Kris Goodfellow is the Vice President for Product Management at cyberhomes.com an online real estate site, and she has been specialist in map-making for the last decade. Prior to joining Cyberhomes, Kris was the creative director for the ArcWeb Services team at ESRI, the world’s largest maker of geographic information software. While at ESRI she was responsible for the creation of MapShop, an online map-making tool used by USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Philadelphia Inquirer among others. She also worked with CBS news on the elections and the city of New York following 9/11. Previously, Ms Goodfellow worked in newspaper graphics. She was the director of graphics at the Associated Press, a graphics editor at the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. During this time she won numerous awards for her work from the Society of News Design and Malofiej. She recently sat down with Sarah Slobin to talk about maps, news and real estate.

This post is part of an ongoing series that invites critical reflection on data visualization and urban cartography – past, present and future. To see all entries on this topic, click here.

National Geographic

Sarah Slobin:
So you’ve seen mapping go from pencil on paper to the digital, interactive versions we have today. Tell us about some of the watershed moments you’ve witnessed.

Kris Goodfellow:
I think that watching the transformation of newsrooms from copying map books to using digital mapping tools and adopting GIS was a watershed transformation.

At the Times, there were 8 or 10 people doing maps and a maps editor checking their accuracy. The department had a history of more than 100 years. The reference material was fabulous. But when I went to AP in 1998, there were two guys doing mapping. One was an 85-year-old, World War II vet with a bad gambling habit and even worse vision. He couldn’t see all of the details on the reference material so there were a multitude of mistakes on even the most basic US map. And these were the maps most newspapers printed for major news stories. It was inefficient and the quality was terrible. We had to change.

That was really the motivation behind creating MapShop. I wanted to be able to create a map of every corner of the world, export it in Illustrator in 30 minutes. MapShop did that for AP and other newspapers.

But where we saw the adoption of professional GIS tools – at AP to be sure, but more importantly at Time and The New York Times – it was an enormous leap step forward. The work that Bill McNulty did at the Times after 9/11 and the maps of Afghanistan during the war, should be featured in a museum exhibit. They are transformational for the industry because they are so beautiful and informative and timely. These were created on deadline. That’s something that just doesn’t happen very often.

USA Today

SS: Have you seen any evidence that our ability to visualize neighborhoods has had an influence of the shape of the neighborhoods themselves?

KG: I don’t think that it works this way. Neighborhoods have a life of their own and are constantly shifting and evolving. Capturing that spirit of a neighborhood within some lines on a map is difficult. There are two schools of thought. One is that you should have lines on a map that fit together like typical political boundaries – one stops and the other begins. The other is to have overlapping boundaries so that there is room for some gray area. The first approach appeals to my personal preference for creating a clean map. But the second really fits what I know about neighborhoods much better.

cyberhomes.com

SS: As a nation we’re fascinated with real estate. Do you think new mapping technology has contributed to that?

KG: More than anything the housing boom and bust have driven our fascination with real estate. But it is a little hard to imagine this national obsession taking hold without real estate data, maps and images online. Prior to 1990 and the advent of Realtor.com, there really was no way to find a new home without going to a realtor. And prior to Zillow, there was no way to know what your home was worth without going to the assessors office or getting an appraisal.  In 2006, it was commonplace to hear, “I can’t believe how much my house is worth, I just looked it up on cyberhomes.com.” But in 1986, that comment would have been “I got my tax bill in the mail…” and that’s just beyond dull.

So as a part of all that data going online, we had to show people the location and that has led to a lot of great mapping applications from cyberhomes and others. Google and Microsoft do a great job pinning homes on a map and showing what’s around it. But as a map geek, what I love is putting that property in the context of its neighborhood using things like median home value and change in value over time. Or looking at neighborhoods that have, say, lots of 20-somethings or lots of children. Those are markers of what type of neighborhood it is and whether you, as a potential new homeowner, would fit in. Our partnerships with companies like Urban Mapping and RMM CADD have made that contextual information come alive and have helped us move beyond “You are here!” mapping.

Still, I know that people are most fascinated with their own home. My favorite comment on cyberhomes.com was from a woman who was looking at our oblique views from Bing Maps, and she said that the photo was wrong because her garage door was open in the picture online and she was looking at it right now and it was closed. She literally thought were had a satellite checking in on her house right then! Who knows, maybe someday!

cyberhomes.com

SS: What advice would you give someone who was trying to use maps to convey an idea?

KG: I’d give the same advice that I do in all visual design. Decide what one message you are trying to convey and then make everything you are doing help support that message. I think that we often have 15 great ideas for maps in our mind but haven’t applied the intellectual rigor to their execution and the result is a confusing and muddled mess.

I personally got a refresher course in simplicity working at CBS News during the 2004 elections. We created their county level map of the US results but also a host of other demographic maps. And I’d want to add city names or even state names or boundaries and they would just keep saying, it’s on air for 10 seconds, Kris. It’s got to be simple! Really, when you think about it, so is that map in your power point slide. When you are presenting something, unless it’s a dissertation, remove anything extra and keep to the point.

The other thing that I’d say, is really spend time understanding your data and making sure it is complete and accurate. There was recently a story in the LA Times about a crime mapping application that the city of LA built that is rife with errors. I see these kinds of applications being created all the time in the GIS community. You can sort of get away with it because the client assumes that the contractor is a wizard and so it must be right. But too often when you start to use that data, especially in an emergency operation center like the one I worked in after 9/11, you realize just how much sloppy work is out there and how under the gun, it matters.

CBS News

Sarah Slobin is a visual journalist. She spent 15 years at The New York Times where she was trained to report the story from the ground up, find the visual language to translate it, then write, design, chart, edit and produce information graphics. From 2006 to 2008 she was the head of graphics at Fortune Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.