Cartographer Bill Rankin began making maps while attending graduate school at Harvard because he found Boston to be so difficult to understand.

"It was a way for me to keep sane through all the reading and writing," he said.

Today, those maps interpret U.S. Census data in a way that's never been done before.

Rankin, now an assistant professor at Yale, creates maps for major U.S. cities, and the entire country, that chronicle every part of daily life in an urban environment, including racial segregation, poverty, and crime.

The project began in earnest when Rankin couldn't find the information he really wanted to see in the maps produced by the government.

As an example, Census maps show racial groups as a percentage of the total population in any given county. So in Los Angeles County, which houses a huge number of people, it looks like blacks make up a small portion of the population, which just isn't true, Rankin said.

For years, Rankin searched for a way to show race as more than just a percentage of the whole. He also explained that it's very difficult to depict more than one racial group on a map at once.

Rankin's maps of Chicago, Phoenix, and D.C. show both segregation and diversity at the same time, something not found in other maps.

The main thing Rankin wants people to take away from his maps is that the data is readily available, it all hinges on how you interpret it.