In this episode, I sit down with Bill Rankin, historian of science at Yale and author of Radical Cartography, to unpack what maps really do beyond simply showing data. We talk about why mapping is an act of representation with real consequences, how common techniques like choropleths and cartograms shape what we see—and what we miss—and why there’s no single “correct” way to visualize the world. Bill shares how his background in architecture influences his approach to mapping as drawing and world-making, not coding or dashboards. We also dig into static versus interactive maps, accessibility, and why starting with questions—not tools—leads to better visualizations. It’s a thoughtful conversation about intention, trade-offs, and responsibility in data visualization.
Resources
Grab Bill’s new book, Radical Cartography, and check out his website at radicalcartography.net.
Guest Bio
William Rankin is a historian of science at Yale University, where he focuses on the history of mapping and the geographic sciences. Born and raised outside Chicago, he was originally trained as an architect before receiving a dual PhD in the history of science and architecture from Harvard. In addition to his work as a historian, he is also an award-winning cartographer, and his maps have appeared in numerous books, magazines, and exhibits around the world.
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Transcript
00:01.56
Jon
Bill, good to meet you. Welcome to the show.
00:04.70
Bill Rankin
John, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:06.58
Jon
ah Thanks so much, Radical Cartography, as I probably mentioned in the in the intro to this episode. Sat down, read it, cover to cover, New Year’s Day, sprinkling in some breaks for Stranger Things, but um ah really, really enjoyed it. um And I think people, I’m putting it, so um I’m putting it in my top three books.
00:27.32
Jon
but mapping books for data viz people. um I just think it’s that like, once you sort of get the understanding of projections and color and all that stuff, like what do we need to broaden our understanding of what maps are and what they can do and what they hide and what they what they what they don’t hide.
00:44.86
Jon
So I want to start with like the core question here, which is, well, first off, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we have you maybe talk a little bit about yourself, a little background, of folks knows who you are, and then um then we can go, yeah.
00:54.02
Bill Rankin
Yeah, sure. um Yeah, yeah. So I’m i’m Bill Rankin. i’m I’m a professor in the history and history of science department at Yale. um My background though was in architecture. So i originally went to design school um and thought I would be an architect.
01:11.35
Bill Rankin
you know, for a long time. um and And then when I realized I wasn’t going to be architect that my talents lay elsewhere, ah mapping really was like, was a way to kind of keep me, you know, a little bit in that world.
01:24.95
Jon
Yeah.
01:25.02
Bill Rankin
um So I went to graduate school for for history of science.
01:25.13
Jon
Yeah.
01:28.70
Bill Rankin
um And it was only then that I really started picking up mapping as a way to kind of keep me engaged with that whole world, right?
01:32.66
Jon
and
01:37.08
Bill Rankin
um
01:37.21
Jon
yeah
01:37.91
Bill Rankin
and And then it was many, many more years after that that I really started to say, oh, how can i you know, not just do this for fun, but really to take it seriously as ah as an intellectual project. um So yeah, I think that the the the basic story ah for me is just that this was a kind of a, you know,
01:55.86
Bill Rankin
a labor of love that I eventually realized like, oh, I can i want to figure out how to make this you know really really hit the hit the hit the hit the ground. um
02:05.14
Jon
Right.
02:05.66
Bill Rankin
and um And so the the people i ask often ask me like, what’s the where’s the architecture, where’s the design education in this? um And the easy answer is that so much of architecture is about creating things, you know imagine creating imagined spaces that don’t yet exist.
02:24.05
Bill Rankin
So that was always my kind of in for the mapping as well, seeing mapping really as a powerful way of making worlds, not just describing them.
02:31.45
Jon
right
02:31.61
Bill Rankin
So that was really the origin of the project.
02:33.75
Jon
So I have i have this, ah maybe unfair, but this image of of architects of like big rolled up pieces of paper with the blue background. and like um and and And I have an image of them drafting with pen and paper.
02:47.80
Jon
And I know there’s the computer side of it, but did you get, did you did you start, like, was your architecture background a lot of drafting and drawing? And then did you transfer that into into mapping of like starting in the physical world before really like doing the hardcore computer stuff?
03:02.10
Bill Rankin
Yeah, ah some. I think that my, so it it really comes from drawing, yes, but I think that when I went to architecture school was kind of the last death throes of pen and and and paper.
03:07.93
Jon
Yeah.
03:15.01
Bill Rankin
So i I did some of that, but most of it was learning to to draw with software.
03:15.22
Jon
Yeah.
03:18.60
Jon
Yeah.
03:19.74
Bill Rankin
um
03:19.90
Jon
Right.
03:20.57
Bill Rankin
So, but when I’m doing the mapping, I’m approaching it often as of as drawing. um So using Illustrator rather you know rather than just ArcGIS, things like that.
03:31.60
Bill Rankin
I use a whole bunch of different software, but in the end, I see it as ah a task of drawing rather than a task say of coding or of things like that.
03:31.67
Jon
Right.
03:39.45
Jon
Yeah.
03:40.90
Bill Rankin
So that’s where so i think you see that in the sense that I’m not coming at this from the from the point of view of coding or creating dashboards or interactives or things like that. I’m coming at it from the point of view of seeing, I want to create a drawing.
03:53.88
Bill Rankin
And often that means, especially at the last step, coming in there with my actual hand um and and moving things around and adding the final touches.
04:03.02
Jon
Right, right. um And I want to come back to the tools because I’m sure people will be will be, are curious about the tools that you use, but I want to get to the book. So um can you can you start by just like, what do you mean by this by this term radical cartography?
04:18.81
Bill Rankin
Yeah, so i but I think maybe first I’ll say what I don’t mean by it, which is to say I don’t mean ah let’s make a bunch of maps on left wing topics um or let’s ah use mapping as part of a radical political project.
04:23.26
Jon
Okay. Right.
04:29.57
Jon
Right.
04:34.95
Jon
Mm-hmm.
04:35.06
Bill Rankin
um There are people who do those things. ah In general, i’m and yeah i’m not and I’m not against that approach, but it’s not what I mean. um I mean more how do we take the active representation itself, the translation of data or world into map?
04:50.68
Bill Rankin
How do we see that as something which ah has a politics to it? and the choices we make about whether represents something with shapes or dots or lines, what colors we use, those things themselves, not just the topics, um not just what the data shows, but those choices about the graphics are themselves political and have real meaning.
