FOSS4G 2013 Map Gallery

About a year ago I was asked by Steven Feldman, Chair of the 2013 FOSS4G Conference, if I'd be interested in organising and curating a map gallery for the event. I jumped at the chance. The conference was being held in my home town of Nottingham, UK and it was an honour to be charged with helping out my geo-friends.

I have worked closely with Rollo Home and Barry Rowlingson, with support from the British Cartographic Society and International Cartographic Association, to get the gallery up and running. We decided early on to go for a 'digital' gallery meaning we weren't going to have walls pinned with paper maps at the conference.  This was initially controversial but in the new age of cartography I felt that giving space to new map-makers and focussing on digital media seemed appropriate. Paper isn't dead but this conference, probably more than many, demands the map gallery to move with the times. This was an experiment in some respects but I'm delighted to say that as the conference kicks off it's come together superbly.

We've had over 70 submissions and I have to say that as someone who often bemoans the lack of quality in modern cartography, I've been hugely impressed.  There are some truly impressive maps and on the whole, the collection represents a time-slice of map-making that showcases the state of the art as it stands.  Sure the tools to make maps are progressing at an astonishing rate and maps will mature and become far more nuanced as products but this is where we are at currently.

So I invite you to head over to the FOSS4G Map Gallery and take a look for yourselves.  You'll find one or two maps you may have seen before and a whole load you haven't. There are maps made by people you're no doubt familiar with and many more from names you're probably going to hear far more of in the coming years.

There are a number of prizes on offer for entrants to the map gallery competition. The categories of best data integration, best software integration, best cartographic display, best static map (digital display), best anti-map, best web map application and most unique map have already been judged by an international panel of map experts. The results will be announced during the closing plenary on Saturday 21st Maptember (yes, the month of September has been hijacked because of the sheer number of geo-events taking place in the UK).

There is one final prize available though...the People's Award.  And YOU can vote too because the voting takes place entirely from the Map Gallery itself.  Click on a map you like and a vote button appears.  The voting is open to the global community and not just conference attendees so if you like a map...let us know by voting.  Voting closes Saturday just before the winners are announced.

It's looking like it's going to be a terrific week of geo-fun at the conference.  The gallery lives online but is also being showcased in a 20 minute movie streamed via three large plasma screens on site.  You can watch the movie on YouTube.

We're also extremely grateful to our friends at CASA who have loaned us their iPad wall to display a patchwork of gallery entries.

The iPad and plasma screens provide a great way of seeing the range of maps and soaking them up but please VOTE.

I'd personally like to thank Barry who has gone above and beyond in developing the technical backend to much of what we can see and use. Thanks.  Oh...and in case you're wondering, yes some of my maps are in the gallery because it was open to all but you can't vote for mine even if you were minded to. The last time I organised and then won a competition it ended very badly...student days, pub golf...those who know me know the story and if you catch me at the conference I'll share it with you. I learnt my lesson.

A HUGE thanks to all who entered. It's been a privilege to help organise the gallery and good luck in the awards!

Guardian's Australian Election Map

Mapping election results usually brings out the worst in cartography.  The usual default is to map an arbitrary area in a single solid colour showing the winner's affiliation (think red/blue US States).  The problem with this sort of approach is the underlying 'real' geography of where people who vote actually live is missing.  The map ends up showing a severely distorted geography because it doesn't take account of the population size and distribution and so the map of US elections appears predominantly red even though Obama (blue) won. The counter is often to distort the geography to equalase the underlying problem..such as creating a population density equalizing cartogram (the so-called Gastner-Newman approach). Then there's the dot density approach, hex-binning approach and the dasymetric approach ad nauseam.

What a refreshing change, then, to see some sense by The Guardian when mapping the Australian election. Nick Evershed briefly touches on some problems with 'traditional' election maps then shows his creation...

It's a sort of Dorling cartogram with circles sized proportional to the population in that electoral area and then coloured according to affiliation.  The circles are displaced to avoid overlapping but they've added a basemap to at least give some geographical sense to the otherwise abstract representation.

I like Dorling cartograms so I am bound to like this effort.  The symbols are clear, efficient and unambiguous. Because of the nature of the population distribution in Australia the map works and the major cities become identifiable (labels would help for people to identify each of the major cities though).  In a country that has far more people crammed across more of the actual space the technique wouldn't be as effective.

I'd have preferred a larger variation in symbol size (it's difficult to see any differentiation) and a legend to tell me what amount of people are represented by the symbol sizes but kudos to The Guardian who have not simply reached for the defaults and have sought to illustrate the story with something more nuanced and thought through. They've actually showed something sadly lacking amongst many of today's rapid map-making map-makers...they've done some cartographic research and made effective use of it. Even better, their write-up briefly describes their design process and explains why other maps were discounted before they arrived at this effort.

Form, function and keeping it simple.  Simple!

The Underground Map of [insert here]

Tube maps. Beck's is beautiful. One or two others work.  I currently have a collection of over 170 copies, parodies, imitations and fakes; most of which are just tedious.  Simon Patterson published The Great Bear in the early 1980s which kicked off the craze of using the Tube map as a canvas on which to hang your own crazy idea.  I gave a talk at the International Cartographic Conference on this very issue as myself and collaborator Professor William Cartwright feel it's time to leave the map alone (slides here).

And then today this pops up...

It's a tube map of the elements in the periodic table. There's a write up in The Guardian. It's a map made by Mark Lorch, a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at University of Hull.  Now I don't want to be too disparaging because no-one likes criticism but in my opinion this guy has clearly spent too long in the fume cupboard.

What was he thinking?  The periodic table is a masterpiece of clear, efficient design that captures the organisation and relationship of the elements perfectly. Dmitri Mendeleev is credited with the first fully published version in the mid 1800s and, like Beck in the 1930s, clearly took cues from previous work but sprinkled a bit of magic to create a definitive masterpiece.

If you are going to have a stab at re-designing such a classic start with a blank canvas and think creatively. Instead, Dr Lorch decided to plagiarise Mr Beck's work and use it as a basis for this Frankenstein of a tube map derivative. Many have done so. Most fail but at least they are usually trying to make a map of some humourous nonsense. This plumbs new depths as it takes two classics, rides roughshod over one while destroying another.

A few years ago such nonsense would have never seen the light of day but now it gets top billing on The Guardian's web site for all to see and it's already racking up the obligatory likes, re-tweets and suchlike.

h/t to @Jon_Two and @williamscraigm for ruining my morning by alerting me to this.

Cartography Conference in Wrong Location Shock

The British Cartographic Society is holding its 50th Anniversary conference in Leicestershire, UK in 2013 (now, as I write).  Their very first get-together was in Leicester and so, reasonably, the desire was to return for the 2013 celebration. The venue is Hothorpe Hall...whose postal address is in Leicestershire except someone forgot to check the map because it's actually in Northamptonshire, its southerly neighbouring County.  Can there be a more delicious slice of cartographic irony for a mapping conference?

That thick black line represents the County boundary between Leicestershire (to the North) and Northamptonshire.  The River Welland is the border and flows about 50 yards north of Hothorpe Hall itself.

It's OK though...isn't this what OpenStreetMap is for?  I quickly fired it up and made a face-saving edit to the location of the County administrative boundary...

There...everyone can relax and get on with the conference which is now, according to the latest digital mapping technology (so it must be right...right?), back in Leicestershire.

PS...no, of course I didn't save the edit