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Maps for the Times
Erin Aigner brings color-rich and data-intensive cartography to the Gray Lady.
From ancient times, cartographers have been sensemakers.
Unraveling the mysteries of distant lands. Charting the stars. Illuminating far-flung horizons to bring the unknown within reach. But twenty-first century cartographers have a whole new set of tools to enrich the tradition that began with wall paintings and papyrus. Technology has expanded the very definition of mapmaking. More than lines and place names and static documents, maps have become a way of understanding the intersections of economy and environment, commerce and culture, politics and people. And for one UO graduate, the resilient art of mapmaking has helped chart the way to a remarkable—if not slightly surprising—career.
* * *
NEW YORK—With keyboard and computer screen, Erin Aigner ’99, MA ’02, is mapping tiny pieces of pop culture—precise color-coded locations where scenes from several of this year’s Oscar-nominated movies were filmed around New York City.
Days before the gilded awards show, Aigner is meticulously pinpointing the exact soul food joint in Harlem where “Precious” Jones steals a bucket of fried chicken, the Queens rooftop where Julie Powell hosts a dinner party, the Brooklyn bistro where Julia Child’s “Parisian” luncheon with her sister and husband was filmed. The resulting infographic is a movie wonk’s delight—a fun, quick-hit visual tour packed with juicy insider details. And it fits nicely with the pre-Oscar buzz humming through the nation’s newspapers this weekend.
It’s just one of many maps that thirty-two-year-old Aigner will crank out from her desk during any given day. As a graphics editor at The New York Times, she creates data-intensive maps that help make sense of things.
From tracking the aftereffects of an 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile to charting new avian flu outbreaks, Aigner seeks out data, crunches and analyzes it, and employs a Macintosh, a PC, and assorted computer programs to craft clear, easily digested images that will accompany the day’s top stories.
Hot spots for pirate attacks off the Somali coast? Congressional trips on the corporate dime? An animated trek up Mount Kilimanjaro? There’s a map for that.
The statistical risk of developing cancer due to California air pollution? Aigner collected data from health studies and environmental agencies to chart deadly peaks in ozone levels across the Los Angeles basin.
One week, she may be tracking regional differences in Medicare costs across the United States. Next, she’s mapping the annual fall migration of monarch butterflies in their desperate race toward Mexico.
From illustrating the slow, uneven comeback of post-Katrina neighborhoods in New Orleans to tracing the latest outbreak of bed bugs in New York apartment buildings, it’s a dynamic job that demands a big dose of the creative as well as the analytical.
For Aigner, that has proven a perfect fit.
Aigner is a cartographer by training—a career that first took root as she was learning about geographic information systems (GIS) in the UO geography department’s InfoGraphics Lab. She’s also a bit of an oddity. Few American newspapers employ fulltime mapmakers, relying instead on wire services or staff artists. Fewer still hire a trained geographer-cartographer for the job.
The New York Times is an exception. There, Aigner has earned a place among an award-winning team of more than twenty-five graphics professionals who research and craft diagrams, maps, charts, and interactive web features. Together, they represent an array of backgrounds, experiences, and advanced degrees, including statistics, graphic design, journalism, cartography, urban studies, and economics.
That intellectual muscle shapes the paper’s daily infographics, from small two-column locator maps to huge, colorful data-intensive illustrations.
And though there are other trained cartographers on the staff, New York Times graphics director Steve Duenes sees Aigner’s experience with mapmaking and GIS as “immensely beneficial.”
First used by landscape architects, GIS programs merge cartography and database technology to take real-world places, objects, and coordinates and tie them to a database of attributes for analysis and computer-assisted mapping. Today, GIS is synonymous with computer mapping.
With her background, not only can Aigner create sophisticated maps, “she has trained a number of others in different software applications and mapmaking methods,” Duenes explains. “You couldn’t fill our department with technical illustrators alone and do the things we do.”
Far from being an artistic afterthought, today’s newspaper infographics are seen as part of a bigger picture in multimedia storytelling, as newspapers everywhere compete to retain and engage readers.
“Information graphics are not just art,” Duenes wrote in a recent online discussion. “They’re a combination of art and journalism and a little bit of science. We want to produce quality journalism, and compelling information graphics must be part of that mix.”
That can mean creating in-depth, breaking news graphics predicting, say, the landfall wind speeds of Hurricane Ike. Or squeezing someone down Saddam Hussein’s “spider hole” to accurately depict its dimensions for a 3-D diagram. Or analyzing Super Bowl advertising strategies and displaying them like a playbook—this is a team that can dissect, amplify, and illustrate almost any subject arising anywhere in the world quickly and dramatically, bringing raw data to life.
