Mexico’s urban pileups 14 December 2016 -- Buy high-res file -- The US-Mexico border is the most frequently crossed, and one of the longest, in the world. The difference in development between the Mexican and US side is perhaps the greatest of any international border. This results in a really interesting urban pileup effect where many Mexicans move to cities that are right along the US border. ...
Valuable Squares revisited 9 October 2016 Here is a version with labels. Previously I published a map that divided the world into around 18,000 squares, and highlighted which squares had a GDP of $100 billion or more. I decided to revisit this concept with the help of GIS software and slightly better data. Data and method The data come courtesy of Dr. Yoshiki Yamagata of Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies. ...
The Unscientific Bay Area 23 August 2016 -- Buy high-res file -- Originally this was supposed to be the start of a line of posters, but it failed to gain traction, despite overwhelmingly positive reactions. Nonetheless, below’s the original post for posterity. I was really inspired by all the positive reactions and support that I got for the original Bay Area map. So I decided to completely redesign and vectorize everything, making it crisp enough to give people the prints they were asking for. ...
Catholic Provinces: Redux 29 May 2016 (click to enlarge) Originally I didn’t think much of this project, though it was nice to see how the provinces looked. It turned out, however, that my map was the only one out there, in terms of mapping out the church provinces. Molly Burhans, the GoodLand Project director, reached out to me asking for my shapefiles. I replied that I had no shapefiles—I made the first map entirely by hand. ...
Long Island according to Urban Dictionary 31 January 2016 (click to enlarge) This one’s pretty straightforward. Like the Washington State map, this was made at a friend’s request. This time I decided to make it a little more empirically sound by sourcing the stereotypes from Urban Dictionary, rather than vaguely coming up with them in my head. The result is pretty edgy but also kind of hilarious. All I did was type in the name of a neighborhood and put the key words that were in the UD entry. ...
US supermarket turf 14 March 2016 This is my final project for the Intermediate GIS class that I just finished. I’m just gonna dump everything into this post. Classifying and Understanding Spatial Distributions of U.S. Supermarket Chains INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND A common problem in retail is the infringement of certain stores upon the “turf” of an established chain—businesses seek to establish, and maintain, market dominance within a particular physical area. ...
Map of Washington State stereotypes 29 January 2016 This map is the result of a humorous request by a friend from the suburbs of Seattle. As someone from the other Washington (DC), I knew little about the internal stereotypes of Washington State, so this project was a great learning experience. Obviously this map is entirely subjective and Seattle-centric. It was created based on testimony from numerous Seattleites, as well as using ample help from Urban Dictionary. ...
Correlations in Ukraine 2 May 2015 The electoral division in Ukraine is very well-publicized, with countless maps all over Western media cropping up, showing the diagonal line that splits the country roughly north-south. As someone with a relatively close connection to Ukraine, I had always been deeply aware of this divide. But I never really thought about the root causes, beyond the idea of the Polish, Russian and Ottoman imperial boundaries. ...
Voting patterns in Europe 1 January 2015 This map shows how voting divides in individual European countries cross national boundaries and have some interesting correlations. The map speaks for itself—each color on the map is the color of the dominant/winning political party or coalition (if political parties change unreliably). In Europe, red is typically the color of leftist or socialist coalitions, while blue is typically for right-of-center or populist parties. ...
Proposed Australian states 3 November 2014 There have been many proposals for states and territories to be added to Australia, many of which were brought up during the era of Australian imperialism. The late 1800s saw many Australian politicians, particularly those from Queensland and Victoria, petition London to annex neighboring Pacific islands without much success. While the territories were worthless to London, many Australians saw them as tokens that confirmed a new Australian Empire. ...