One of the neatest data visualization projects I’ve seen lately is Topi Tjukanov’s “Map of Notable People.” It takes a database of birthplaces of notable people and maps them to cities on a global interactive map. Surprisingly addictive to pan around.
Tom Patterson has released a new version of his Equal Earth Map, this time as a physical topographic map style. Beautiful stuff.
This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together.
I love this idea and am excited to see him do more like this down the road.
In this latest cartography project I’m working on, I’m rediscovering the tedium of searching for appropriate data. I’ll grant that it’s amazing how much high quality data is produced and freely distributed, but given the advances of web technology, it’s frustrating to see how bad many of the web map content management systems are.
Of course the difficulty of finding data depends on the geographic area. I happen to be working on a region that’s pretty sparse, so some data (like rasters) can be harder to find.
Here are a few resources I’ve either found or rediscovered worth sharing:
This week is some reading, but some simple admiring. I wanted to highlight the work of two cartographers I follow that is fantastic. We live in a great world that people can still make a living producing such work.
A beautiful, artistic work from David Garcia sorting each island’s landmass by area. My favorite map projects aren’t just eye candy, they also teach you something. I spent half an hour on Wikipedia reading about a few of these islands.
This is a project...
Another great cartographic analysis from Justin O’Beirne, this time on the latest updates to Apple Maps. Their new data and styling covers mostly northern California, and has some gorgeous computer-extracted natural land cover, derived from satellite imagery. The golf courses look particularly impressive:
But even ignoring Apple’s competitiveness with Google, Apple’s inferior place database also impacts its own stated ambitions in augmented reality (AR) and autonomous vehicles (AVs)—both of which heavily rely on accurate and comprehensive place information.
Most of the analysis digs into how they might be deriving...
This is Google’s answer to Apple’s recently announced ARKit coming in iOS 11. After years of buzz with little substance, it’s great to see AR coming around to fruition with real commercial potential. The confluence of hardware fast enough for SLAM, mature OS platforms, and the APIs making it simple for developers to drop in and experiment with.
Waymo seems clearly in the lead in vehicle automation. This piece has some stunning figures on what they’re doing not only with their well...
An excellent, extremely detailed analysis from Justin O’Bierne on how maps and cartography might evolve if autonomous vehicles negate our need for turn-by-turn navigation.
We can’t apply today’s maps to tomorrow’s cars – but this is exactly what those who think cartography is dying are doing. (It’s not that we’ll no longer be navigating, it’s that we’ll be navigating different things – and we’ll need new kinds of maps to help us.)
Brian Timoney’s...
At the State of the Map US conference in Portland, I talked about a pet project of mine: mapping marine data in OpenStreetMap to build beautiful, open data-based nautical charts. The OpenSeaMap project is a sub-project of OSM to map aids-to-navigation, channels, ports, and marine facilities to create a database of free, easy-to-use nautical data.
If you’ve ever done much involving symbol sets in mapping (especially web mapping), you know about the nightmare of managing 700 separate PNG files, with different, duplicate versions for slightly different size variations and colors. Even with a small set of a dozen symbols, if you want 3 sizes and 5 colors for each, you’re looking at 180 distinct PNG marker symbols to keep track of. Ugh. SVG format simplifies this in certain ways, but isn’t as universally supported or easy to work with as simple GIFs or PNGs.
With TileMill, I’ve wanted to use marker symbolizers frequently in...
The mapping industry has historically underappreciated the human and sociocultural aspects of geography. This talk from the first Ignite Tampa Bay series focused on understanding the value of localized knowledge, and why human geography matters.
Watch the video here.
