A Q&A with Kaitlin Yarnall, SVP of Media Innovation at the National Geographic Society
By: Rachel Holm
Not only is the entire world not already mapped, but there are huge parts of the planet—particularly the oceans—that are unmapped. The planet is changing constantly and will continually need to be re-mapped. — Kaitlin Yarnall, SVP Media Innovation at the National Geographic Society
Kaitlin Yarnall has spent her career immersed in maps.
With more than a decade at National Geographic, Yarnall’s worked to expand the organization’s impact on journalism, photography, and data visualization. She’s held many roles within the organization, ranging from a researcher in the Maps department to Executive Editor of National Geographic Magazine. During her tenure, she’s seen mapping technology evolve from light tables to robust visualization software. Now, as the SVP Media Innovation at the National Geographic Society, she works with the researchers, scientists, and creatives of the Explorer Program to tell compelling stories that shine a light on three focus areas: Our Changing Planet, Wildlife and Wild Places, and The Human Journey.
We sat down with Yarnall to talk about the state of mapped storytelling and plot the future of cartography. Take a look:
How did you become interested in maps and cartography?
I discovered cartography at Humboldt State University. I was looking for a second major to take, and I walked into a geography class, and it immediately clicked for me. To me, geography was this combination of art and science — appealing to the math part of my brain with datasets and projections, and the art part of my brain with beautiful visualizations and storytelling.
After school, I knew I wanted to work with maps. I started at National Geographic in the maps department through a professor at Humboldt, where I had an opportunity to work on an atlas, and just loved it. After grad school, I returned to National Geographic publishing, where I had a variety of roles — Senior Research Editor in the maps department, Deputy Art Director, Deputy Creative Director, Executive Editor and Director of Cartography.
Now, I’m on the nonprofit side of the house as the SVP of Media Innovation at the National Geographic Society, where I build partnerships with Explorers — the world’s best scientists, researchers, technologists, conservationists, educators, journalists, and photographers — to tell compelling stories about our planet.
How has cartography changed from when you started at National Geographic? What tools did you use and how have they evolved?
I started in the maps department when we were doing desktop publishing, but software wasn’t yet the norm. No one was writing code then. We still had light tables in the department when I started. We still did a lot of hand painting and stitching. Now we use software — new mapping, design, and visualization tools. The technology has advanced a lot over the years, but the same basics are there: we’re still using maps to tell important stories.
What’s the Explorer Program?
At the National Geographic Society, we invest in bold people with transformative ideas to further our understanding of our planet and find solutions to some of the most pressing global challenges. Our Explorers embody this mission. They are researchers and storytellers who come to us with the very best ideas…and we want to fund them. Each year we award more than 600 grants to scientists, researchers, and creatives at varying points in their careers. Recipients range from grad students and postdocs who are just beginning field research, all the way up to luminaries at the peak of their careers.
At the Society, it’s our job to ensure that they can explore, they can discover, and they can educate. They’re out in the field, performing impactful research, and we’re providing the means for them to do their work.
How have Explorers integrated maps and visualizations into their work? What do maps tell that pictures or words can’t?
Maps give you a sense of location, space, and scale. We use them to give our readers context on where the story is in the world. We use them to illustrate movement through space, or show distribution over space — to show the movement of migrants, or to show the populations of local animals ballooning or shrinking over time. Maps are also a good way to layer different information sources together and tell a complex story in a simple, visual way.
Our Explorers can use maps in two ways, the first being in the field. Researchers on the ground can use maps as a tool to guide their work. Some Explorers even include mapping as one of their larger project goals, often trying to map underserved geographies or populations.
One Explorer doing this is Adjany Costa, the Deputy Director of the Okavango Wilderness Project. This team has been working for several years to map and protect the headwaters of the Okavango River in the Angolan highlands. Angola had a decades-long civil war, so this area was not only under-mapped, but it was also physically inaccessible for many years due to extant landmines. Costa and team are now working to map the river from its source up in Angola, through Namibia, and down to the Okavango Delta in Botswana.
The second way we use maps is to tell stories about our Explorers. Paul Salopek is an Explorer fellow who’s literally walking around the world. He’s been following the path of ancient human migration out of the Rift Valley in Africa. He wears a GPS unit on him which lets us track and map his movements. We use the map as the framework and visual guideline for all of his dispatches that he writes from the field.
Switching gears now — with all of the new visualization and mapping technology that’s emerging, what’s currently going on in the mapping space that excites you?
The public’s mapping literacy has gone up. We now walk around with incredible mapping tools in our pocket every day — our phones. Because of that, we’re now dealing with a readership that’s so much more educated and savvy spatially. They understand the difference between a satellite image and a vector map. As a storyteller that’s really exciting to me. Readers expect interactivity in maps — they expect to be able to zoom around and toggle layers on and off. Even six or seven years ago, that wasn’t something the average person was prepared to do.
The other thing that excites me is the recent advances in remote sensing — new forms and frequencies of satellite imagery and non-visual data-types. You can build interesting predictive models from large volumes of remote sensing data. People are predicting crop yields based on sensor data, and extrapolating that information out into the real world, building better field irrigation.
Up-to-date remote sensing data is also used for things like finding and mapping wolf dens in the arctic — tracking the health of hard-to-reach wildlife populations from space. I think it’s exciting from a conservation and science perspective because it allows us all to monitor the Earth in a non-invasive way.
What do you want to see in the mapping space over the next five years?
Right now, there are incredible amounts of remote sensing data available, but the barrier to entry is still quite high for field scientists or policymakers. There’s still a lot of non-visual data that needs a lot of interpretation, and I’d like to see tools made that put that data in the hands of people in the field (like our Explorers) without a data preparer or an analyst middleman.
In the past, when I would tell people I was a cartographer, they would say to me, “isn’t the whole world already mapped?” That used to frustrate me, but now I think it’s an exciting opportunity to tell people that: not only is the entire world not already mapped, but there are huge parts of the planet— particularly the oceans—that are unmapped. The planet is constantly changing and will continually need to be re-mapped. Look at Kilauea’s recent eruption — we’re already starting to re-map that. When you start layering human and animal data on top of geography, the world will constantly change… mapping will always need to exist.
Don’t miss your chance to catch Kaitlin Yarnall and a select group of National Geographic Society Explorers on stage together at Locate.
The Unfinished Map was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.