The pressure is high, the demands are great, the topics intriguing. And any section of the newspaper is fair game.
* * *
Few people wind up working at The New York Times by accident. For seasoned journalists, it can be considered the pinnacle of a career. Despite ongoing economic struggles throughout the newspaper industry, the Times still boasts weekday circulation of close to one million readers.
Yet, Aigner—who has never taken a journalism class—admits that working there is an outcome she could never have predicted.
If you had asked her, as a young UO student, to map the course of her professional life, the result might have looked like a jumbled mash-up of encyclopedia entries.
Interests? There was art, always art. Growing up in southwest Portland, she loved arts, crafts, and drawing. But by high school, a practical streak made her confront the economic realities of earning a living wage from art. By the time she arrived at the UO, Aigner had decided upon a compromise. “I really loved drawing and thought that architecture would allow me to draw,” she says.
Once on campus, Aigner had second thoughts, torn by competing interests. Growing up in Oregon had nurtured a deep love of the environment. And she’d always been drawn to physical sciences. The possibilities gnawed at her.
“Architecture was a rigorous program to pursue at eighteen,” Aigner acknowledges. “The program was so strict in the curriculum, there just wasn’t a lot of room for electives. Once I got to Eugene, I realized there was so much out there, as a freshman does, and I started surveying departments.”
Call it the early awakening of a budding analyst. Aigner studied, researched, and weighed the data. In the end, she found herself turning to a burgeoning multidisciplinary program—environmental studies. Many of the requirements could be found in the geography department. “It ended up being a really good fit,” she says.
Somehow, Aigner put off taking a required cartography course until her senior year. “At the time, I was rebelling against doing things on the computer,” she recalls, laughing. “I grew up in a single-parent household; we didn’t even have a computer at home. And I really loved drawing.”
It was an ironic choice. If she had signed up a few terms earlier, “I would have been able to take the last actual pen-and-ink cartography class from [UO geography professor] Bill Loy, the grandfather of Oregon cartography,” she laments.
When Aigner finally did take the course in 1998, she loved it and promptly signed up for an advanced cartography class with James Meacham, director at the UO InfoGraphics Laboratory. “She had a lot of natural curiosity and raw talent—the only student to earn a perfect score that term,” says Meacham, who remembers Aigner as organized, meticulous, and extremely conscientious. “There was a great design sense, as well as an intellectual curiosity, a willingness to help other students with their mapping projects and an ability to solve complex problems on her own,” he recalls.
“She had great promise.”
UO geography professor Susan Hardwick, who served as Aigner’s academic advisor, remembers “this eager young woman who was excited, really passionate about integrating the world of design cartography with human geography, interested in doing something different. There was an edge of originality to her, from the very beginning.”
At the time, Meacham’s advanced cartography classes were creating maps for the web-based Atlas of Lane County, covering topics ranging from watersheds and salmon habitat to school districts.
“We were supposed to publish it online, but it didn’t quite get done,” Aigner says. “I volunteered to continue the project to see it up and running. No compensation, no credit—I just wanted to see the work online, to see our work mean something” (to view it, check geography.uoregon.edu/infographics/lcweb/lcindex.htm). The project gave Aigner a taste of what was possible, cementing her desire to make maps. It also demonstrated her competency with big-scale mapping projects.
Without knowing it, she had positioned herself to join one of the most acclaimed mapping projects ever attempted in Oregon—the second edition of the Atlas of Oregon.
In 1976, Bill Loy and UO graduate student Stuart Allan had produced a landmark publication to honor the UO’s 100th anniversary. The Atlas of Oregon was considered exemplary, offering an extraordinary glimpse into the state’s history, geography, and people. Twenty-five years later—Allan having become an internationally renowned cartographer—the pair joined forces again to publish a second edition of the award-winning atlas, which features more than 700 maps, charts, and diagrams showing Oregon’s landforms, wildlife habitats, and geography, as well as tracking human activity such as politics, religion, and economic growth.
Resources for the updated atlas were drawn from the UO geography department, the UO InfoGraphics Lab, and Allan Cartography, Inc. While recruiting talent to work on the project, Meacham thought of Aigner. He tracked her down at a Eugene boutique, where she had landed following graduation, and pitched his idea. She was intrigued.
In 2000, Aigner returned to the UO to pursue her master’s degree. She also signed on as a graduate research assistant dedicated to the second edition of the Atlas of Oregon.
