Howard Veregin is the official state cartographer of Wisconsin. As avid users of maps both old and new, we were enchanted by his descriptions of maps as weapons, the “Google revolution,” and what makes the post of “official state cartographer” such a unique job.

Where did your interest in maps come from?

We moved a lot when I was young, and I lived in some pretty isolated communities, so I learned early on that where you lived at any particular time might just be a historical accident. I entered college with the idea that geography was a subject I might like to major in (which I did). I wasn’t really interested in manual (pre-computer) cartography as a profession. I enjoyed the creative, artistic side of making maps, but to make really good maps you needed to master a lot of fussy arcane skills that frankly bored me a bit. But what really got me hooked on maps was computers. In graduate school I took a computer cartography course and realized this was something I really wanted to do. This was in the early 1980s […] we used some of the earliest computer-mapping software ever written. What appealed to me about computer mapping—although I doubt I knew it at the time—was the opportunity to combine left- and right-brain thinking in the creation of something both useful and beautiful.

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