Here’s another round of the 30DayMapChallenge featuring Lake Ontario. I’m finding some of these results to be less than exciting between the prompts and the subject matter, but I’m working with what I have. Another complication is the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Lake. I often need to get data from two different countries and they’re in different formats and don’t match up well at the edges.
Day 5 - Sight
There are going to be a series of these “Senses” (not Census) prompts and they are not going to be easy. It interests me that you are not always looking in the direction you think you are at a shoreline. Usually I think I’m looking directly across the water but the orientation matters. Mostly you cannot see across Lake Ontario unless in a tall building but at the ends you can. I have seen the Toronto skyline from areas around St Catharines. Also interesting (to me at least) is that the waterfront’s of Rochester’s major beach and Oswego both face towards the Prince Edward County peninsula - as does the waterfront of Belleville across the Bay of Quinte.
Day 6 - Vintage
Using various cartographic hacks I’ve learned over the years I made this map, based on a 1755 map by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville. Here is the relevant section of the map - the entire map can be seen at the Rumsey Map Collection here.
Day 7 - 10 minute map
I made this using Keynote, Mac's version of Powerpoint using basic shapes. It took 8 minutes. I decided to go back in to rotate Erie a bit. That brought it up to 10 minutes. This could have also been under the upcoming categories of New toolor Is this a map?
Day 8 - Utopia
Is your vision of Utopia a place with no human footprint? Not my best work and the scale is way off-those waves and trees are humungous!
Day 9 - Urban-rural
Land cover data is from Sentinel-2 imagery via Impact Observatory.
Day 10 - Prompting only.
The idea of this day is to make a map purely from AI prompts. Much as I hate AI and love to make fun of it, I used Claude and was very impressed by it (him?). Claude is very transparent- you see the thinking process as it goes along. The first prompt was just “make a map of Lake Ontario”. Claude spent time thinking about what cities to include or leave off - based on what criteria I don’t know but it made good decisions. It also spent time making sure the text was all placed on the land.
From Claude: “The outline is hand-drawn from approximate coordinates, so it’s good for orientation but not for navigation. I left out details like the Bay of Quinte and the islands near Kingston. If you’d like, I can add more cities, the U.S.–Canada border, or depth zones.“
For a second prompt I asked it to add the major rivers that flow into the lake to add interest. It gave me some goofy arrows.
For the final prompt I asked Claude to draw the rivers instead of arrows. The final map expanded the coverage area. It also added Rice Lake. Here’s Claude’s report.
“I replaced the arrows with river courses and extended the map south so the rivers have room to run.
Niagara River runs from Lake Erie at Buffalo, past Niagara Falls, into the southwest corner of Lake Ontario. It’s drawn thickest because it carries by far the most water.
Genesee River winds north to Rochester. It’s cut off at the bottom edge of the map, since its headwaters are in Pennsylvania.
Oswego River starts where the Seneca River from the Finger Lakes (Seneca and Cayuga) joins it, then flows north to the lake.
Trent River drains Rice Lake, loops east, and reaches the lake through the Bay of Quinte.
St. Lawrence River is the outlet, running northeast from Kingston.
The courses are stylized from approximate coordinates, so the bends aren’t exact. I left out the Black and Salmon rivers on the eastern shore because their upper courses fall off the map. I can widen the map to include them, or add the smaller Toronto-area rivers like the Humber and Don.“
Day 11 - Sound
I used communication tower data that I downloaded from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a proxy for noise. For some reason OSM data is much more dense on the Canadian side so the picture is a bit skewed.
More next week!
Bonus content - if you’re as pissed off as me about renaming Lake Ontario you might enjoy this video by Bryan Adams (remember him?)