“It wound up being more than a fulltime job,” recalls Stuart Allan, who owns Allan Cartography. “For a graduate student, it was a terrific project, with all kinds of extremely interesting and varied topics that called for different cartographic approaches.”
For the last six months of the project, Aigner worked out of the Allan Cartography offices in Medford. The work was all-consuming. “Very long hours. Sort of like, ‘Thank God it’s Friday, only two more working days until Monday,’’’ Allan says. “There are people who can’t do that. Erin could.”
Aigner’s responsibilities exceeded a typical internship. “It wasn’t just a question of putting numbers together—Erin was responsible for getting these maps built,” Allan says. “Cartography is a funny blend of graphic skill, geographic insight, and the capacity to figure out how to convey what’s important. Particularly now, in the digital age. It used to be that every component of a map had to be built piece by piece. Now, the data come in and you have to pare them down. The worst thing you can do is to flood your image with too much information. The reader is swamped. From a cartographer’s point of view, it comes down to deciding what really matters.”
Allan acknowledged that for a young cartographer, the Atlas project was an unparalleled classroom. “I had exactly the same training ground twenty-five years earlier [with the first Oregon Atlas]. She was following the same path. There is simply no substitution for going from raw ideas to a completed map. You can study it forever, but in the end, you’ve got to make one. In that way, cartography is like learning to swim—ultimately, you have to dive in.”
For nineteen months, Aigner dove deep into final production on the project, even driving to the Pearl District in Portland to see the finished book run on the presses. Today, she wonders if the thrill of seeing her work transform from blank page to print influenced her career path toward journalism.
Some stumble across their own good luck; others simply make it happen. As Aigner was completing her master’s thesis in 2002, Hardwick encouraged her to apply for a four-month internship in the cartographic division at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
By the end of August, Aigner had finished her thesis. Two days later, she was on her way to Washington, D.C.—the coveted internship was hers.
Yet within a few weeks on the job, Meacham contacted her with another opportunity. He knew someone at The Washington Post looking for a cartographer and artist for the paper’s News and Art Department. Was she interested?
Aigner had never been inside a newsroom. She didn’t even know who Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were. But she liked seeing her maps in print. And her training was flexible enough to support it. GIS skills can be applied in many settings: government and federal agencies, environmental services, transportation planning, even the U.S. Census. Newspapers were simply another option—one with lots of variety.
By January 2003, Aigner was working at The Washington Post. And in the nation’s capital, the business of news was booming. A sniper was terrorizing the Beltway. And the United States was inching ever closer toward war in Iraq.
Aigner found the work deeply engaging. This was mapmaking with a very human face. From school shootings and economic development to foreign uprisings. She felt amazingly well prepared for it. After the Atlas of Oregon, Aigner understood the demands of deadline-driven work. Now, she found a new intensity, an immediacy that hadn’t been there before.
“Making maps of Iraq day after day, being there until two or three in the morning—I was probably the person least affected by the war, but it was such a different, difficult subject,” she says. “I suddenly had to pay so much attention to the news all the time. You are the person who is supposed to be the expert.”
She stayed two years. Although she loved the job, there was much she didn’t love about Washington, D.C.—the soggy produce, the oppressive humidity, the bureaucrats. She quit after the 2004 elections, determined to return to the Pacific Northwest.
Aigner chose Eugene, where she took a contract position doing GIS work. “I just wanted to come home,” she says. “All my stuff was literally on a truck when I got an e-mail from New York Times graphic director Steven Duenes.”
The Times was looking for a cartographer. “I called and said that I was flattered, but that I’d just moved back to Oregon and it was impossible,” Aigner says.
Duenes left the door open. “If you ever change your mind, stop by the office, we’d love to meet you,” he suggested.
Mulling it over, Aigner discussed the offer with Meacham. He reminded her of a day, shortly after 9/11, that she had burst into his office clutching a copy of The New York Times and pointing at a map saying, “This is what I want to do!”
Now, the newspaper had come calling.
“Are you crazy?” Meacham asked her. “This is The New York Times!”
The New York Times.
Of course, he was right.
She flew east for an interview. They offered her a job that day.
* * *
Interactive media. Multimedia storytelling. Infographics. Smart maps. These are phrases that increasingly drift about America’s newsrooms, as journalists grapple with how to build a better product. Aigner knows that she is creating practical, hands-on news you can use—maps that may likely be clipped and pocketed and pulled out down the road. Presidential parade routes. Olympic venues. Electoral outcomes. It is work that matters.
“The best reporters want good graphics to go with their stories. And a good graphic can convey a lot of information in a short amount of time,” she explains. “What I do is often event-driven. We’re usually making graphics and maps that either correspond to an event or respond to news.”
