Author: tm-admin

Maps don’t always answer straight-forward questions. They can also be powerful tools to build community and help navigate through situations where it’s not clear what questions to ask. Community mapping is a longer-term dialogue between maps & data and the lived experiences and political realities of people. It’s an iterative, back-and-forth process which can be rewarding and fruitful community organizations and for me as a cartographer. For more on community mapping and counter-cartography, see my thesis: Alternative Cartographies Building Collective Power.

In the past, I have:

• Developed maps & visualizations of the legacy of agricultural infrastructure in Warren County, NC, based on interviews I helped conduct as part of a process of community economic development led by Working Landscapes
• Worked with residents in the oldest historically African-American neighborhood in Chapel Hill to understand and document the impact that student-housing development was having on the quality of life in their neighborhood; the maps we produced helped lead the Town Council to pass a one-year moratorium on development.
• Designed mapping and data components for None of the Above, a traveling exhibit about the school-to-prison pipeline, based on interviews with teachers, students, people in prison and folks working in the legal system (see more of my work on Behance and also here)
• Worked with students at Queen Mary University to produce a counter/map of their campus and it’s role in the policing of immigration in the United Kingdom, as part of a monthlong residency at that campus.

GIS software, combined with my knowledge of demographic data sources, makes it easy to get answers to questions like:

• Which legislative districts overlap with a given city?
• How many people live within a 5-minute walk of each store?
• To what extent are there racial disparities in the location of landfills or point-source pollution?
• What is the geographic distribution of households living in poverty?

GIS projects can range from tutoring sessions over Skype where I walk you through how to use ArcGIS or open-source QGIS to accomplish a particular task (1-3 hours), to short-term research projects where I use GIS to answer a particular question for you (2-10 hours), to longer-term projects where I assemble data about an issue, perform analyses and look for patterns (10+ hours).

Do you need a locator map for your business? Maps of demographic data for a non-profit? Professionally-designed maps for a book or journal article? Or maybe you’ve made maps yourself but would like help touching them up before publication?

Whatever the application, I design beautiful maps in grayscale or color. I usually work in Adobe Illustrator and ArcGIS, and can accommodate most typical output formats. Costs estimates for a print design job typically range from $300 – $720 (5 to 12 hours at my standard rate of $60/hour). Please get in touch if you have a map in mind and I can give you more specifics!