Plan to Attend FOSS4GNA 2016

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

Ever since the very successful FOSS4G conference in Denver 2011, the conference and its North American counterpart the FOSS4GNA conference, have been the go-to conferences for anyone involved in or interested in Free and Open Source Software with a Geospatial bent. My understanding is that the 2011 conference consisted of a veritable who’s-who of FOSS4G developers and power users. Despite the auspiciousness of the attendees the information exchange level was high.

I went to my first FOSS4GNA last year and can attest to the fact that the information exchange level is still high while also being inclusive of those who are new to FOSS4G with plenty of intro sessions for newbies. Of course we’re all newbies at one or more aspects of FOSS4G as it’s impossible to know all of the great things coming out of this community at an expert level. So this is the conference to delve deeply into your software of choice, dabble in libraries or packages that are entirely new to you, and swap great ideas for new possibilities with fellow attendees.

This year’s FOSS4GNA is in Raleigh, May 2-5. I plan to give a cheesy talk where I interweave bits of the Tony Robbins best-seller Awaken the Giant Within with a live demo of QGIS. Hope to see you there!


This slide may or may not be going into my FOSS4GNA 2016 talk.

This slide may or may not be going into my FOSS4GNA 2016 talk.

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The Truthful Art: A Review

Posted by G.P. in Education on March 1, 2016

The very first thing I thought about Alberto Cairo’s brand new book The Truthful Art is that the title on the cover sports no capitalization. This shows gumption! This shows panache! This shows that the author may have some new, snazzy, and possibly risky design tricks to teach me!

And guess what? I am happy to report that the contents absolutely lives up to my first impression. And I’m not even saying this because I’m completely psyched that my name is in the index or that he graciously refers to Cartographer’s Toolkit as “A good book to have by your side when choosing styles for your maps.”*

I've been indexed!

I’ve been indexed!

This is Alberto Cairo’s third book on data visualization. It manages to be both entertaining and full of substance in its main goal of taking to task misleading data visualizations, telling us why they are sub-optimal or even downright lies, and how we can do better.

In one particularly important section he describes the idea of applying controls to your data. We cartographers are familiar with the idea that we should normalize by population in a map of, say, the numbers of people who go to graduate school in each state, but we may be less familiar with other methods of normalization. One of the examples in the book is that a visualization of traffic fatalities by state might be more beneficial if we also knew how much people commute in each state. If we don’t apply these controls then the reader can come to erroneous conclusions. That bit is from Chapter 3, The Truth Continuum, which is quite possibly my favorite chapter in the book as it really reminds us of all the ways our data can trip us up.

The Truthful Art, Interior

Another bit that really resonated with me was the motto that he says he shares with his students:


“It’s more complicated than that.” 


And also: “Good visualizations shouldn’t oversimplify information.” I’ve been saying that for years (see When is Complexity Okay? and Not to Complicate Things…But More on Complexity.) Yes, clutter is bad but taking away all the details is also bad. In practice this means reducing unnecessary visuals such as neatlines around map legends but leaving in supporting charts and graphs that further explain the map data, for example.

One quibble, which I need to think more about, is that the text equates isarithmic maps such as weather and temperature with kernel density maps. However, kernel density analyses display a measure of the highest concentration of points in a given dataset, not the connections between points of real data. So I don’t typically think of kernel densities as isarithmic even though on first appearance they seem like similar beasts. But like I said I need to think more about this and feel free to weigh in, because I suppose kernel density visualizations really are typically shown as areas with the same value, but the values themselves really shouldn’t be seen as indicating anything other than relative density in a dataset, which to me is very different from lines connecting discreet data points.

Back to the positive notes, as these should far outweigh any quibble that I may have just uttered and that I haven’t even spent enough time really thinking through (something that Cairo says is SO important for any kind of visualization–Think It Through!). For one thing, the infographics explaining map projections are superior to the ones I’ve put together for my books. Also, Cairo goes into great detail on classification schemes for choropleth maps, which I think is a very good thing considering this is where a lot of data journalists (his primary audience, perhaps) need to be more cognizant. 

In all, a wonderful addition to my library that I’m sure I will go return to again and again in the years to come!


*Disclaimer which turns out not to be much of a disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book. But! I was not asked to review it. Furthermore, since I had already purchased this book on pre-order before finding out that I was getting a free copy, I believe we could almost say that no disclosure is needed though clearly instead of that we now have one very complicated and drawn out run-on disclosure.


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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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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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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Labels on Maps: A Before and After

Posted by G.P. in Typography on February 18, 2016


Many people feel that halos (aka outline text) around their map labels will help their map labels stand out better and thereby be more legible. However, in many cases the use of halos ends up obscuring the legibility.

Typeface designers spend a lot of time working out the exact proportions of their letter forms and making sure that the “counters,” the blank space in and around a letter form*, are roomy enough and provide just the right amount of style in just the right places.

Unfortunately, halos run counter to the counters! Especially halos that have a high color contrast with the text. In many cases you can provide the necessary legibility by simply altering your typeface choice, capitalization, text color, and size parameters.

Brian Bancroft, @Brian_Bancroft, provides a great example of this in the before and after maps, below.


Before:
With Halos


After:
HalosAfter




*Better definition of counter from Webster: an area within the face of a letter wholly or partly enclosed by strokes.

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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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