A typical day may include departmental meetings, consultations with reporters, the hunt for external data, research and analysis—all before a map is ever created. The process is symbiotic. Her projects are often conceptualized in partnership with reporters and other graphics editors, with everyone contributing a bit of their expertise.
Sometimes a project is all her own. For instance, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg promoted a plan to create miles of new bike lanes in New York City—2,000 miles of lanes were added from 2006 to 2009—Aigner, an avid cyclist, suspected that there weren’t enough public bike racks to support it.
“I had gone to farmer’s markets and I’d seen bike racks completely jammed with bicycles. Anything that was a pole had bikes glommed onto it, and it seemed that everyone was pushing a stroller or bike,” she recalls.
Her goal? Conduct a block-by-block survey of the city to determine the location of public bike racks, then compare that with other bike-friendly cities, neatly demonstrating the need for more bike racks.
“That turned into a summer-long project born from my own pet peeve,” she laughs. “It ran as a large, stand-alone graphic in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times.”
Coming to work on the second floor of The New York Times—the same floor as business reporters—Aigner views herself as “a cartographer who works in the field of journalism” or some days, a “graphic journalist.” Some days, she feels more akin to a feature writer, “getting a lot of time to do research, while simultaneously working on three or four projects.”
In a typical week, Aigner may do projects for nearly any section of the newspaper, working with all kinds of data. Building plans. Government reports. Scientific studies. Satellite imagery. On-site reporting. Police drawings. Public records. The trick is translating it all into a succinct visual, helping readers dig deeper into content, absorb a concept, or make sense of the headlines.
“If a reader can glance at a map or simple chart and quickly orient themselves or understand a statistic, and then continue reading the story without skipping a beat, it means we’ve edited and designed those graphics well,” according to graphics director Duenes. To create a map is to tell a story—even if you don’t know what lies beyond the edges of that map or how the story will end.
If Aigner didn’t expect to wind up with a prestigious career that merges mapmaking and journalism, there are those who are not surprised.
“Her job kind of makes perfect sense—the ideal blend of cartography and real world problems,” says geography professor Hardwick. “As you look at geography, you realize it’s everywhere. We offer this wide perspective that could be useful to understanding the world at large . . . what’s unusual is the high level that Erin has achieved with it.”
That her maps are seen by hundreds of thousands of people each day is “good for the field [of cartography],” mapmaker Allan observes. “The New York Times has a very high standard of graphic presentation. They don’t just plug in what comes over the Associated Press. They really think about this stuff.”
Aigner’s abilities as a critical thinker makes the work a good fit, Meacham adds. “As a cartographer, if you don’t understand the underlying subject, that could be a huge failure,” he said. “But Erin has that. She’s smart, she tries to question and understand.”
Sifting through criminal records to demonstrate how restrictive residency laws make sex offenders wind up living in geographic clusters on Long Island. Receiving field reports to help track bomb strikes in the Middle East. Employing digital elevation data and satellite images to build a 3-D mountain. Breathing visual life into raw data.
Her greatest aggravation is the desire for more time to polish her daily deadline work—every journalist’s lament. And Aigner can’t help but worry about the overall health of the U.S. newspaper industry—last year, New York Times employees faced pay cuts and layoffs.
For now, she simply enjoys doing what she loves. And she loves to design and display data. “I’m surrounded by such smart, talented people, and the diversity of the subject matter is amazing,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll be making maps of Istanbul and New York City and an Olympic venue on the same day.”
Suffice it to say, Aigner is not someone you would want to take on in a round of Jeopardy. “If the category is geography, I have to leave the room,” she admits, laughing.
In her spare time, she teaches spatial analysis and GIS methods in the Urban Studies Program offered through Barnard College at Columbia University. “I love teaching and remaining connected to academia and students—they are so earnest, such hard workers,” Aigner says. “I feed off their energy and keep current.”
Though she dreams of returning to the Pacific Northwest some day, Aigner acknowledges that after almost eight years on the East Coast, “this is where I was meant to be.”
She remains an Oregonian at heart, making her home in Brooklyn, where she finds a “kindred chemistry” that reminds her of Portland.
Now, with the onset of warmer weather, she’s been thinking about biking those ten miles to work.
You never know. She just might find a story along the way.
Kimber Williams, MS ’95, makes her home near Atlanta, Georgia. Her last piece for Oregon Quarterly was “Ascent of a Woman,” Autumn 2008.
Web Extra! See Selected maps and informational graphics from Erin Aigner’s New York Times portfolio. .