05:10.59
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
05:11.48
Bill Rankin
And if we ignore those things, we often make not just crummy maps, but maps that can kind of undermine some of the the goals we have for what we’re actually trying to show. um So it’s really about trying to make ah the process of representation more intentional to try to think about how do we align that more with our values, what we’re actually trying to show, the meaning that’s actually created in the maps, not just showing the data in the most sort of you know transparent, honest sort of way.
05:33.91
Jon
isn you
05:38.74
Bill Rankin
um But it’s about the act of of of cartography itself rather than the topics of cartography.
05:43.54
Jon
Right, right. and And you talk a lot about in the book about different ways to approach. um I’m going to kind of ah kind of showing what tends to not be seen um in cartography, right? Like small areas. You mentioned the U.S. territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands that tend to just be thrown off to the side. um Can you talk a little bit about how you think through, um i don’t want to call them outliers, but the things that are not as sort of like standard and easy for people to just throw on a map. There are all these like other things to consider.
06:20.76
Bill Rankin
Yeah, I think that’s a good example. So ah you know if you take the the default way of showing something like population density, where you shade different areas, different colors based on you know people per square mile or whatever, um that small little areas, whether they’re you know Manhattan or islands or whatever, you just won’t be able to see them at all on a large map.
06:39.80
Jon
really
06:40.95
Bill Rankin
um And so there’s nothing like no one’s made a mistake in like no one’s lying, no one’s trying to hide anything.
06:46.11
Jon
Right.
06:48.94
Bill Rankin
But by just doing it the usual way, one of the unintended consequences is that small areas, cities, islands, and so forth, are completely invisible.
06:58.03
Jon
Mm-hmm.
06:58.17
Bill Rankin
And so yeah once you realize that, you’re like, oh, gosh, I really shouldn’t do that. And that isn’t necessarily about having an agenda ah you know ah about these places, but about saying, like if I actually want to show the world in the way that I i know it,
07:13.88
Jon
hmm. Yeah.
07:14.14
Bill Rankin
I need to rethink the the buttons I’m pushing. um And just doing it the default way ah really is is not right. um And so that’s, that’s I think it’s yeah think think it’s a good example of how a lot of the um kind of easiest ways of mapping do have these consequences of flattening what you could call outliers. um And a lot of what I try to do is to say, how do we make sure that everything, either in the data or or in the in the world, um is actually on this map in a way that we can see and we can actually consider?
07:43.72
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
07:46.30
Bill Rankin
Or another way I think about it is, if I’m making a map that has ah people or landscapes, whatever, how how can I be confident that the people I’m mapping will be able to see themselves on this map?
07:59.16
Bill Rankin
um So if you’re making a map, say, of I have an example in the book of ah Hispanic, Latino Americans, and you’re just doing it the standard way of you know ah percent of of total by county or zip code whatever, there’s lots of places where the answer will be close to zero.
08:16.01
Jon
Right.
08:16.09
Bill Rankin
And those people won’t be able to find themselves on the map at all.
08:19.19
Jon
Right.
08:19.32
Bill Rankin
um So I think, yeah, there’s it’s not so much about a fascination with outliers. It’s more trying to say, okay, if I do it the usual way, i want to make sure that I’m catching the things that would be we erased.
08:32.18
Jon
Yeah. So I think there could be people who listen to this podcast, this episode and hear you say, oh, this is not from a left-wing perspective. It’s not a political perspective. But also at the same time say, oh, this just sounds like, you know, woke, you know, we want people to be seen. So, and, and and um you know, I’m doing similar work in and and another vein. And I’d just like to ask you to talk about how um from your perspective, enabling people to see themselves in the data, in a map, in a visual is not some sort of left wing or right wing, you know, ideology. It’s not, ah it’s not woke. It’s not, you know, so, so if, if someone came to you and said, ah, this stuff, this book is just woke. It’s just, it’s just trying to like, you know, whatever, like what would your measured response to that be?
09:26.13
Bill Rankin
Yeah, well, I think of things. I think that um I do think that I’m but happy to stand up for the value of making sure that people are seen and heard.
09:34.66
Jon
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
09:35.29
Bill Rankin
i definite Definitely, right? um And, ah but you know, I hope that’s not just a left-wing value, but it might be. um And…
09:43.41
Jon
Yeah. I mean, I, I don’t know. I just, yeah. I mean, I, I guess to the core of the point, I feel like there is this like, Oh, you need to make everybody feel seen is this sort of like soft thing.
09:57.63
Jon
I mean, I’ll let you answer, but like from my perspective, it’s just, it’s, if people see themselves, it’s more likely that they’re going to use it. I mean, I, I’ve, for me, it’s a very simple, you know, but I want to hear your, like, more perspective it.
10:06.14
Bill Rankin
yeah Yeah, sure.
10:09.05
Bill Rankin
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So here here’s a good example.
10:10.57
Jon
Yeah.
10:11.82
Bill Rankin
um So cartograms, which I’m sure this audience knows well, ah yeah, i I see them all the time. I like them, um but I don’t really use them myself.
10:23.48
Bill Rankin
um And what happens with a ah so standard ah map of the state election, right, we are shading ah red or blue by counties, the cities are going to be almost invisible.
10:35.32
Bill Rankin
right, in exactly the way I was just talking about. And so a standard election map with no ah you know geographic distortion is gonna over represent
10:37.30
Jon
Yeah.
10:44.38
Bill Rankin
rural areas, ah it’s you know it’s a map of land rather than people, all these kinds of things. But the opposite, is to the alternative of the cartogram where you deform based on population, where the cities become huge, like rural areas now become almost invisible.
10:54.01
Jon
evening
10:58.90
Bill Rankin
right They become stretched to these thin little spaghetti strands where you can’t even figure out where on the map you are.
10:58.87
Jon
Right. Yeah.
11:04.58
Bill Rankin
So all you know all of Wyoming becomes a kind of weird little thing in the corner.
11:04.76
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
11:07.99
Jon
yeah
11:08.73
Bill Rankin
right
11:09.02
Jon
yeah yeah
11:09.78
Bill Rankin
I don’t think that’s good either.
11:11.58
Jon
yeah
11:11.77
Bill Rankin
um So I don’t think, so it’s not just that I want to hold up the voices of people who are, you know, marginalized in the way that the woke community would want to ah valorize, but to say that like cartograms, for example, that that show city population pretty well, but completely obliterate rural areas, that’s also not a good solution.
