A good reminder that maps don’t just show the world. They shape how we think about it. North isn’t “up”. It’s just a cartographic habit. Source: https://www.maps.com/this-map-is-not-upside-down/

06/02/2026

Happy pride everyone! Wanna see some gay maps?
A quick brief on Queering the Map with a little help from:
"Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino (1972)
"Infinite Cities" by Rebecca Solnit (2010)
'Monarcha and Queens' by Mona Caron and Rebecca Solnit

06/02/2026

Some folks have been having a hard time finding me in my new location. Maybe this will help?