Archive for category Cartography Profession

How I Got My Start in GIS, Sloppy Joes, and Tree Hugging

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession on February 22, 2016



tinafey


With this post I’m jumping in on the “how I got my start in GIS” meme. (Thanks to Bill Dollins for starting this.)

For me it was really pretty straightforward. Here’s how it played out:

My adviser sophomore or junior year at Cornell was a man who, shall we say, had a bit of a relaxed personality. This was a guy who organized stunts for his environment seminar such as getting some guy to run across the stage yelling, “tree huggers!” while brandishing a chainsaw. My adviser would nonchalantly continue to lecture to the 300 or so students in the class while this was going on.

He was generally unflappable. However, there was one time when two men streaked naked across the stage during a lecture. Apparently this was not a professor-planned stunt because he abruptly discontinued the lecture for the day. The students were stunned first by the streakers and second by what my adviser said in response. “And that is all,” he said. Or maybe he just said, “Class dismissed.” I don’t remember the exact words but they were perfunctory and unprecedented. This was 30 minutes before the formal end of class. At first we were not really sure if the whole thing was a joke or not but when my adviser left the stage and didn’t come back we eventually filed out of the hall and had an early lunch.

So it was that guy who told me I should take a class in GIS. He said it was going to be all the rage for natural resources managers someday, which was what I was aspiring to be. I took the class, got a gentlewomanly grade of B and that was that. It was taught by Steve DeGloria, a nice man whom I kept in touch with for a while after college. He was probably the first (and not the last) to warn me against trying to start a consulting business. :)

My junior year I applied for a work-study position at the NY State Water Resources Institute, which was conveniently located on the Cornell campus. The position was primarily supposed to be a graphic design job using Pagemaker on their office mac. In the interview I pretty much told them I knew Pagemaker and got the job, at which point I immediately hit the mac lab and spent an entire weekend learning not only how to use Pagemaker but also how to use a mac.

Happily I didn’t completely fail at my first Pagemaker tasks so I was still working there when some GIS work needed to be done. One of the managers asked me to do it since I was the only one around with any kind of GIS experience. I continued to do most of the GIS work from then on out, which expanded as we realized the capabilities. One of my main memories of this time period was that ArcInfo was practically impossible to use if you didn’t know what keywords to search for in the ArcInfo listserv archives. Let’s just say I spent a lot of my time searching for answers using the wrong questions.

During this time something occurred which I call the File Cabinet Incident. A fellow intern was in a rush to tell me something exciting and in the process crashed straight into the filing cabinet in my office. It was awesome.

Another memory from that time was the major snowstorm that occurred the day of a workshop that I was supposed to give in SUNY Binghamton, an hour’s drive away. The professor I was supposed to ride with made me drive since I was from Colorado. This apparently  made me a good snowstorm driver by default.

Lucky for him he guessed right as I did spend my teens doing things like scraping snow off the windshield of my 1850s era, red velvet seats, Mercury Marquis with a long stick. While simultaneously driving slowly down the road to get home from high school tennis practice. Yes, tennis practice during a snowstorm, you read that right. It’s all about having the right gloves.

I also won’t ever forget the map that I made to go on the front of the Susquehanna watershed report that the Institute produced. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that great, but it was a major accomplishment to make a map with digital data. This was due to the special combination of my not having very user friendly software and my being 20 years old.

I gave my first big conference talk as part of that internship too. It was to the 1998 NY GIS Conference on the topic of “Source Water Assessment and GIS.” The most vivid thing about that talk that I can remember is that I inexplicably ordered a sloppy joe sandwich to eat right before my talk. And I was wearing a white dress shirt. Sheesh, interns! (And thanks for all that you did for me, NYSWRI! :) )
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Announcing GIS Appreciation Day 2016

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession, News on February 5, 2016



edited 3/3/2016 to add:
Wednesday, March 1, 2017 will be the next GIS Appreciation Day. Thanks for participating everyone!


Wednesday, March 2, 2016 will be our first GIS Appreciation Day!


It will be a day to post your fantastic map finds, funny GIS memes, and just about anything that you can think of. Just be sure to use the hashtag #GISAppreciationDay with your social media posting! I’ll be participating on twitter but I assume it can be extended to Instagram and Facebook or wherever you’d like.

It was inspired by the very successful (seriously) Squirrel Appreciation Day that happened back in January. For example:

 




Here is the history behind the making of GIS Appreciation Day:

So let’s all celebrate GIS Appreciation Day on March 2, 2016 by posting at least one GIS fact, one great map, one photo of your colleagues or whatever you come up with. I’m looking forward to this!
*****************************

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Adding Desktop Design to Your Repertoire

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession, Education, Terminology on November 6, 2015

 

What type of cartographer are you? Do you assume that other cartographers know the same tools that you do? Is it okay to be a beginner who knows one set of tools really well but still needs to get busy learning another set?