11:30.01
Jon
Mm-hmm.
11:30.17
Bill Rankin
um And so what I’m trying to to do in the book is to try to find some ways to say, how do we keep all these things kind of in play at the same time? find some strategic strategic compromises rather than to to say the only one correct way to do it is to only show cities or to only show rural areas, to try to push back against the ice this sense that ah there can be a single correct way to show everything.
11:39.64
Jon
Mm-hmm.
11:54.14
Bill Rankin
but just And I think that that’s that’s also a little different than the, ah you know, let’s find maps that highlight the people who have been traditionally obscured.
11:54.18
Jon
Mm-hmm.
12:05.35
Jon
Right.
12:05.62
Bill Rankin
Rather to say, how do we find ways doing maps that that keep our thinking flexible and to say, okay, when we do it this way, we’re making a trade-off between showing more of this or less of this and to kind of keep ourselves in those trade-offs rather than trying to say, i want to find the one final map that shows the world the way that I think it should be found or shit should be seen, right?
12:25.47
Jon
Right.
12:25.81
Bill Rankin
Yeah.
12:25.94
Jon
Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole section um on on cartograms in the book and you you describe them as corrective, the word corrective rather than maps that stand on on their own. So when you think about i think the election examples is perfect. When you think about a good ah platform that’s showing your election results.
12:44.60
Jon
um Do you think that sort of the the better way to communicate the data is to give people opportunities to see the geographies in different ways?
12:56.09
Bill Rankin
I think that’s certainly better than just here’s the one map, for sure. um And i think that, ah but i i don’t I don’t love the the strategy of just here’s the you know the the map of land area and here’s the cartogram and you can go back and forth because they’re so difficult to keep those two your head, right?
13:10.67
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
13:13.56
Bill Rankin
Because they’re just so different. um So ah what I come up with in the book, and I’m not the first person to ah to do these kinds of things, to say, how do i you know ah use things like scale circles ah but to keep them in their kind of you know geographic place so we know where people are, how many people they are, how they’re voting, like just keep track of the questions we’re asking and then to try to find a map that does those things pretty well, even if it doesn’t do everything perfectly, rather than saying here are the to two or three different ways you can visualize the same data and I’m not going to help you figure out how to integrate them.
13:50.54
Jon
Right, right. So we kind of sped right to cartograms. I want to come back a second to sort of the standard color shaded map, the choropleth map. I really found it interesting. um you never you I don’t think you ever used the word choropleth map in the book. You call them jigsaw puzzle maps, which I i love. Yeah.
14:12.92
Jon
and And it never really occurred to me until like there’s like a part in the book in the very beginning where you sort of like the map looks exactly like a jigsaw puzzle the way it’s just the the diagram. I’m curious, I’m assuming that was a conscious decision on your part to not use terms like choropleth. And I’m curious how ah you know how you came to that decision.
14:33.82
Bill Rankin
Yeah. So I think I think Korplev might have snuck into a footnote or two, but you’re right. I don’t use it in the.
14:38.49
Jon
and Okay, I’ll admit maybe I didn’t go through all the footnotes and end notes.
14:40.98
Bill Rankin
Yeah. remember that The point is, like, it was, in fact, a conscious choice.
14:41.73
Jon
I’ll admit, yeah.
14:44.26
Bill Rankin
Right. um So it’s ah it’s certainly a word that that I’ve used.
14:44.66
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah
14:47.89
Bill Rankin
that I think about and i’ve in in my my academic work, I’ve actually done some some research on where that term came from and why it was used, ah why it was coined in the nineteen thirty s um And in the book, there’s I think it’s two reasons.
15:00.60
Bill Rankin
the this The simplest is I want this book to speak to people who who haven’t really thought about maps that much, not just to speak to people who’ve already thought them out about them a lot. And I’ve always found the the term chloropleph kind of clunky.
15:13.08
Bill Rankin
ah People you know often mispronounce it. They think, you know, you know chlo chloropleph, like like chloroform or whatever, right?
15:17.05
Jon
pour out yeah Right.
15:19.11
Bill Rankin
right
15:19.08
Jon
Yeah.
15:20.20
Bill Rankin
This is not a great term. um So that would be a way of kind of you know closing off the ah the windows rather than than opening them up.
15:22.11
Jon
Yeah.
15:27.57
Jon
Mm-hmm.
15:28.70
Bill Rankin
um But I think that beyond that, though, what core when choropleth was coined in the 30s, it was part of a moment of really trying to systematize cartography.
15:40.22
Bill Rankin
to say we can have some specific vocabulary for different kinds of techniques.
15:40.23
Jon
Mm.
15:44.14
Bill Rankin
There’s three ways to show this kind of data. There’s four ways to show these kinds of ratios, right? And they had to have a sort of an overall, to make cartography more technical, more systematic, a bit more abstract, right?
15:56.64
Bill Rankin
So it’s not about ah how do you show, you know, say population or elections or landformers, but how do you show quantitative data in general, right?
15:56.62
Jon
Hmm.
16:06.78
Bill Rankin
Or qualitative data, or how do you know, those kinds of things. and And I feel like that’s not great. I feel like there’s something really important about having mapping be in touch with the actual meaning of what you’re showing.
16:20.25
Bill Rankin
And I think that the jigsaw puzzle as a kind of metaphor um does do more to sort of you know, get a sense of what’s at stake with representing the world that way. Right.
16:30.39
Jon
Mm hmm.
16:30.97
Bill Rankin
ah You have this idea that like, oh, that means you can take certain pieces out, maybe, you know, throw them on the floor. They’re independent sorts of things. Each piece is a kind of independent thing, you know, that just happens to slot and next to others, but doesn’t really interact with them.
16:38.33
Jon
Yeah.
16:44.31
Jon
Yeah.
16:45.11
Bill Rankin
I think that the the term gets ah it conjures more about what’s at stake with that form of representation rather than just slotting it into a kind of you know technical vocabulary.
16:55.22
Jon
Yeah, it also, for me, when I got to that section, i think it also, I want to say in some ways, opened view to thinking about maps as, you know, not everything has to be adjacent. To your point, you can take things out and you can put things in. And there’s a freedom there where you’re not bound by just using the, you know,
17:18.78
Jon
whatever projection um that you can start to play around with moving things around to tell the story as effectively as possible.
