Q: Tell us about yourself.
A: I work full-time as a Cartographer at National Geographic Maps, part-time conducting freelance work as Tombolo Maps & Design, and part-time working with the conservation NGO BirdsCaribbean. I’m rounding up on 10 years of experience at the end of 2019 and am passionate about beautiful maps, participatory mapping, bird conservation, addressing climate change, and working in small island developing states. I recently published a co-authored book entitled Birds of the Transboundary Grenadines, which is part bird guide, part atlas, part photo-book-pretty-enough-for-your-coffee-table, and part historical and sociological dive into the connection between birds and the people of the Grenadines. This was the culmination of 7 years of collaboration with my incredible co-author, Juliana Coffey, and the local communities in these tiny islands which are split between the Eastern Caribbean countries of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada (where I’ve lived on and off since 2011). Morale of the story: I have a lot of overlapping passions, which is how I ended up deciding to study geography anyway. (Did I mention I also make map jewelry?)
Q: Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know).
A: As a history minor, some of my favorite courses in undergrad at Middlebury College were on historical geography (taught by the exceptionally inspiring Dr. Anne Kelly Knowles). I profoundly appreciated how historical geography could be used to understand how and why things happened and decisions were made (flashback to Historical Geography of North America and reading topographic maps which visualized how Civil War battles were lost or won).
Today, like any normal person with a map obsession, I spend my fair share of time keeping an eye on David Rumsey’s Map Collection and, during one of my stints living in Maine, I found this historic map of Portland from 1851:
I was surprised to see how dramatically the coastline had been changed in the past century and a half, and—as most cartographers are inclined to do—I immediately wanted to map it and show the amount of land reclamation on the peninsula, particularly in Back Cove. It is also really cool to see how the downtown buildings changed from small houses and businesses to city block-sized multi-purpose buildings made up of storefronts, office space, and apartments.
While it took me a while to make the time to fit this just-for-fun map into my crazy schedule, I’m glad I finally made it happen!
Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.
A: This map was made by combining the 1851 Map of the City of Portland, Maine (from original surveys by Henry F. Walling, Civil Engineer) with current data for Portland in ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator with Avenza MAPublisher. I started by georeferencing the historic map with contemporary data in ArcGIS and then I completed the cartographic design work in Illustrator. To break that down further, I spent a considerable amount of time in Photoshop cleaning up the historic map (removing the sketches and labels and adjusting the different shades in which it had faded) so that I could have a clean and not overly distracting background on top of which I could add current data and my own labels. I also digitized the coastline from the historic map to make sure it stood out and went through quite a few design iterations before choosing one whose color scheme was historical with a modern pop, and still allowed for full visibility of all of the historic and modern data.
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