 

eatingman

 

I was just doing a mental inventory of the tools I’ve been using this year and how long I’ve been using them:

Git: 2 yrs GitHub: 2 yrs SourceTree: 6 mos Inkscape: 4 yrs ArcMap and all previous iterations thereof: 17 yrs QGIS: 2 yrs Python: 10 yrs but not frequently Gimp: 1 mo AGOL: 1 yr d3.js: 6 mos JavaScript: 5 yrs but not frequently OpenLayers: 1.5 yrs GeoServer: 1.5 yrs CartoCSS: 2 yrs …etc

 

I don’t even know if I’ve got those years all exactly correct and I’m not sure it reflects relative expertise since at any one time I’m immersed in a few tools and therefore slowly forgetting the others until I pick them up again. Then there’s the little things you need to know enough of to get you by, like SQL. It’d take me a while to write a really complex query but knowing a little bit of SQL is a must, for example, for querying osm extracts for the tags that you need. I think this is pretty typical of a cartographer and GIS professional, though some are going to be heavy on the dev side of things, some on the design side, and some on the GIS side.

 

In fact, let’s take a look at these cartography “sub-specializations:”

  • Developer. Strong on programming, weak on design.
  • Desktop GISer. Strong on analysis, weak on programming.
  • Online mapper. Strong on cartoCSS, webGL, weak on desktop design software.
  • Designer: Strong on design, weak on analysis.
  • Data Specialist: Strong on PostGIS, MongoDB, etc, weak on design.

The gurus tell us to make sure we’re focusing on programming:

 

But it’s not a one-size-fits-all-weaknesses situation. Perhaps the vast majority of cartographers are traditional desktop GIS users who are weak on programming and therefore need to focus efforts there, I’m not disputing that at all. But recently we’ve seen another sort of “weakness” that needs to be addressed, and that is, in particular, the cartographer who doesn’t know desktop design software and all of its intricacies, oddities, and special lexicon.

 

Exhibits:
A) A front-end geospatial developer with an emphasis on cartography tells me that she was thoroughly perplexed when another cartographer assumed that she knew what “path to text” and “erase” meant with respect to Illustrator/Inkscape commands.
B) An all-around geospatial developer who has to make maps as a side-product of his work tells me that he needs to make icons for his maps from time to time and struggles between whether to hire out such a small task or whether to just take the time to learn Illustrator or Inkscape so he can do it on his own.

 

My conclusion is that cartographers need to add basic desktop design software to their set of skills. Whether that means taking a class while getting their degree or learning it on their own, I think it’s a worthwhile skill. And I don’t say this lightly. I myself was hemming and hawing the other day at the fact that I needed to learn Gimp for something. A fellow GIS professional essentially told me to stop complaining and just learn it already. So I did and a few tutorials later was on my way.

 

So maybe there’s a mental hurdle keeping you from learning these things. In that case I’ll tell you the same thing: just take an hour or two to learn the basics of desktop design software. Learn a bit of Inkscape so you can design vector-based drawings and icons, and manipulate cartographic outputs from QGIS or ArcMap. Maybe learn Gimp (better for raster) for photo and screenshot manipulation. It really won’t take long and then you’ll have the ability to do these things yourself.

 

Does adding desktop design to your repertoire seem daunting, especially since you’ve been meaning to add deeper programming knowledge to your skills too? And what about spatial analysis skills? Why isn’t anyone getting ticked off about the fact that we have “GIS Analysts” running around who don’t have the ability to do multi-criteria decision analysis?

 

Get going and learn some things. Don’t expect that someone else with the title of “cartographer” knows the same stuff you do. If someone’s spouting off incoherent software-specific verbiage don’t be afraid to stop and ask them to explain. And if you want to get familiar with a bit of the desktop design lingo, here are a few things to start with, inspired by a real-life situation where someone assumed that these terms were universal knowledge (hint: they’re not):

  • Path. In Illustrator and Inkscape you can draw a line and display text on it. The line is called a path. You draw the path first and then tell it to place your text on it. Here’s a tutorial for Inkscape.
  • How to actually move something. You’d think this would be easy. Anyone with basic desktop skills knows how to click and drag. But did you know that you can’t always click and drag in, for example, Gimp? Sometimes you have to select a piece of the drawing with a certain tool or use the Layer Dialog. It’s a different way of thinking that you should get familiar with on a basic level at least.
  • Erase. Erasing or clipping is so odd in desktop design software. One of the best ways to make a triangle might be to make a square and then clip off half of it! You might want to draw a path and use it to erase instead of an eraser tool. You might need to know that a basic crop is a little complicated in Inkscape, since you essentially would want to draw another shape to crop with and then use Object>Clip>Set. Again, not exactly intuitive for a newbie.
  • Live trace/trace. This can be really handy if you want to create a drawing that looks somewhat like a photo or other drawing. You have the design program trace it and then you modify the result.
  • Scaling elements. Use the little lock symbol in Inkscape or the chain link in Gimp to make sure that both the height and width change in the same proportion. You might click and drag to make something bigger or smaller or you might need to use a scale tool, depending on the software.

