Week 02

Basemaps

Tuesday, 9/1/26: Basemaps

Your first activity is due today! Submit it on Canvas for 6 points 15 points by 11:59pm.

In class today, we’ll talk about basemaps and introduce the first cartography challenge: an alternative campus map for the University of Richmond.

I referenced many readings today, including Kelly and Bosse (2022) on “pressing pause,” Roth (2021) on narrative mapping, Tyner (2010) on map design (this one’s a textbook), that map of Venezuela, Wilmott and Wood (2024) on basemaps and shelter justice in urban cartography, Miller and Schaetzl (2014) on soil base mapping, and Mapes and Spence (2026) on counter-mapping restrooms (part of which you’ll read for the challenge this week).

You can check all of these readings out in the references below if you want to dig deeper into any of the content.

Finally, I mentioned vector tiles and XYZ tiles. You can read more about vector tiles on this MapTiler blog post. These short slides nicely explain XYZ tiles. Pan/zoom around the interactive below to get a better sense of how this works in practice (XYZ tiles are “pyramids” that load dynamically based on zoom depth):

This visualization is by Bert Schoonman of the Allmaps project

Here are those vector tiles that we looked at in class:

https://basemaps.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/World_Basemap_v2/VectorTileServer

Thursday, 9/3/26: File names and open lab

We’ll have a short mapping activity about scale and cartography, followed by open lab.

Update: instead of talking scale, we’ll have a short activity about what makes good and bad file names/file naming conventions. It will not take more than 20 minutes to watch and then complete. Scale will have to happen another day…

Here are some things we talked about in class:

References

Kelly, Meghan, and Amber Bosse. 2022. “Pressing Pause, ‘Doing’ Feminist Mapping.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21 (4): 399–415. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i4.2083.
Mapes, Jennifer, and Noelle Spence. 2026. “Counter-Mapping as Action Research: Lessons Learned from the Microgeography of Universal Public Restrooms.” Cartographic Perspectives, June. https://doi.org/10.14714/CP110.2035.
Miller, B. A., and R. J. Schaetzl. 2014. “The Historical Role of Base Maps in Soil Geography.” Geoderma 230–231 (October): 329–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2014.04.020.
Roth, Robert E. 2021. “Cartographic Design as Visual Storytelling: Synthesis and Review of Map-Based Narratives, Genres, and Tropes.” The Cartographic Journal 58 (1): 83–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00087041.2019.1633103.
Tyner, Judith Ann. 2010. Principles of Map Design. New York London: The Guilford Press.
Wilmott, Clancy, and Alexis E Wood. 2024. “Terra Infirma: On the Base Map in Urban Cartography and GIS.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42 (5-6): 734–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241263205.