Year: 2013

GIS Christmas day 3

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For todays post I want to share one of my favourite websites about maps, Strangemaps. This website is filled with interesting maps and discussions about them. One of my favourite posts is about what happens to your head if you look at too many maps. Another is the map of Procrasti-Nation, and the explanation about which words are used to describe procrastination in different languages. BBC made a very good tv series about maps called the The Beauty of Maps, and one of the episodes were about cartoon maps, politics and satire. Some of these maps in this episode can be found on Strangemaps for those interested in learning more about them.  Here’s a link to that episode on Youtube:

GIS Christmas day 2

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Mercator Puzzle

Today I want to share a link to a game that is useful for learning how the Mercator projection distorts the shape of countries closer to the poles. This game is made by Google who uses the Mercator projection for their maps due the square grid which makes it easy to make tiles (Google’s map tiles are 256 x 256 pixels in size). Speaking of projections, XKCD has a good and fun webcomic about map projections. On the website of Steve Waterman it’s possible to learn more about the Waterman butterfly projection, and he also have a poem where he compares his projection to other map projections. Here’s the Mercator Puzzle

GIS Christmas day 1

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This year I have decided to share one GIS or cartography-related post every day until Christmas. Most will be from my bookmarks archive, but I may also make a few guides on how to do nice things or share some personal work. I hope this can be useful for anyone interested in geography, GIS or cartography.

Colorbrewer

First out in the GIS Christmas calendar is a very useful tool for finding out how colours look on maps, and help choose colours for your own maps. You can select the number of data classes you have and which type of color scheme you need (sequential, diverging or qualitative schemes), and then get colour schemes with colours that fit well together. You can also see if the colours are colourblind-safe, colour printing friendly, photocopy friendly or laptop (LCD) friendly. I can recommend it, and it can be found at http://colorbrewer2.org/

Schnappi tracker

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In EGEA we have an inflatable crocodile called Schnappi that travels around to different places along with members of EGEA. As I wanted to see Schnappis travels in a simple way I googled “time map” and found exactly what I wanted in the Timemap javascript library. It was easy to customize one of the Timemap examples to my needs. I chose to go with a kml file for the location and timeframe data, as that seemed the easiest to me, and I also chose to go with Openstreetmap as I like their maps and I didn’t need a API key to use it. The result can be seen here.

EGEA entities map

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This is a map of the entities of the association EGEA. The markers on this map were made using the tool Batchgeo to generate a map and a kml file based on an excel file of locations, in my case a list of cities. I then used the KML to Shape tool in ArcMap to get a shape file that ArcGIS Online could understand. I’m now working on getting better coordinates for the entities than just in the middle of each city. Click here to get to the map.