A selection of interesting geo events occurring over the past week and other things I’m taking note of.

ONE

At the beginning of this week Brian Timoney, Chris Helm*, and Steve Citron-Pousty hosted JSGEO13 in Denver, an informal conference on geospatial applications of JavaScript. Despite the extreme cold we were experiencing here in Colorado, the meeting (which I wasn’t at) seemed to be well attended and quite a success. I highly recommend this summary by Peter Batty, which includes tons of links to the presentations and other supporting material.

TWO

Esri and David Allen have produced an update to the GIS Tutorial series for ArcGIS 10.1 that is now available. I have recommended this series in the past and still do so wholeheartedly. I am especially fond of the second book in the series, which steps through many of the analytical capabilities of ArcMap and how to go about using them. This book is a must-have for those using ArcMap for analysis. Even though it is an ArcMap tutorial book, I think you could still use it to learn what is possible with regard to GIS analysis, even if you don’t use ArcMap.

THREE

If you haven’t browsed Esri’s Storytelling with Maps gallery in a while, you should head on over there to see what they’ve got. I like how there is a common look and feel to all the maps, while still allowing for the variation that is needed for maps with such disparate subjects. You can download the story map templates to achieve the same professional appeal for your organization.

*Cartographer’s Toolkit showcases a webmap made by Chris Helm!

Nathan Saylor (@gisn8 on twitter) has just posted a thorough review of GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design on his blog. It looks like Saylor began blogging about cartography in September 2012. The posts are definitely worth a look through, especially this one about creating a cemetery map.

We need five people, from five U.S. locales, to spend about an hour each on a region delineation project. If you have an hour to spare and have lived in one of these places for at least 5 years recently, please let me know. You won’t have to do any GIS unless you want to. Your task will be to check the existing regions and re-draw if needed, using your expertise of the place. We aren’t as much interested in physical geographic knowledge as we are with knowledge of how and where people travel, commute, and where their sense of community lies. Anyone with at least 5 years of living in such a place should have this knowledge.

Locations:

• Texas/Oklahoma
• Missouri/Arkansas/Iowa
• Alabama/Mississippi/Georgia
• Virginia/West Virginia/Maryland
• Michigan/Wisconsin/Illinois

This should be an easy task. We will pay $50 per helper. Email me to inquire: gretchen …at…petersongis …dot…com

The temperatures are so high in parts of Australia that the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology’s weather forcasting chart  is now sporting new colors to identify them. The newly extended temperature range is now topped off with blue and pink/purple. The original color gradient ended in black, so these two new colors are incongrous and suprising, which seems fitting given the anomolous temperature situation. HT @mrgeog

For the last post here of 2012 I’m going to give a shout-out to a tool that I use from time to time: Identifont.

What’s up for PetersonGIS in 2013?

• I plan to use a coworking space beginning in January. I’ve already met someone there who does climate change research. Since I did some analysis and modeling for CSU’s climate change model a few years ago, this is obviously an interesting topic for me. I hope to meet a lot of other great people there and increase my creative output with the change of scenery.
• My editor wants me to start writing and designing a new edition of GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design because the book is doing well and is widely used in cartography courses and GIS departments across the country. The “design” part of it comes in developing interactive content for a digital version. While I think it is a great idea, I’m not sure I’ll do it. Writing a book is extremely time-intensive and the rewards aren’t always commensurate with that. Jury still out.
• One client is back up and running toward a goal that was paused a year ago. I’ll be helping him with some intense data research and data overlay techniques to combine certain datasets into a workable solution for his product. That’s about all I can say about it but it will be fun and interesting.
• Another client has come back for some design work that I’m excited about. It’s a small project but it involves picking colors and fonts, so it is just the kind of cartography I like.
• I’ll be continuing to try and help the salmon situation out in the Northwest with the creation of a new dataset of onsite septics and an analysis thereof.
• Other projects as they come in

Here’s to hoping everyone’s New Year is full and productive. Let us know what you will be up to!

Well, all the other bloggers are doing it, so here’s my most visited posts from 2012 list, as determined via Google Analytics stats. Some of the posts are from years prior to 2012, but were still very popular in 2012.

1. Toblerone’s First Law this one is a play on the geo-principle “Tobler’s First Law”, and has to do with chocolate, which I truly believe is one of the top things a blogger should blog about if they want a lot of traffic. People tend to search for articles about chocolate. A lot.

2. Halo’s are Evil a post that states why cartographers hate halos around text and, most importantly, backs up the assertion with instructive and illustrative examples.

3. Foray’s into Typographic Mapping here I’ve described what type maps are, and shared some of the tips and tricks I learned when trying to create my own.

4. What You Need To Know To Be A Cartographer in 2012 this is where I introduce the idea that cartographers now need to have some software development knowledge in their toolbelt. If I recall correctly, there was a lot of discussion on twitter about this post.

5. Making and Using the Colors for Maps Booklet it was nice to see this post make the list. It happens to be linked to from the main e-book buying page, so I assume that is where a lot of the hits come from. I’ve just checked the stats and it looks like 207 of these have sold to date. Sales have slowed, as was to be expected, now that the print-book is available, but there are always those who prefer the e version. For those thinking about writing their own books, you might be interested to know that the print version has sold about 63* times this amount and it has only been available for less than half a year. Of course, the print book benefits from Amazon’s search engine, whereas the e-books are only available via this site. I’m extremely happy with the sales of both the e-books and the print book, given the small niche market that is GIS and cartography. The best part, for me, is that based on feedback I’ve gotten, the products really seem to be helping people do better work. Goal accomplished.

There were more than 13,000 unique visitors this year! Thank you for reading! Can’t wait to see what next year will bring.

*edited because I screwed up the math originally.