Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Good morning, AEA365 readers. I’m Liz DiLuzio, evaluation scientist and lead curator of AEA365.
I’ll never forget the day I learned I had been walking over the remains of fifteen thousand people for years without knowing it. I was five years into living in New York City, walking through Lower Manhattan on my way to teach a class at DCAS. The pattern of red and green lights that morning sent me down a different block than I had traveled before. The monotony of office towers and federal buildings opened into green space. Trees. A wide stone wall. A low circular structure. I paused, because the scene somehow demanded it.
It was the African Burial Ground. Beneath my feet were the remains of free and enslaved Black Americans, denied burial in the city’s churchyards and laid to rest in 6 acres outside the colonial settlement’s boundary. The site held their graves for more than a century before it was paved over and built upon. Construction of the federal building next door rediscovered it in 1991. The monument is the city’s acknowledgment of what is underneath, and of how it got there.
I had seen a lot of maps of New York by then. Street maps, subway maps, asset maps showing collaborators, maps showing concentrations of need so city workers would know where to direct their services. None of them laid this bare.
A map shows you what its maker chose to show you. Every map is a frame around a place and an argument about what matters. The city builders who chose to mark the burial ground rather than bury it again did what a responsible mapmaker does: they acknowledged the context around what their work was leaving out. A responsible map reader, in turn, has the wisdom to know what each map is and is not telling them, and what it would take to see the rest.
The annotation is part of the map. A title, legend, and source line tell the reader what they are looking at. They do not tell the reader what to make of it. Three additional sentences do real work: one to name the boundary you chose and why, one to name the forces that produced the pattern on the page, and one to name the limits of what the map can show.
Place describes need. It does not explain it. A map showing concentrated disadvantage tells you the where. It does not tell you the why. When the why goes unspoken, the map reads like a description of the community rather than a description of what was done to it. Redlining, school funding tied to property taxes, environmental siting, decades of disinvestment: these are the forces that produced the pattern. Pair the map with language that names them.
The boundary you choose is the story you tell. The same dataset produces different findings depending on whether you map it by census tract, zip code, council district, or service area. None of these are neutral. Be discriminating about the unit. If the available framings do not carry the story your work requires, make a different one. Then name the boundary you used and why. Treat that choice as part of the analysis.
The hardest part of mapping is making the first one. If you’ve always wanted to learn but haven’t yet had the opportunity, June is your month. You have two opportunities to learn from ELC’s very own Sarah Kontos:
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