17:27.16
Bill Rankin
um Yeah, I think that that seems, that i i’m I’m in favor of that. I think that the, yeah, I think the main thing really is how is the map ah giving us a kind of take on the world, right?
17:41.91
Jon
Yeah.
17:42.58
Bill Rankin
um Which is different than how are we going to represent our data set?
17:42.87
Jon
know
17:46.81
Bill Rankin
um And so to say, yeah, there might be other techniques that are a bit unorthodox that might mean, you know, cutting and pasting and rearranging or whatever, they’re going to give ah an account of the world that I can stand behind.
17:48.34
Jon
yeah
18:00.06
Jon
Yeah.
18:00.28
Bill Rankin
um And so i’m I’m definitely in favor of of that kind of giving yourselves a license for that kind of freedom.
18:07.42
Jon
yeah
18:07.70
Bill Rankin
um And to say, ah i’m going to do things a little differently um because i I feel like this is the the the way to represent the the things that i as I understand them.
18:19.51
Jon
Yeah, I mean, the the other part of the book that I really liked throughout all the examples and and ah what I found kind of funny is that there were so many in here that I recognized but didn’t know they were yours. So that was kind of entertaining for me. How…
18:34.10
Jon
how in a lot of your work, you layer things together. You layer sort of different perspectives on data together. So one example that i really like is you have this map of the world in sort of a rectangular box. And then along the the horizontal axis is the distribution, basically histogram of population. um Can you talk a little bit how, you know, in this discussion of, in this discussion, how you think about presenting data, you layer different,
19:01.33
Jon
sort of views together within a single, i’ll call it a map, but it’s really sort of like ah a bigger visual.
19:08.66
Bill Rankin
Yeah, I think that the ah the the the main thing I try to resist is let’s make the the final map that shows everything perfectly.
19:21.30
Bill Rankin
um And I think if you’re trying to say, how do I show the population of the world perfectly? right You’re never going to come up with that kind of histogram approach, right?
19:28.15
Jon
Yeah.
19:30.48
Bill Rankin
Because the histogram of by latitude and longitude obviously leaves a lot of stuff out, right?
19:35.70
Jon
Yeah.
19:36.00
Bill Rankin
um but ah So I think that I like being more intentional about what are my actual questions and then how do I answer each of those questions, perhaps individually?
19:36.34
Jon
Right.
19:43.12
Jon
Right.
19:46.87
Bill Rankin
And I might have more than one, and so I might have more than one thing in the same project. So if I have a question, like, I’m actually kind of curious how the distribution of you know human population varies by latitude.
19:58.46
Bill Rankin
I can ask that question independently of ah you know how are people distributed within Asia or whatever, right? um and But I’m also interested in ah how are people distributed within Asia?
20:09.88
Bill Rankin
And so I can have a have a separate question about that.
20:10.39
Jon
isn he
20:12.52
Bill Rankin
So I think that having saying, ah being really conscious for myself, um Yes, for my audience, my readers, um but even just for myself as the mapmaker, what are my questions and how do I make sure that I’m getting clear answers to those questions rather than just saying I’m trying to do mapping?
20:29.53
Jon
Yeah.
20:30.22
Bill Rankin
Yeah.
20:30.84
Jon
Right. So starting with a question rather than a kind of a thought of what a final product is.
20:37.18
Bill Rankin
Yeah. um or Or a thought of this is the way we do it. Right.
20:41.43
Jon
Yeah.
20:42.10
Bill Rankin
um So ah there’s, you know, if you look at the history of population mapping, 100 years or more of in atlases and online everywhere, it’s like, okay you make, ah you know, you ah you you shade based on ah kind of ah a color scale that goes from a kind of pale buff to a darker, you know, reddish brown um population density, people per square mile around the world.
20:42.26
Jon
Right.
20:52.71
Jon
Yeah.
20:59.20
Jon
Mm-hmm. Right.
21:04.58
Bill Rankin
That’s how we do it. Right.
21:05.37
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
21:06.04
Bill Rankin
um And I’ve seen, i’ just I’ve seen, once you go looking for that kind of map, you see it so many times again and again, it’s just a cut and paste.
21:10.78
Jon
Yeah.
21:12.56
Bill Rankin
Right. um
21:13.27
Jon
Yeah.
21:13.94
Bill Rankin
And we’ve already touched on a couple of reasons that that I think is not good. you know, you can’t see cities, you can’t see islands. I think the color scale again, like once you step back a little bit, obviously conjuring skin color um in a way that’s like not even accurate.
21:25.90
Jon
Yep.
21:28.54
Bill Rankin
Right.
21:28.98
Jon
Right, right. Yeah, right. Yeah.
21:31.17
Bill Rankin
It’s like i mean yeah i mean it’s not like not accurate for a few different reasons, right?
21:31.34
Jon
Yeah.
21:36.42
Bill Rankin
Not everyone in the same place has the same skin color, but also the most densely populated areas are not the places where the people have the darkest skin color. There’s all sorts of problems with that, right? um and So, so yeah, then so I would say over the last you know many years, I’ve, I’ve taken that same, literally the same data set and ask so many different questions of it.
21:54.62
Bill Rankin
So the latitude longitude is one of them.
21:54.82
Jon
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
21:56.54
Bill Rankin
ah One that didn’t make it in the book is just ah how does population distribution by altitude? um So I have a, you know, histogram of where people live in terms of, you know, about sea level. One that is in the book is trying to think about how, you know, how,
22:12.70
Bill Rankin
if you divide the world into two hemispheres, which is the hemisphere that has the most people?
22:17.86
Jon
Mm-hmm.
22:18.04
Bill Rankin
um And you can pick a hemisphere that has 93% of all population and the other side of the earth has 7%.
22:25.87
Jon
Right.
22:26.22
Bill Rankin
That was another, just a separate little question, right?
22:28.25
Jon
Yeah.
22:28.34
Bill Rankin
um
22:28.53
Jon
Yeah.
22:29.34
Bill Rankin
so ah So I think that’s the thing is kind of question focused ah rather than I need to show my entire data set in the way that we’ve kind of inherited, right?
22:41.08
Jon
So, but are you thinking of it as let’s take population and see, ah you have some big data set of population by all these different elements. Are you thinking,
22:53.78
Jon
ah it sounds to me, I’ll put it this way. It sounds to me that you are sort of asking questions of the data um and sort of like the visual comes last.
