The title, of course, is from a West Wing episode a long time ago, where the point is made that how things are visually represented goes a long way to influencing how we think about them.
So, the other day, we talked a little bit about maps, and specifically about cool GIS things that people are doing.And we’ve found some more interesting tools for you, in case you feel like doing mappy things on your own:
- the Humanitarian Data Exchange: Thousands of interesting maps as well as Common Operational Datasets. It has some interactive visualizations you can explore, which is how I made the map in the header in about 35 seconds, on displacement in S Sudan.
- Color Brewer 2: To get your style on, and check your color scheme for choropleth maps. There are options such as colorblind-friendly, photocopy-friendly, and print-friendly for all of us who have suffered the agony of producing a graphic illegible to a lot of people.
- Map Maker 4 is software for professionals who need to make maps; people like foresters, estate managers, archaeologists, emergency services, ecologists, and many others. It has been designed so that you do not have to be a “GIS” professional to use it.
- Cartographic Design Lab – how to create a choropleth map.
- UNHCR Emergency Information Management Toolkit has a lot of interesting links and resources, like delimiting AOR using Google Earth, map style guides, and other goodies.
- Humanitarian Response, Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry
- Map Action: Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping, First Edition, March 2009
- Standard symbol set from UNGIWG
- OCHA Map Guidelines: Field Map Production and Guidelines
- REACH Mapping Guidelines
- CartoBlog – lots of tutorials, such as a Tutorial on Choropleth maps with excel, Tutorial to collect for ArcGIS offline, and Social Media Mapping with ArcGIS Online
- UX Patterns for Maps: This site presents some design patterns for visualizing and scenarizing content with maps. Each pattern is associated with the problem(s) it solves. The patterns are being spotted and described on GitHub by a set of contributors.
- Carto courses: Online Mapping for Beginners In this lesson, you will learn how to work with datasets to create interactive map visualizations. You will explore styling your map, adding multiple datasets, and experimenting with different ways to display your data, including animated maps. You’ll learn how to share your new visualizations with friends, family, and the world. See also: Intermediate map design
cadacuanto: plus ça change 