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foundational education vs pinnacle education

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession on August 20, 2015

In education there’s a debate over whether a student should start with foundational knowledge and build from there or whether they should start at a place (i.e., framework) that’s further along so that they can reach even higher at an earlier age than those who have to, for example, spend time memorizing addition and subtraction problems when they could have just relied on a calculator. (Apparently this is something they do in Sweden?)

Recently we in GIS land have brought up the question of whether a 12 week course that promises to teach you to be a data scientist is snake oil or not. Given: an advanced statistics degree is a huge accomplishment and we need some people who know those fundamentals.

The question is, though, what if we taught the tools (but not the theory, thus saving people time) to people who are experts in other disciplines? I think there’s definitely a place for modularized education like this. And providing this 12 week option–if the quality of the teaching is good–could enable more and better advances.

It’s kind of like saying: “we shouldn’t enable people without expertise in cartography or GIS analysis to make maps by providing shortened educational opportunities.” Well guess what? We didn’t provide shortened educational opportunities and still our entire profession has been up-ended over the past 10 years by people who have had virtually no expertise in GIS analysis or cartography.

The gut tells us that too much territoriality never leads to new thinking. If the 12 week course turns out to be a disappointment due to poor teaching that’s certainly something to complain about. But to complain about the spirit of the course? Perhaps that’s sour grapes.

potter

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Too Much New Software, Too Many New Libraries, Even for the Nerds

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession, Design on July 28, 2015

minioncompute

I’ve been learning d3 and it’s been a fantastic learning experience. It’s a low-level javascript library for making interactive visualizations–including maps–inside SVGs for nifty client-side rendering effects of datasets that can be updated easily with new data. Incidentally, Scott Murray’s book Interactive Data Visualization for the Web is a fantastic first resource full of the most important bits to know and written in an accessible style.

So that’s been great, yes. But even the nerdiest among us have their limits to how much of their day, their week, or even their year, they can jam with brand-new material. And that leads me to my thesis, which is that when you are designing a new product or a new library or a new software, keep in mind that it isn’t just your computer laypersons who have to leap a mental hurdle to even begin working with your product, it’s also people who have just simply saturated their number of “new things” that they can handle that week or that month, even if they are supremely computer-savvy individuals who would really have very little trouble with your product.

In product design teams, the engineers and managers all have a tendency to think about the lowest common denominator when designing, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. But the computer scientists among us hit their limits from time to time too. So you’re not just in the business of making things simple for the newbies, your making your product easy to adopt by everyone.

My forays into d3 came at a time when I was granted a few hours of paid time to work on it, and that helped. It also came at a time when I was ready to really dive into something new. Don’t count on that being the case for all your users.

As usual I’ve reached the end of my little thesis statement with a feeling that it could be argued in the opposite direction as well (the downside of being analytical). So if you’d like to argue the opposite please go for it. And keep in mind the goal here: giving the best advice for teams building brand-new products as well as individuals who are building brand-new tools and libraries.

 


 

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for all newcomers

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession on June 14, 2015

I don’t care how many mistakes a cartographer makes. I care about what those mistakes might lead up to if the person keeps trying and experimenting: perhaps a world-view changing map that makes a huge difference to human welfare, to the environment, to science, or to happiness in general!

To be protectionist about ones’ profession when one is at the top is to cover up fears. Fears that professional truisms that you once held dear will be upended. Fears that naive mistakes will ruin the world (or worse-that naiveté will result in creative advances that you yourself didn’t discover!). Or any myriad other fears.

To be protectionist of the principles of your profession, to denigrate those who make mistakes, and to ignore creative enhancements just because they haven’t yet made it into an approved text or some such accepted measure of correctness is to declare that you believe there is no improvement to be made to the current accepted state of knowledge.

Naysayers live it up for a short while, if they’ve made it far enough. But they don’t stay there long if they don’t make room for the up and comers. Up and comers don’t have to look like them, act like them, or make their contributions in the same way. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. You have the potential to change any of a number of things in the cartography profession that need shaking-up.

Could you imagine someone who is truly a genius, someone like Richard Feynman perhaps, getting angry that a scientist misunderstood or misused a principle? He could have held an attitude of admonishment for those who knew less than himself. But instead he thought hard about how to teach better.

And if you make mistakes along the way? Roger Schank says, “we need to reason logically from evidence we gather, carefully consider the conditions under which our experiment has been conducted, and decide when and how we might run the experiment again with better results.”

But please, don’t stop experimenting.

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