23:05.18
Jon
I mean, this is a book on mapping.
23:06.17
Bill Rankin
one
23:07.10
Jon
You do a lot of mapping, but it doesn’t sound to me that you are coming to asking a question about the distribution of population.
23:07.38
Bill Rankin
m
23:13.78
Jon
How am I going to make a different kind of map out of that? You’re just asking questions. And then what is the way to effectively visualize it?
23:23.13
Bill Rankin
Yeah, I’d say, mean, I think that’s that’s right.
23:23.45
Jon
all that story.
23:25.42
Bill Rankin
I think that it’s also iterative. and The more time I spend with the data set, the more I’m like, oh, there’s a question I didn’t think to ask.
23:27.54
Jon
Yeah.
23:32.38
Jon
Yeah.
23:32.44
Bill Rankin
um Or ah like the map of elevation, like just the single data set of population around the world won’t answer that.
23:33.35
Jon
Right.
23:39.00
Bill Rankin
i have to you know I have to combine that with ah ah the DEM for elevation.
23:39.45
Jon
Right.
23:43.04
Bill Rankin
um so ah So, yeah, it’s not just it’s not just ah i I know all the questions before I look at the data.
23:51.22
Jon
Yeah.
23:51.35
Bill Rankin
um Often I don’t know any real good questions before look at the data. um But in the end, I want to make sure I’m not just trying to say… i think like a lot of the standard um kind of cliched advice is about trying to find the truth in your data as if it’s already there, right?
24:09.72
Bill Rankin
um but Here’s the data set.
24:09.73
Jon
Right.
24:12.95
Bill Rankin
explore it and and figure out what the the patterns are.
24:15.70
Jon
Yeah.
24:15.98
Bill Rankin
Right.
24:16.39
Jon
Yeah.
24:17.02
Bill Rankin
And the idea is, you know different people would come across the same data set and reach the same conclusions, find the same patterns, represent it the same sort of way. And we know that’s not true. Different people will find different interesting things going on.
24:28.42
Bill Rankin
um And so I think the more we can be kind of honest with ourselves, that’s what’s going on, that this is about my own somewhat idiosyncratic way of exploring this particular data.
24:33.71
Jon
Yeah.
24:37.51
Bill Rankin
And I’m going to always kind of keep myself, ah to the the questions I want to ask and then make sure that what I’m coming up with is answering those questions pretty well, um that’s the idea.
24:43.22
Jon
Yeah.
24:48.38
Bill Rankin
um Yeah, which is really different, I think, than just um I download the the population data set and I now need to represent it because that’s my job.
24:54.49
Jon
yeah
24:57.59
Jon
Right, right, right, right. um I did want to ask, you mentioned the the elevation, the altitude map. um I don’t think I saw a lot of mention of maps that are done in three, in a third a third dimension. um Do you have strong feelings? I know there’s the ray shader package, which I know people have been using a lot the last year or two to like make more of the, you know, three dimensional maps. But do you have a strong feelings in either direction about making maps that are 3D?
25:28.90
Bill Rankin
You’re right, I don’t do that. um i thinking i assume you’re thinking about the ones where there’s kind of know oblique view from an airplane or something like that.
25:34.74
Jon
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
25:36.70
Bill Rankin
um i ah
25:36.84
Jon
Yeah.
25:38.62
Bill Rankin
I think that there’s, um some of that is because i feel like those are sometimes harder to, ah like, there’s lots of confounding things the things that can happen when you’re there’s having the the bar charts you know erupting off of the three-dimensional surface and that kind of stuff.
25:52.98
Jon
Yeah. Right.
25:54.51
Bill Rankin
um you know ah How are you taking perspective into account when you’re trying to show the the data at the same time you’re showing the view, that kind of thing. um Some of that, I think, is that I ah think I just had had my plate full with three-dimensional stuff.
26:09.30
Jon
Yeah.
26:09.39
Bill Rankin
And and And I think this is, this me wait, wait, wait me big but what what it makes me think about more than the 3D stuff is the kind of animations and things like that.
26:19.69
Jon
Oh yeah.
26:19.78
Bill Rankin
Cause I’ve done less with animations.
26:19.94
Jon
Okay.
26:22.26
Bill Rankin
I’ve done some, um I know how to do it, but I don’t i don’t do it really.
26:22.46
Jon
Right. Yep.
26:27.77
Bill Rankin
um
26:27.77
Jon
Right.
26:28.60
Bill Rankin
And I think that the the reason is because the the doing the animations or the interactives often means that you’re making a real compromise on the kinds of questions you can ask and the clarity of the of what you can come up with.
26:41.10
Jon
Mm-hmm.
26:43.93
Bill Rankin
um So oh I think of some really fantastic examples of maps from the past that could never be animations at all.
26:43.93
Jon
Yeah.
26:52.92
Bill Rankin
um This one that I was thinking about, this is from the 1940s, showed um September as hurricane month.
26:53.10
Jon
Mm-hmm.
26:59.96
Bill Rankin
And so it showed all the hurricanes, the tracks of all the hurricanes that have hit the Eastern United States in any September ever.
27:00.03
Jon
Mm-hmm.
27:06.69
Jon
Mm-hmm.
27:07.19
Bill Rankin
um And it’s really interesting to see like, oh yeah, I never thought about September as the most hurricane-y month. And here are all the different September hurricanes that have ever hit the East Coast.
27:12.71
Jon
Right.
27:17.11
Bill Rankin
And it wouldn’t work as an animation, right? An animation that showed storm after storm after storm wouldn’t get that sense of, oh, September, there’s something going on in September.
27:23.80
Jon
Yeah.
27:25.06
Bill Rankin
I want to know more about September, right?
27:26.86
Jon
Right.
27:27.13
Bill Rankin
um And just that way of showing time, I think more in a more sophisticated way, when you have it as a static graphic,
27:27.52
Jon
Right.
27:35.54
Bill Rankin
um or flow maps or things like that. There’s the things you can do with static graphs that are just harder to do with animations.
27:42.23
Jon
is
27:42.97
Bill Rankin
And so I think maybe with a three-dimensional thing, it’s it’s a similar sort of thing. theyre like There’s something fun about the three-dimensional views, there’s fun about the animations, um but it actually really limits the kinds of ah kind of analytic graphics we can make.
