Cartographic Skills

This week, we worked on making a visually coherent map and also sharpened our Adobe Illustrator skills. We were given a incoherently colored map of South Florida depicting the percentage of Hispanic population by county along with a pair of smaller scale maps to provide geological context for those who don't know where Florida is. I fixed the colors by generating a monochromatic range of colors via Color Brewer and manually editing the colors for each percentage range. A blue background helps the orange tones stand out, while the two inset maps have been left with color schemes that tend to blend in to the background.

GIS & Cartography

This week, the assignment spanned three maps and stretched current skills while introducing new ones. One map involved using a raster Digital Elevation Model (the topo map), one dealt with managing multiple layers with a great deal of overlapping data (and having those only display specified data, while the third involved creating a new shapefile via selection of specific data.

Introduction to Adobe Illustrator...

This map is output from a simple introduction to using Adobe Illustrator with output exported from ArcGIS in *.ai format. On the surface, one can't really distinguish it from an export to .jpg from ArcGIS as most of the work was done by organizing the map output in the layers panel, primarily in such as way as to ensure that the scale bar and the geographic output always stayed the same relative to each other. I've done enough Illustrator map work on my own to appreciate this viscerally.

Own Your Map

This week's Intro to GIS assignment focussed on creating a professional looking map layout. The process of creating the map per the instructions was designed to provide practice with the ArcGIS layout tools as well as manipulating data frames and layers.

Two Map Critiques

Example of Good Design:

This map succinctly depicts the status of the opposing alliances of the Cold War - NATO and the Warsaw Pact - as they were comprised in 1970. The design minimizes clutter, placing the rest of the world in the background (or simply not depicting it due to the use of an orthographic projection). The map layout, with the North Pole tilted toward the viewer, helps emphasize the proximity of the rival powers.

Map source: From Nuclear Weapons and NATO: Analytical Survey of Literature by United States Department of the Army, 1970. 

From the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas

Example of Poor Design:

At first glance, this map is rather striking. It purports to show growth trends among the world’s “Mega-Cities”, which it defines as those with a population of 10 million or greater. However, on closer inspection, the data displayed on the map suffers from being incomplete and incoherent. The megacities displayed on the map have a graphic representation of their populations from 1950, 2000 (an estimate) and 2015 (a projection). One can infer that Mega-City status is conferred based on city populations in 2000, as many of the cities listed had populations much lower than 10 million in 1950. However, this is never defined. However, if that inference is intentional, then this map is woefully incomplete. Several cities that qualified for “Mega-City” status in 2000 are not included on this map. These include Seoul, Delhi, Baghdad, Teheran, Istanbul, Manila and Moscow. Meanwhile, the time increments selected for the population growth graphics for the cities included are inconsistent, spanning fifty years and then just fifteen. The fifty-year span from 1950 to 2000 is also used to depict national population growth trends with a single metric depicted chloroplethically. The metric used is (presumably) on the population difference for each nation from 2000 to 1950. Since each nation had a different starting population, population density and land area, this metric is meaningless. The fifty year timespan is simply too great to show any meaningful trends, anyway, even if the mapmaker had used a per capita growth rate or something else more appropriate.

Map source: From Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts [page 29], National Intelligence Council, 2000 

From the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas 

Behold! A very basic chloropleth map based on country population as of 2007.

Introduction

I'm here by way of Providence, RI, where I recently got back into IT with a unix sysadmin gig that I'm doing to get out of the debt I've accumulated since I got my masters in landscape archaeology back in 2008.  Since then, I've had the privilege of digging in London and Iceland for a bit before I had to move back to the States.  I'm hoping to get into a fully funded PhD program in a couple of years, although I wouldn't be all that broken up if I just ended up working for a CRM firm instead.

I've been interested in GIS since I started the process of switching careers from IT to archaeology, but didn't get the kind of in depth GIS training I'd expected from my Masters program, so I thought the archaeology track here looked like a good option (especially since I couldn't find any appealing GIS programs near where I am).