When I think about what Guerrilla Cartography does, I think of building and creating something new from many different pieces, like a puzzle that only makes sense once it’s put together. But unlike a puzzle, there is no single correct way to put the pieces together, as they can fit together in different ways, revealing new images each time. Our crowdsourcing methods allow each guerrilla contributor to be a piece of that puzzle, to fit together as part of a whole to be published and promoted. This collaborative process ensures that anyone, anywhere, can contribute a piece, regardless of skill or experience. And, our dedication to open access facilitates the ever-expanding scope of cartography.
A personal history
Guerrilla Cartography is the brainchild of Darin Jensen, co-founder and president of the organization, who continues to be the driver of our ideas and main source of inspiration for our projects. I first met Darin when I was a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he worked as the Department Cartographer and Cartography Lecturer. In fact, the origins of Guerrilla Cartography trace back to the Mission Possible atlas during one of Darin’s 2011-12 cartography courses. I also learned cartography from him, taking his courses outside of my area of research at the time, and got to know Darin as a colleague and friend.
Later, as luck would have it — or perhaps luck = serendipity + hard work — when Darin decided to move on in his career, I found myself in his former role as Cartography Staff & Lecturer at UC Berkeley from 2015 to 2019. It was during that time that I joined Guerrilla Cartography and started working with other board members on the Water atlas and promoting our projects at academic and cartography-focused conferences. Since the approach I’ve taken to my own career has been a bit guerrilla, moving from the arts to science to cartography, I consider Guerrilla Cartography to be part of my academic and creative work. A year ago, I started a new role as the Creative Director of the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab (UWCL), and this position, like others I’ve held in academia, enables me to travel and present Guerrilla Cartography’s work in places we wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.
One of the first things I did in my new role at UWCL is attend a conference on the opposite side of the world. In August 2023, a little over a month after I moved from Denver (where I was previously working as the Director of a geospatial lab at the University of Colorado Denver) to Madison, I traveled to the International Cartography Conference (ICC) in Cape Town, South Africa to give a presentation on Guerrilla Cartography’s atlas trilogy. The talk, titled Food, Water, Shelter: Crowdsourcing a Diverse Atlas Trilogy on Global Human Needs, was an overview of our efforts in “guerrilla” atlas production and publishing. I began this presentation to an international audience with a few definitions of the word “guerrilla,” since English was not the first language of most attendees. Thinking of this as I was preparing the talk the night before, I quickly searched a couple of definitions, and the two that best defined our “guerrilla” methods were included in this slide, along with the Guerrilla Cartography website home page:
These two definitions seemed to perfectly fit an organization that self-publishes all its atlases, provides free access to all its work on its website, and uses a Creative Commons License for everything it publishes.
For this talk, I gave an overview of Guerrilla Cartography’s history, including its origins with the Mission Possible atlas in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley and the first experiment in crowdsourcing and crowdfunding an atlas with Food: An Atlas. Then, I explained how the following two atlases, Water and Shelter, were themes that naturally followed after the first and how our organization and process evolved over time, becoming a registered non-profit and implementing a global peer review process. Through all of these efforts, we hoped to widen our reach and invite as many cartographers and collaborators as possible to be part of our projects, providing a platform for publishing a map regardless of affiliation, experience, or perceived skill. I also showed our Collaborators & Backers maps from each atlas during this talk, in hopes of inspiring others in this international audience to join our efforts and fill out the map.
Collaborator & Backer Map from Guerrilla Cartography’s Shelter atlas.
The crowdsourcing movement
I ended the presentation by briefly discussing a different kind of atlas project we’ve been doing recently, called Atlas in a Day. Here, we provide the same access and platform for map-making as our published trilogy, but we create a theme-based atlas in a single day, lowering the barrier to entry for publishing a map, along with a fun-filled day of talks and inspiration. After this talk at ICC, I was approached by an attendee who wanted to emulate our methods and convene a similar crowdsourced atlas project in her community.
Incidentally, for the last ten years, the UW Cart Lab has hosted an annual, one-day intensive event called the Design Challenge, which has much in common with Guerrilla Cartography’s Atlas in a Day. The UWCL Design Challenge is described as a “day-long mapping event that brings together geography and cartography students around a curated mapping theme.” This event was therefore a natural fit for adopting and adapting Guerrilla Cartography’s Atlas in a Day concept during my first year as Creative Director at UWCL.
UWCL Design Challenge participants discuss their ideas with Kela Caldwell during the 2024 Design Challenge. Twenty-one students and staff participated, along with the event organizers: PhD students Gareth Baldrica-Franklin, Kela Caldwell, Alicia Iverson, Cart Lab Creative Director Alicia Cowart, Associate Faculty Director Bill Limpisathian, and Faculty Director Rob Roth.
For this year’s challenge, we partnered with PhD student Kela Caldwell on her dissertation project to decipher and historicize the term “race riot,” and specifically to think through ways of visualizing these historical events in a counter-narrative by examining African American newspaper archives. Kela had mentioned that she was inspired by Guerrilla Cartography’s approach to atlas creation and was interested in seeing what kinds of narratives could be revealed through a collective research and map-making process. So, inspired by Guerrilla Cartography’s Atlas in a Day, the UW Cart Lab’s 2024 Design Challenge was a full day of archival discovery and creative production culminating in a collaborative atlas of maps on this theme.
At the start of the UWCL Design Challenge, participants chose the themes and locations they would map by placing a sticky note on this map projected on the wall, made by Gareth Baldrica-Franklin, of data compiled from African American newspapers.
While the event itself and resulting atlas were different from GC’s AIAD challenges in several ways, the UW Cart Lab’s 2024 Design Challenge demonstrates the relevance, utility, and adaptability of Guerrilla Cartography’s efforts to promote and expand the “art, methods, and thematic scope of cartography.”
Guerrilla Cartography’s next Atlas in a Day Challenge will be associated with the NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society) annual conference in Tacoma, Washington in October 2024. As a Guerrilla Cartography-hosted challenge, we will reveal the single-word theme for the atlas approximately 24 hours before the end of the event and publish the atlas at the end of the day. While the details are still being sorted out as of this writing, we look forward to collaborating with both novice and seasoned guerrillas alike to create the newest Atlas in a Day!
Alicia Cowart is a long-time Guerrilla Cartography board member.