27:57.08
Jon
Right. um On this animation or interactive versus static, it’s a question I ask a lot of people, which is um ignoring the complexity of the tools.
28:08.41
Jon
Do you think, generally speaking, static maps are harder to create than interactive or animated maps? Yeah.
28:15.29
Bill Rankin
ah
28:15.30
Jon
I
28:16.09
Bill Rankin
I think, i don’t i don’t i don’t know that it’s about harder or easier. Certainly from a technical point of view, you know, making animated maps is hard.
28:23.16
Jon
mean,
28:25.08
Bill Rankin
Yeah.
28:25.22
Jon
Right, right.
28:25.59
Bill Rankin
there and
28:25.92
Jon
But if we abstract from the the tool, the code, ah and so ah my you know in some ways, the static map, you kind of have to pick a story or perspective and animation or interactivity allows the user to do that.
28:36.18
Bill Rankin
Exactly.
28:41.50
Jon
But maybe that’s not right for maps.
28:41.69
Bill Rankin
Yeah. Yeah.
28:43.34
Jon
I don’t know.
28:44.15
Bill Rankin
I think that i think it is is is basically right. So um the I think that that having the static map gives you the the both the i say the the option and the opportunity, maybe the obligation as the map maker to figure out what I’m actually trying to show here.
28:56.60
Jon
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
28:59.32
Bill Rankin
And there’s no cop out of just, I’m going to show all my data um and I’m going to let the user figure out what’s going on.
29:02.55
Jon
Yeah.
29:05.63
Jon
Mm-hmm.
29:05.78
Bill Rankin
um And I think there’s a larger ethic there, too, where there’s a lot of projects that are really about trying to get data in the hands of users. um And I think that’s generally good.
29:16.85
Bill Rankin
I certainly benefited that a lot from from ah that a lot myself, where I can go and just get the data myself rather than having to go through some clunky um government website or whatever. um But I think that that can…
29:28.41
Bill Rankin
ah that that that itself isn’t enough, right? I think that there is something really important about saying, I also need to figure out what’s in this data set and to try to present that to my audience.
29:40.70
Bill Rankin
I can’t just dump the data on them and say, yeah, okay, I have, you know, several advanced degrees and a lot of technical skills, but I’m going to expect that you’re going to go through this data better than I can, right?
29:50.74
Jon
Right. if i’m Right. Yeah.
29:52.01
Bill Rankin
So for me, it’s not, it’s not, it’s a both and thing, which is like, yes, share the data. Absolutely.
29:56.23
Jon
Right.
29:56.70
Bill Rankin
um But also,
29:56.81
Jon
Right.
29:58.58
Bill Rankin
i think that there’s I feel obliged, actually, to say, I’m going to figure out what I think is important here and to try to then put it together in a way ah that makes the questions clear, the answers clear and say, I think this is what’s important.
30:03.68
Jon
Yeah.
30:10.10
Bill Rankin
And this what I want you to know about it um without then without without also shutting down their ability to to to you know explore themselves.
30:17.78
Jon
Yeah.
30:18.17
Bill Rankin
So things like animations, I think that there’s, um it’s harder, to i think it is harder to do that.
30:18.82
Jon
I’ll go to that.
30:24.39
Bill Rankin
It’s harder to say, this is the thing that I want to focus on because so much of the the bandwidth on the on the screen um is really about just showing this this this flow of information, right?
30:37.21
Jon
Yeah. I also worry, especially for maps, because they can be so data dense that when you put up an animated or interactive map that requires a lot of bandwidth, that there’s a lot of people who don’t have the broadband access or they don’t have the phone or computer that allows them to sort of see the full the full richness of the project that the person, that the creator sort of intended them to see. And so I worry a little bit, I mean, to the earlier,
31:09.50
Jon
Point you made about the rural urban divide. I mean, you’ve got a lot of people in rural areas, at least in the United States who don’t have good access to the internet. And so if you create this really heavy thing that requires a lot of bandwidth, they’re not going to be able to interact with it.
31:23.67
Bill Rankin
I think that’s not just true for like literal bandwidth questions. I find it true for myself.
31:28.53
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:29.71
Bill Rankin
like When I come across ah you know even a really cool project, um I’m on my laptop. ah’s It’s a nice laptop, um but it’s not the huge screen that I think it was probably designed on.
31:35.19
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:40.73
Jon
Right.
31:41.02
Bill Rankin
Um, and, uh, so a lot of times these, you know, dashboardy things, like in the end, it’s like a, you know, three by four inch of the screen is what I actually, I have to deal with.
31:47.78
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
31:50.83
Bill Rankin
Right.
31:51.03
Jon
Yeah.
31:51.59
Bill Rankin
And it’s clunky. It’s not, you know, it’s, it’s slow. I don’t, I don’t, I’m on a good connection. I don’t know what the problem is. Um, but I think some of it is even just the design.
31:57.26
Jon
Mm-hmm.
31:59.47
Bill Rankin
Like I think it’s designed on a huge screen.
32:02.39
Jon
Yeah.
32:02.74
Bill Rankin
Um, And yeah even on a slightly smaller screen like my laptop, it just doesn’t really work.
32:07.29
Jon
That’s all right.
32:07.93
Bill Rankin
um and And it’s a real shame because clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into that.
32:11.77
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
32:13.18
Bill Rankin
But yeah, I think that my my approach has been to have ah things that work on the size that I think that they’re going to be seen and then to be able to download a big
32:22.42
Jon
he
32:25.69
Bill Rankin
version of it, again, kind of bit just a big PNGA, you know, a static thing.
32:26.58
Jon
in
32:30.29
Bill Rankin
um People can save it.
32:30.26
Jon
yeah
32:32.43
Bill Rankin
That’s a big problem, I think, with a lot of interactives is that they work for a year or two on the web, something breaks, and then they never, and you can’t you can’t do anything with them. So, yeah, I think that it’s, and I think that it even comes back a little bit to architecture and drawing,
32:50.36
Bill Rankin
ah where I’m always reminding myself, reminding students that I work with, you’ve got to check in with the actual… you know, dimensions of the thing you’re going to be creating.
33:02.65
Jon
Yeah.
33:02.78
Bill Rankin
um Instead of saying, I’m going to make, make a kind of a map that works. If you’re in this immersive world where you can zoom in and out forever, I’m going to have a huge 24 by 36 inch screen whatever.
33:10.71
Jon
e he Yeah.
