One of my daughters is a staunch vegetarian – won’t even eat fish, even if Kurt Cobain tells her they don’t have feelings.
The other loves to fish. Whenever we go north on the weekends to visit my dad who lives on a lake full of meter-long muskies, walleyes, and a bunch of other homely looking fish I can’t remember the names of, all she wants to do is stand on the dock and cast. It’s how she bonds with my dad. It’s adorable. And we tend to eat really well those weekends, because she has a knack for it. (Well, everyone but my other daughter eats well. She gets veggie burgers, which was a day two weeks ago that I skipped mapping.)
I was excited when I saw National Go Out Fishing Day. I don’t fish often, but I like to hang out with people that do, in boats, on docks, etc. It’s social, it’s typically tranquil – until some yahoo jet skier blazes by – and there are over 15,000 lakes in Minnesota, so it’s readily available here.
For those that have never gone fishing, I recommend you try it. You can always put fish back in the water after you catch them, and if nothing else, you’ll find yourself stuck on a boat, sometimes with no cell reception, and nothing to do but read or chat with a friend (minor shout-out to the Besties Map from two weeks ago). It’s very peaceful.
Assuming many of our readers haven’t gone fishing on fresh water lakes, as most people don’t live in Finland, Minnesota, Canada, or other water-logged or glacier-destroyed places, I thought it would be fun to make a map of the United Lakes of America. (It is a “national” holiday, after all, which means I could safely limit the geographic extent.)
I remember seeing a crazy cool map in the Exhibit Hall at the International Cartographic Conference in Vancouver in 2025. It was visually powerful. I really wanted it to win an award, honestly. If you made the map, just know, I probably voted for it – though, I don’t remember specifically. And you had an impact on me. It inspired today’s map.
The in question showed all of the national parks, or perhaps nature parks, in France represented as islands in a blue sea. And you could easily discern the shape of France from how the parks were arranged. Gestalt at work – brilliant!
When I saw this day on the calendar, that map immediately came to mind. I thought to myself: I love sitting out in the middle of different lakes just thinking. Wouldn’t it be cool to inverse lakes and represent them as islands of tranquility where people can flee to just escape from others – particularly in a time of massive tumult in the US. So that’s what I created.
Yes, the idea came from something I saw at a conference. Probably the original French cartographer’s idea came from something they saw somewhere else. In fact, I’ve seen this technique used before by the New York Times or another newspaper to map places that vote Democratic Party (i.e., urban areas) as islands in the US, or similar.
I know from personal experience that this is how creativity works. That’s why artists like meeting up in bunches in places like Greenwich Village, New York City, or perhaps, if LinkedIn is any indication, young cartographers enjoy conglomerating in Vienna right now. Meeting up with others interested in what you are is how inspiration flourishes – at least, that’s the conventional wisdom. (It might be argued that it can lead to creative path-dependency, lock-step thinking, and echo-chamber-built dogma too, but who am I to judge?)
The point is: we gain inspiration through exposure and then mimic or expand on what we’ve seen to create new things that hopefully inspire. That’s why we have map exhibits, or I should say, the reason people go to map exhibits. It’s part of the genealogy of creativity. Memes… cultural ideas, norms, and trends spreading virally, just as our genes do, according to Dawkins – though, I’m sure I’m simplifying and bastardizing his theory a bit here.
In sum, I parroted this visualization technique I’ve seen before to represent all US lakes. That’s creative expansion, in my mind; though, according to people trolling me on the internet, if an LLM helps me do something like this, it’s copyright plagiarism and theft.
Which leads me to the question: if prompt my LLM cartography tools to do something, in particular mimic a style I like because I think it will work in a given scenario, is that plagiarism? Hopefully for some of you reading this, you see where the “anything made with LLM prompts can’t be creative” argument falls asunder. The result is no different than if I had made this with ArcGIS, QGIS, Adobe Illustrator, or drawn it by hand recalling the inspiration and expanding on the style to fit my dataset. It is my vision, inspired by what I’ve witnessed, observed, and personally liked at map exhibits and in newspapers.
WebMapGPT? That was simply the tool I used to bring my vision to life. In ~20 minutes!*
(as opposed to probably a week with other mapmaking tools)
Long-story short, I hope you enjoy the map and find one of the 100,000-plus lakes close enough to visit this year. Hope to bump into you on a lake soon.
And as for the French cartogarpher(s) who made the map that inspired me. Thank you for the inspiration. Your original idea and work lives on, beyond the original map. It’s now part of the genealogy of this one. 🙂
* Note
20 minutes is to create the web map, which includes a tileset. It does not include the time used to find the dataset with Spatial Dataset Doctor GPT and then simplify it using Mapshaper. That was another 10-15 minutes. (Note: if you haven’t tried Mapshaper, I give it the highest of recommends. It’s very robust. If you haven’t tried it because you are scared of command-line interfaces, here’s a pro-tip: simply just tell Google or ChatGPT what you want Mapshaper to do to your dataset and ask it to output the correct Mapshaper script. Copy paste. Boom – done!) You no longer need to learn different command-line syntax anymore when interacting with other people’s APIs or tools online. Another game-changer!
WebMapGPT Prompt
Please analyze the style of the attached photo. Sorry for the poor quality – it was taken in a hurry at a conference.
I don’t want to mimic this map’s design, but it is the general premise I would like to follow for my forthcoming map idea that I will present to you. The map is in French, but what it does is maps all of France’s national parks (or something like that) as islands.
Could you please analyze it’s styling techniques and develop an explanation about how this map works visually. I would like to use a similar symbolization technique to create an interactive html map. We are going to inverse lakes in the US to make them islands. So please devise some symbolization techniques from the attached image that might work similarly but perhaps more intuitively for lakes being shown as land, and also come up with some reasonable zoom-level schemas for showing the lakes (i.e., displaying 100,000+ lakes of varying sizes at different scales), and some styling differences that might make sense for symbolization of lakes as islands instead of parks.
Output your analysis in two ways: 1) a json schema that you can refer to as out conversation continues and we develop together to help us avoid concept drift; and 2) a markdown text output for me (a human) to refer to so I can analyze the schema we are using and iterate on it with you.
Thank you! I’m super excited to build this map with you!