This week a minor spat broke out on the twittersphere, so what’s new you ask? The chart in question is Ken Field’s somewhat ironic decision tree on whether one should make a map I need to emphasise that this is a joke that makes a serious point (IMHO) and the promotion of Ken’s excellent book Cartography. is the punchline. This prompted Amber Bosse, who describes herself as a critical cartographer, to reference Ken and other […]
Making Maps
8 posts
I was invited to deliver a keynote last week at KortDage to an audience of nearly 800 Danish (and Scandinavian) GI professionals. There were just a few snags: The person who invited me said “Last year Jack Dangermond gave a keynote, this year we wanted something different”. No challenge there! The slot was at 9.00am on the final morning after the delegates had been up till 1.30am boogying I don’t speak Danish and I wasn’t […]
Last week I wrote a post about making a map of the locations of US steel plants and the electoral results in their local communities. I concluded with this brief summary “it’s a first draft and needs a good bit of work, but you can certainly see a pattern – most of the steel plants (and all of the large ones) are in Republican Districts – hardly a big surprise but there you go. I guess […]
A couple of days ago a friend asked me if I could help a friend of his make a map showing the locations of US steel plants against US 115th Congressional Districts (2016). I tweeted out asking my American geogeek friends if they could help me find the data for this map. Within a few hours I had the Congessional District boundaries and the 2016 election results but the steel plant locations were a little […]
Thanks to the enormous efforts of the FOSS4G 2017 organising team the videos of keynotes and presentations are now appearing on their site. There were a couple of technical glitches when I was giving my FAKEMAPS talk in Boston but fortunately the video finally appeared with sound, slides and me. Get your self a cup of coffee, a beer or even a single malt, sit back and hopefully enjoy, it’s worth making the video ‘full […]
This is another post about making maps from OpenData. I am trying to learn more geeky stuff rather than my usual blathering about the map and data business, things open and stuff, so I am playing with PostGIS, QGIS, taking some tentative steps into CSS and JavaScript and generally having lots of fun. But hey, you can burn a lot of time wrangling data and making maps. A week ago I saw this tweet Mapping […]
This making maps business is certainly not as easy as it seems! I have just burnt an inordinate amount of time trying to make a half decent map and publish it to the web, but I am learning stuff on the way even if I did disappear up some blind alleys. 2 years ago, I wrote a piece “Could you make a better map than this?” which questioned the way in which the Local Government […]
This is a maps and Arsenal post with a tiny bit of geekery added in. In the 2003-4 season Arsenal won the Premier League title while going the whole season unbeaten (actually including a couple of games in the preceding season and several in the following season they went 49 games unbeaten) a record that is unlikely to be equalled. My favourite Arsenal blogger is a guy called Andrew Managan who blogs at Arseblog, he […]