33:14.24
Bill Rankin
Like what about when it’s printed in a, in a, on a six by nine inch page now or it’s on a laptop or a, or a phone or whatever. um Yeah. I think that there’s a, I see a lot of people ah making wraps that kind of require this constant zooming in and out because you can’t actually, nothing really works at the at ah at ah at a single zoom level.
33:34.49
Jon
Yeah. um I’m curious now that you mentioned that, were there maps or images in the book that you either had to get rid of or you had to go back and recreate so that they would work in the the physical book and the size of the page?
33:50.17
Bill Rankin
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
33:52.38
Jon
Yeah.
33:52.44
Bill Rankin
So there’s definitely maps that didn’t get in the book at all um because I had designed them as big posters.
33:55.94
Jon
Yeah.
33:59.83
Jon
Yeah.
33:59.96
Bill Rankin
I had exhibited them as posters. And when you shrink them down, they just, eh, it didn’t work, right?
34:04.27
Jon
Don’t worry. Yeah.
34:05.63
Bill Rankin
um
34:05.72
Jon
Yeah.
34:07.06
Bill Rankin
And then there’s plenty of maps where I had to go back and redo you know the the the text, the line work, all that kind of stuff to make them work and redo the layouts.
34:15.58
Jon
I can just imagine how fun that was for you.
34:17.59
Bill Rankin
Oh, it was, I mean, oh my God.
34:18.47
Jon
Go back to old code. yeah
34:20.52
Bill Rankin
um Yeah, but it was but you’re right, it was necessary, right? um And there’s a few times when I couldn’t do and I just said, okay, this is going to be two-point font and they’re goingnna no one’s going to be able to read it, that’s fine.
34:24.19
Jon
Yeah.
34:30.54
Bill Rankin
um
34:30.62
Jon
Yeah.
34:31.50
Bill Rankin
There’s times when I would show the whole thing and then I would show a detail in large. ah But yeah, no, I had to really think this is a book with certain dimensions. It’s on paper, um or maybe it’s an ebook, but still, it’s you know you shouldn’t have to zoom in on the on the on the PDF when you’re reading it.
34:47.99
Bill Rankin
um And that meant really going back and and doing a lot of lot of work on old projects, for sure.
34:52.84
Jon
Yeah. The other question I wanted to ask specifically about the book was on um the stories in here. So like there are, the I think this is why it was kind of easy for me to read it cover to cover because there are stories sort of almost kind of throughout.
35:09.85
Jon
It’s not like every chapter leads with a story. Then you get into the content. It’s like that story is the through line throughout the, the, the, the whole book. And there’s a really interesting story about um maybe Robinson, I think of the Robinson projection.
35:22.04
Bill Rankin
Yeah, Arthur Robinson. Yeah.
35:23.04
Jon
Yeah. Was there, Or is there a story that you still really like? Like, is there one that really like for you is the, is the one that, you know, is your favorite or they want all your kids, you know?
35:32.50
Bill Rankin
m
35:37.08
Bill Rankin
Yeah, I think… yeah Yeah, Well, I think that the mapping of Northern Canada is probably my favorite.
35:43.00
Jon
Yeah.
35:43.22
Bill Rankin
um So you’re right that there’s there’s some that kind of ah come and go throughout the book.
35:47.83
Jon
Yeah.
35:48.03
Bill Rankin
Robinson is a character that appears in many chapters. um And the the Inuit mapping in Northern Canada, that’s a more self-contained thing. um But i I really like it ah for a few reasons. um One, I think that there’s there’s a lot of ah scholarship about indigenous mapping.
36:05.08
Bill Rankin
um And when I zoom into the particularities of that rather famous case, at the conclusions I reach, I think, are are pretty different than if I think about indigenous mapping in a kind of abstract sense.
36:05.13
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
36:16.89
Bill Rankin
um I also think just the the maps are super cool in a way that wasn’t, as I say in the book, was not actually like intentional. i think the people who made I know the people who made the maps kind of didn’t like them.
36:27.61
Bill Rankin
um They were kind of apologetic about, you know, oh, it didn’t quite work. It’s about… And I think that the way that it didn’t work is really interesting. So they were mapping, they did all these interviews with Inuit hunters about where they had found certain species of a wildlife in their in their life as a hunter.
36:38.37
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
36:45.11
Bill Rankin
And then they combined all those interviews to make little blobs of, know, here’s where the Inuit have hunted caribou or ptarmigan or whatever it is.
36:52.41
Jon
him
36:53.14
Bill Rankin
um And then they layered them on a map, um to show you know areas that had been used by the Inuit in recorded memory or in lived memory.
37:04.57
Bill Rankin
And what I find so interesting was that the maps are ah completely completely make a hash of the the the boundary between land and water.
37:13.98
Jon
Yeah.
37:14.56
Bill Rankin
It’s really hard to sit like,
37:14.94
Jon
Yeah.
37:16.84
Bill Rankin
it’s so it’s a it’s a it’s kind of ah unnerving and in in a kind of nice way, right? Like it doesn’t work as a map that shows here are the, you know, here’s the recognizable map and i’m going to shade it in based on where Inuit have found certain species.
37:21.95
Jon
Yeah.
37:29.40
Jon
yeah
37:32.12
Bill Rankin
the The data kind of obliterates the background.
37:34.65
Jon
yeah
37:34.78
Bill Rankin
um And I found it so interesting how important that was politically in the negotiations that the Inuit had with the Canadian government for actually, creating different kinds of wildlife management agencies for having a different understanding of territory that included ice and water, not just land.
37:52.09
Bill Rankin
um
37:52.20
Jon
Yeah.
37:52.92
Bill Rankin
So there was a way in which the the mapping really made a real difference. ah Not because, ah again, not because of the topics, um not because of the sort of conviction of the map makers, but because the graphics themselves made it easier to see the world in a certain way and harder to see the world in the more traditional way. And that that really had ah a lot of a lot of traction. um But in the end, I also just think like, I think the maps in that eyeless are really interesting and really cool um because ah because they’re not, that they they don’t do the thing that you might you know maps like that would usually do.
38:19.77
Jon
Yeah, for sure.
38:26.45
Bill Rankin
Yeah.
38:26.78
Jon
Right, right. They they blur the the the border, I mean, literally the border between land and water. Yeah, it’s really fascinating.
38:32.50
Bill Rankin
Yeah, exactly.
