Archive for category News

QGIS Map Design Released!

Posted by G.P. in News on February 24, 2016



qmd_front_cover


My new book, co-written with the estimable QGIS expert Anita Graser, was released just this afternoon.

You can get a copy for 25% off straight from Locate Press with the coupon code: gistribe. Today only!
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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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Review of “Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users 2nd Edition”

Posted by G.P. in News on January 6, 2016

 

I received Cynthia Brewer’s new edition of Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users in the mail yesterday. Yes, I purchased it myself and was not asked to write this review. I just happen to be very interested in cartography reading material. As if you didn’t know that already. The book covers a lot of the same material as my book GIS Cartography: Effective Map Design 2nd Ed, but is shorter and has fewer jokes. I’m just saying.

The other thing I immediately noticed about the book is that it is heavy. It is so much heavier than you would expect for a book of this size. At 10 by 10 inches and 260 pages, the thing weighs 2.6 pounds. For comparison, Cartographer’s Toolkit is only slightly smaller, at 8.5 by 8.5 inches and 184 pages and weighs 15.4 ounces. The explanation for the excess weight is cupcakes. Oh, that’s just me. The book’s excess weight is due to the really high quality paper inside it. You could buy two and walk with one in each hand as a nice way to work cupcake weight off.

DesigningBetterMapsInside1

Getting into the substance of the book, I’d say it’s much better than the previous edition. All the images have been updated and are now in keeping with modern cartography practices. All the typical things that you need to know are covered from fonts and labels to color and layout.

There’s a few pages on projections that offer great examples of why some projections are good (e.g., azimuthal projections show great circles as straight lines) and why some projections are not good under certain circumstances (e.g., the Plate Carrée projection stretches areas near the poles, thereby misrepresenting those areas). You won’t find an in-depth discussion of all the projection distortion possibilities but it’s enough to give a taste of what projections are all about, which I think is really the aim here.

There are a lot of great tips throughout such as labeling states and counties in pairs along boundary lines at medium scales, not using The Great White Halo*, reserving sequential color palettes for sequential data, and my favorite: do not stump your reader. One way of representing bi-variate data that I hadn’t seen before is depicting one of the variables with black and white dots overlaid on a heat map depicting the other variable. This is a visualization I’m taking note of as I think it could be very useful in future projects.

In summary, Designing Better Maps is a well illustrated book with concisely but excellently written explanations on all the basic mapping considerations. It needs to have a place in the library of all new cartographers and is also worth a look by experienced cartographers who seek a refresher and a few new tips. You will find references to ArcGIS in here (it is published, after all, by Esri Press) but the material is for the most part applicable to all cartographic endeavors, irrespective of the technology used.

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greatwhitehalo

Your donation in support of this blog is very appreciated! It’s simple to make a donation with PayPal using my link.

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Happy Holidays

Posted by G.P. in News on December 24, 2015

santaearth

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Gender and Willingness to Participate in Unpaid Work Activities

Posted by G.P. in News on December 18, 2015

Here are the results of an informal Twitter poll regarding gender and whether or not a person engages in unpaid professional development activities and/or contributions to the profession outside of regular business hours.

 

This indicates that approximately 14% of the female respondents don’t do unpaid field-related work while approximately 20% of the male respondents don’t do unpaid field-related work. Two of the things I can think of that would make this poll less than reliable are:

  • It was worded such that if you ever once did unpaid work you could have answered yes whereas there very well could be a genderized difference in the amount of unpaid work people do and this poll didn’t get at that.
  • If you aren’t someone who generally participates in unpaid work related activities, you very well might not be on twitter to answer the poll. Twitter participation, I suspect, at least somewhat skews towards those who are interested in professional development. At least in the geo-space. Low sample size in general is also relevant to this bullet point.

However, I think that what the poll might be able to tell us is that we haven’t proven that women do less unpaid work. It was posited at a meetup more than a year ago that perhaps women aren’t as present at meetups, hackathons, and so on, because they are, on average, more apt to be doing other unpaid work (with the hidden subtext being that they were doing the childcare and household chores more than men). And further it was suggested that if hackathons and such would pay their participants, that more women would jump on that train.

This obviously doesn’t prove that at all. However, I think the only way to really get something a bit more scientific going would be to try a meetup or hackathon with a significant payment to all participants and see what results.

Ahem. So yeah, once again you were reading to find out what the answer is when you find out that the researcher says “more study needed.”

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GIS Coffee

Posted by G.P. in News on October 20, 2015



Do you want to order some coffee for a good cause? GISCoffee.com is taking orders, for the next 6 weeks only, for GIS-y branded coffee and mugs. It’s a project coming out of the  excellently executed and always supportive #GISTribe discussion that happens on twitter every Wednesday.

The coffee just went on sale yesterday and is already generating a lot of buzz. (Pun not intended–after all I haven’t actually received my coffee yet). I went ahead and ordered The Experience package, which looks to consist of:


giscoffee

I bought this package myself, this is not a paid or sponsored post. I just wanted to help out. I can’t say what the coffee is like yet since we don’t actually get the orders for another 6 weeks. But these are good people behind this thing and I’m hopeful!

 

If you want to order, use the special code Nathan Saylor agreed to give the readers of this blog: QMD at checkout for 10% off.


After reading through the website I still had some additional questions about GISCoffee.com, and asked them of Saylor. I’ll reprint the questions and answers here for your edification as well!

  • So all orders get fulfilled at basically the same time? Yes, except for the GIS Day shipping orders which is an option for an additional $15 and must be ordered by Nov. 2.
  • This is a one-time kind of thing, you can only order within those 6 weeks and then no more? At this time, yes. This is our first try at something like this. If we meet or exceed our goal, we will likely do this or something like it again next year. But there are no plans to do this full-time.
  • I understand the dream of a coffee shop for geo people but are you actually doing something physically? Like a brick and mortor? (Gretchen’s question clarification: I thought maybe they had all gotten together on a regular basis in real life.) No plans for that, but I think that would be a pretty hard sell unless it would be in D.C., Boulder, CO, or Redlands, CA.
  • Like will the hashtag be used one day at a special time for all of us to drink our coffee at the same time and chat on twitter? I hadn’t thought of that, but it isn’t necessary. #GISTribe chats every Wednesday at 12pm Pacific regardless of choice beverage.
  • Also, what does the music have to do with it? You don’t have coffee shops in your area that have live music? (Gretchen’s response: no, I live in a cave and I’ve never heard music in my life. Gretchen’s non-snarky response: I figured out that with The Experience package they also send you some music.)
  • Whom does the money go to? Will there be profit? Our initial goal is $300 to cover general web costs, but more to promote #GISTribe in the geo community. For example, Nathan Heazlewood (@nheazlewood) held a #GISTribe event at the Esri UC this past year. We did a live chat projected and it was a lot of fun. He supplied refreshments, but I felt it would be better if we had an expense account for those sorts of things. I’m already thinking in the spring we could get some lanyards and maybe some other items made up for conference season. Also, when #GISTribe was first starting out, Emily (@wildlifegisgirl) would offer prizes for contests. Those were paid for out of pocket and as a result, have tapered off. We’d like to bring prizes back starting with this event. Profit-wise? Beyond our goal, we will donate to http://hotosm.org  who organizes mappers such as ourselves in humanitarian mapping efforts in disaster-hit areas. Setting up a scholarship fund is also on our radar. We haven’t set this up as an NPO at this point, but we’re definitely of that mindset. Any more questions or want clarification? Send them along. Thanks!

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