I've been asked this a few times. What's "mapkid" all about? Sometimes it's not phrased as a question, but presented as speculation.
The reason is simple. At the time I chose the name, I was a cartographer. I made maps. Actually, I held a very junior role in my company (was still finishing my senior year in college), so I was editing maps that the more seasoned cartographers created. In 1997 I worked at Hammond, which used to be a major map publishing house, along with Rand McNally, Hagstrom, Oxford University Press and National Geographic. Hammond was located in Maplewood, NJ. They were a family-run business, roughly 100 years old. Unfortunately, they ran into financial problems in about 1998 and were acquired by the German publisher Langensheid.
My job was to review digital maps (database-driven) in a CAD program for readability and geographic accuracy. This involved researching regions that were undergoing political transformations to find out if there were any resulting changes to place names or classification of land use, such as a wildlife refuge turning into a national park. I recall that one of our deadlines was being challenged by the turmoil in Congo, formerly known as Zaire. They hadn't settled on a name for their new country yet, and we were waiting patiently for them to do so.
I also neatened up text placements around rivers (pesky and arbitrarily curved lines) and urban centers. Names of suburbs inevitably crash into each other. The goal of this sort of work is to maintain as much data on the map as possible by re-aligning the names around the dots, but that only gets the cartographer so far. Sometimes towns simply need to be removed from the map. Start with the ones that have the smallest populations (even though their populations are probably greater than half the towns that end up remaining on the map -- the rural ones 100 miles from any city, whose names are free to roam in "empty space"). Once those are cleared, do some more re-arranging and look for the next round of cuts. It's okay to leave a small town in favor of a larger town if the larger town's name is particularly unwieldy and will continue to cause problems.
There is also a problem of editing blank parts of the map -- areas where there are few (human) inhabitants. People construct places and name them. We create these constructs in our imaginations, and they become part of our cultural and political fabric, even when we don't build them up as towns and cities. For example, we name mountains and valleys, deserts and shore lines. As a species, we seem to have an urge to circumscribe anything we perceive and slap names and labels on them.
There are some regions in the world that have not been plagued by place-ification. There may be places in these regions, but the places are not tessellated (that is, the places within them aren't contiguous; there is un-named territory between the places). This is the case with the Sahara Desert -- an obvious example. The knee-jerk editorial response is to add labels to this region on the map. Blank space seems to make us anxious. There must be something there. One of the maps I edited had all sorts of desert details labeled: sub-regions of the Sahara, geologic features formed by sand dunes and varying levels of the water table, and dried up river beds. I don't recall how many of these labels represented culturally relevant places versus geologic features, which were possibly not known or perceived by the inhabitants of the region, nomads or otherwise. It seemed to be an exercise of reducing anxiety over emptiness in an abstract representation of a space, rather than in representing anthropologically significant entities.
Anyway, this is what I was busy thinking about when I signed up for AOL one day in 1997 and had to choose a screen name. I tried all sorts of variations on "ruth," but nothing I came up with was available. I blurted out "mapkid," and it stuck. Even though I don't work with maps anymore, I like holding onto a remnant of that time in my life when I was passionate about cartography and encountered philosophical and ethical dilemmas in information design work as a young and inexperienced college grad.
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