James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti are the 2017—2018 recipients of the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography. Dr. James Cheshire is an Associate Professor at University College London (UCL) and President of the Society of Cartographers. He completed a BSc (1st Class Hons.) in Physical Geography at the University of Southampton (2008) before undertaking a PhD in GIScience at the UCL Department of Geography (2011). James was the 2017 recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s Cuthbert Peek Award for “advancing geographical knowledge through the use of mappable Big Data.” Oliver Uberti is an award-winning graphic designer and was Senior Design Editor at National Geographic before turning to books. Oliver earned a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Michigan (2003) and a MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins (2009). At his design studio in Los Angeles, Oliver combines fine art principles with research and storytelling to create memorable books, infographics, and branding. His latest collaboration, Notes from a Public Typewriter, will be published by Hachette in March 2018. James and Oliver first worked together in 2010 to produce a map of the most popular surnames in North America for National Geographic. In 2012, James began envisioning a book of maps and graphics to show the range of data available for London, his home city. Oliver agreed to design it. Since then, the two have become a rare pair: academic and designer, collaborating on equal footing to turn statistics into stories. Their first book, London: The Information Capital, became a bestseller and won three British Cartographic Society Awards for cartographic excellence. For their second book, Oliver was keen to map data from a domain that had inspired him during his time at National Geographic—the animal kingdom. The result, Where the Animals Go, was hailed by Scientific American as a “stunning translation of movement onto paper.”