38:33.41
Jon
Yeah.
38:33.62
Bill Rankin
Exactly. Yeah. um and ah And there’s a few other examples of like like that in the book of, ah there’s the one I’m particularly, I’m thinking of this um NASA data set of cloud cover.
38:45.09
Jon
Mm-hmm.
38:45.34
Bill Rankin
um With this just a, you know, you take cloud cover, i think it was October, 2009, whatever it was. um And it’s really interesting how certain ah boundaries ah between continents and oceans are really crisp and really clear.
38:58.93
Bill Rankin
And you see them in the data and others completely are are blurred.
39:00.44
Jon
Yeah.
39:02.33
Bill Rankin
um And it’s just like, i think it’s actually a really interesting way of thinking about the world in a different way. Right.
39:07.86
Jon
Yeah.
39:08.38
Bill Rankin
um
39:08.57
Jon
Yeah.
39:09.21
Bill Rankin
So it’s not like I’m, uh, only making maps where the you know coastlines are invisible. But I do think that that’s it’s really interesting to see maps that work really well, even when they obliterate certain taken-for-granted ideas about you know background legibility. We have to have the coastlines because every map has to have coastlines.
39:28.78
Jon
Right.
39:29.40
Bill Rankin
Yeah, yeah.
39:30.08
Jon
Yeah, yeah. I would end there, but I do have one more question for you because I think i think listeners are interested on the tool sets that you use.
39:40.99
Jon
You already mentioned Illustrator and and ArcGIS, but what is your what are your sort of what is your toolkit and how does your toolkit maybe differ for like, I’ve just got to make this map for you know this academic journal versus I’m going to go in and make a poster and installation or something.
39:59.90
Bill Rankin
Yeah, sure. So i I don’t think I’m alone and in, in ah you know, touting the virtues of using lots of different programs, each for what they’re good for, rather than going all in for for one thing, right?
40:08.41
Jon
Mm-hmm.
40:11.71
Bill Rankin
I think i made ah i’ve made one map ever that was just in ArcGIS, and it was terrible. It was terrible. like I’m never doing this again. It was so hard and it looks like crap.
40:21.59
Jon
and
40:23.10
Bill Rankin
um So yeah, I use text editors. I have a couple different text editors, actually. There’s one that I haven’t used in a while, it’s called JujuEdit, where it doesn’t actually load the file into memory.
40:35.54
Bill Rankin
um So you can open like a two gigabyte file and just, you know, ah just deal with the headers, for example.
40:41.53
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
40:41.86
Bill Rankin
And I have other text files that are more traditional. They load the whole thing into memory um i use ah spreadsheets for lots of different things, not just for spreadsheet stuff, but um as I was saying to you before we started recording, I’ve used the spreadsheets sometimes to cobble together Python code, and then I cut and paste from the spreadsheet into the Python box.
40:58.52
Jon
Mm-hmm.
41:01.65
Bill Rankin
I use ArcGIS, I use Illustrator, I use Photoshop. um ah And then putting a stuff on the web, yeah I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on JavaScript or D3, but I’ve done enough of those kinds of things.
41:13.85
Jon
Enough.
41:14.88
Bill Rankin
Back in the day, used Flash.
41:15.06
Jon
Yeah.
41:16.54
Bill Rankin
So it’s a whole bunch of different things. I would say it’s pretty typical to say, you know i’ll i’ll tell I’ll start and with a text editor, I’ll do some stuff with spreadsheet, I’ll take it to into ArcGIS. um
41:26.34
Jon
Mm-hmm.
41:26.90
Bill Rankin
I think the thing, though, is I try to get it out of ArcGIS as quickly as I can. um Because it’s just not a graphics program in the end.
41:30.58
Jon
Mm-hmm.
41:34.55
Bill Rankin
um
41:34.70
Jon
Mm-hmm.
41:35.32
Bill Rankin
And so i will I will take things, if I’m going to do layering or transparency, that goes into Photoshop. Final colors happen usually in Photoshop because the color pickers are just better. I can see the real-time adjustments.
41:45.79
Bill Rankin
And then I take it from Photoshop into Illustrator where i do the text, the line work, um that kind of thing.
41:46.26
Jon
Right.
41:49.79
Jon
Gotcha. Okay.
41:50.62
Bill Rankin
um But there’s plenty of projects um where I don’t use ArcGIS at all and I’m just drawing it.
41:56.17
Jon
Mm-hmm.
41:56.94
Bill Rankin
um
41:57.87
Jon
Mm.
41:57.98
Bill Rankin
So I will bring in an existing map, ah trace over it in Illustrator, and then you know delete the background, um things like that.
42:04.17
Jon
Oh.
42:05.19
Bill Rankin
So ah yeah, i I think ArcJS is super powerful, super helpful. I use it all the time. There’s things that I could not do without it. um
42:13.83
Jon
Right.
42:14.65
Bill Rankin
But I think people are often surprised by how ah the the kinds of maps I’ve made without it at all. And how I really, that the less I can use it, I think the happier I am with the results because then I’m really thinking about what am I trying to to to show rather than how am I wrestling with the the data.
42:30.58
Jon
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, great. um Well, before I let you go, um obviously people should read the book. If they have questions for you, if they want you to come give a talk or teach class or consult where, um or they just want to ask you question, where can they, where can they find Where can they get ahold you?
42:48.57
Bill Rankin
Yeah, so ah you most of these maps are on my website, radicalcartography.net. But i know um I teach at Yale. You can Google me. I’ve got a faculty bio. There’s my email addresses there. My inbox is is open.
43:01.21
Bill Rankin
So I’m a very Google-able person.
43:01.46
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
43:03.32
Bill Rankin
And yeah, i love I love hearing from people. And actually, one of the things that I think ah you can see in the in the book is, is a lot of the the mapping projects started by people emailing me um saying, I’m interested in this.
43:14.94
Jon
yeah
43:16.30
Bill Rankin
Can you show me this? um Can you give me a different version of that? So I think that’s really helpful and really generative. And I think I’ve gotten as much from those kinds of interactions as I have just from stuff on my own.
43:26.65
Bill Rankin
So yeah, I totally welcome it.
43:28.28
Jon
Awesome. Bill, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. ah Really love the book and congrats on it. And and thanks again for for coming on.
43:36.66
Bill Rankin
Well, thanks, John, for having me. This was great.