pigeon creek in mingo county NHD permit boundaries and valley fill boundaries on Flickr.
paper chase
SOURCE: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/intro-maps/01.jsp
Via some gif-surfing I found that someone was actually paying enough attention to Clint Eastwood’s babbling to catch the moment shown below. I am not saying that Clint Eastwood wants to hang Barack Obama. I am saying that on the final night of the RNC Clint Eastwood got up in front of a giant throng of white people and belittled an imaginary president and then made the motion of slitting the president’s throat. To finish, Eastwood and the crowd recited a movie line that was originally delivered to a Black thug, something else the Republican Party is always talking about. This isn’t taking what he said and did out of context. The images that color our culture, and a map that shows the underlying political economy - this is the full context.
SOURCE: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/intro-maps/01.jsp
Overview of the African Slave Trade out of Africa: 1500-1900.
To quote Chris Christie’s address to the Republican National Convention last night:
See, we are not afraid. We are taking our country back
because we are the great-grandchildren of the men and women who
broke their backs in the name of American ingenuity, the
grandchildren of the greatest generation, the sons and daughters
of immigrants, the brothers and sisters of everyday heroes, the
neighbors of entrepreneurs and firefighters, teachers and
farmers, veterans and factory workers and everyone in between
who shows up, not just on the big days, or the good days, but on
the bad days, and the hard days. Each and every day. All 365
of them.
You see, we are the United States of America.
Unlike Peter King and other Republicans from the northeastern states, Chris Christie doesn’t engage in the same kind of race-baiting and Islamophobia as his national allies. I don’t think he’s using intentionally coded words here to impart a sense of “us” and “them” to his audience. But it’s still important to decode what one white guy is saying to a room full of white people about politics and identity. Wouldn’t it be nice if this map was hanging behind him while he spoke?
Last summer I lived with some great people at the CRMW volunteer house in Rock Creek, WV and tonight Molly wrote a good post reminding me to think about trying to find a way to keep practicing my kind of mapping in Alaska. It is one of the last frontiers, and so now one of the far peripheries set for extraction and penetration in the newest depths of mineral resource extraction. It’d be nice to make some maps of communities and landscapes before both are disturbed by strip mining. I’m still thinking of living in Philly, but it can’t just be the Bees what bring stories from the peripheries to the centers.
picture of a 3 meter digital elevation model of an active strip mining site in southern West Virginia.
Adam’s tumblr has a map showing where his visitor’s are from. For some reason it thinks I’m in Oak Hill, which is totally crazy because I’m in Rock Creek, d’uh.
talking about neighboring bioregions with Sammy
This makes me wonder: what about creeks or springs? So many of the smaller bodies of running water in and around DC are springs, creeks, channels, though also several branches and runs. The many names for water!
This is an awesome infographic map! As someone who works in Appalachia and is constantly looking up HUC Reach Codes, and other hydrographic data for the region I can confirm the prevalence of the terms branch, run and fork in this region. What is a “wash?” I’ve never even heard of that one before. Since these seem to mostly be in parts of the country that are flat and dry, it would make sense. When it does rain in the SW, that water is going to move very fast and very wide and wash the basin out.
The underlying spatial data they are using here is the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), which is free and easy to download although it is quite a large file so I recommend downloading the state versions (if you were thinking of doing that). I do wonder - why didn’t the cartographer here do anything for the regions of the map that were left off? Since every stream section in the NHD has a name attribute it shouldn’t have been too much work to code the rest for symboligization … .
Via my buddy Adam
A good reason to be suspect of anyone telling you that they “worked hard for everything they have” and so there’s no reason to share, think collectively, or even conserve resources. It’s all stolen land.
The truth comes out
When people ask me what I do and I explain, their response is often “cartography!” and I have to explain a little. While these programs do let you design maps, and I do design maps if you want it done right you need to talk a real designer. I’m not actually much of a designer. I’m the guy that gets the data and makes sure that things are accurate and at the necessary precision. This is one of the last drafts of the map that I’ll make for this project, before I pass all the vectors off to my buddy Dan who will then design the package for the speakers. There’s other data I still need to pull, like high resolution aerial photography for the image background, but until I get better at Illustrator (need access to Illustrator again) I’m not going to be much use trying to design a package design on my laptop. I should also take some time to track down a shareware design software. Knowing the internet these days, there’s probably something out there that’s alright.
audio masons draft 3
Talking
Pigeon Creek Watershed
Elkhorn Creek Watershed
Laurel Creek Watershed
Light pollution in the USA. The Upper Peninsula is dark.
