William Rankin: Radical Cartography

Bill Rankin’s research focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and geography, from the territorial scale of states and globalization down to the scale of individual buildings. He is particularly interested in the political effects of geographic knowledge—in mapping, the environmental sciences and technology, and methodological problems of digital scholarship, spatial history, and geographic analysis (including GIS).

His new book, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World (Viking, November 2025), is a historical, methodological, and practical exploration of data mapping. It argues for a new ethic of data visualization centered on the idea of visual argument. Instead of the “extractive visualization” of most contemporary mapping, which puts visualization in a subordinate position to “raw” data, it calls for a more interventionist and constructivist approach to spatial imagination grounded in the epistemic values of subjectivity, multiplicity, and uncertainty. The book brings the last two hundred years of mapping and visualization into conversation with Rankin’s own mapping projects, which have been published and exhibited widely in the US, Europe, and Asia. Specific topics range from urban segregation and desert land use to the history of slavery and the geography of climate change; most of these maps are also available on his website, www.radicalcartography.net, maintained since 2003.

His first book, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016), was a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century. It tracked the shift from the god’s-eye view of the paper map to the embedded experience of GPS, and it analyzed the role of mapping both in the macropolitics of US global power and in the micropolitics of everyday subjectivity and the unexpected uses of new technologies. It won book prizes in the history of technology, social-science history, and international studies; more information is available on the book’s website, www.afterthemap.info.

 
Bill is currently working on two new book projects. One is a long-durée history of the theories and uses of “natural borders,” from medieval frontiers to contemporary climate governance. The other explores the human history of the biogeography of birds.