Thirty Day Map Challenge - Part 1

 Several years ago Finnish cartographer Topi Tjukanov began the Thirty Day Map Challenge and it has run every November since. The idea is to create a map every day of November based on a theme he posts at the start. These maps are posted to Twitter using the hashtag #30DayMapChallenge. There have been some wonderfully inspiring maps created in this process. I had never participated before this year, correctly assuming it would take up a major part of my time and energy. 

As in other years, I had no plans to do this but on November 1st I suddenly found myself making a map and it took off from there. At the risk of being a self-indulgent show off here are the first 10 maps. As of right now I don't have an online portfolio so here is a place for me to post them. I'm hoping to continue on this challenge but time will tell if I make it to the 30-day mark.

Day 1 - Theme: Points

I'd been working on a general "where I've been" map and I got to thinking about places I've spent the night. I looked at a few states that either didn't seem interesting or had too many uncertainties when I settled on Ohio. I've been working on my weak artistic skills. This was drawn in watercolor pencils by hand while looking at a map of the state.

Day 2 - Theme: Lines

 I don't really like the song "Every Day is a Winding Road" by Sheryl Crow, but somehow it got stuck in my mind and I set out prove it. I used various mapping services such as Google, Bing, Apple and OpenStreetMap to illustrate examples of streets around the world named for the days of the week. One of the tricky parts was finding streets that are in fact "winding."

Day 3 - Theme: Polygons

Points, lines and polygons are the main building blocks of maps so each one gets a day. DC seemed like a good polygon city. I used Opendata DC to get my points. I removed some tiny triangles and it's possible I missed a few circles and squares. There are many rectangular parks that I didn't include because they don't have "square" in their name. I almost forgot about the Ellipse! 

This was a mixed media project. I made and printed a map using QGIS annotated it with pencils and put a little watercolor into the rivers.

Day 4 - Theme: Hexagons

Hexagons are a popular way to represent grids these days. Studies show that certain patterns are easier to detect with a hexagon grid than a square grid. They are particularly popular with election maps but I was looking to do something a little more creative. Not many things in nature are hexagonal. Bee hives use that shape but that kind of map has been done by many others.  While looking for inspiration, I discovered that some of Annie's Snack Crackers are hex shaped, including their saltines and cheddar crackers. I decided to use them as my hexagons.

    So where is a place that has both salt and cheese production? I settled on upstate New York, knowing where some of these places are located. The salt areas are mostly based on an old map I found showing salt deposits, mostly in the southwest. I also know of a couple of salt facilities from my travels so I put those in. I used the term "more likely" to cover the uncertainties but some of those hexagons in the southwest should probably be cheese. The cheese areas were determined by a combination of dairy farm maps and places I know that make cheese.

Day 5 - Theme: Data Challenge 1: OpenStreetMap

For the uninitiated, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is like Wikipedia meets Google Maps. Content is all user generated and it is freely available to use. Despite having contributed to OSM in the past, I don't have a lot of experience using the data so this was definitely a learning exercise. I knew that you can get things like businesses out of it so I tried a query on business names. For some reason, the first word that came to me was "monkey" so I grabbed all businesses with monkey in the name. After seeing an empty South America, I decided to add Spanish and then to make it a bit more objective I grabbed the other three of the world's top languages. In the process this became as much of a linguistic map as anything. 

There are many translation issues here. French and Spanish have different masculine and feminine words and the Spanish words (mona, mono) are contained within many other words and names. My Hindi translation must have been especially off since all my results came from outside of India. Anyway I did what I could here.

Day 6 - Theme: Red

Getting personal here. This is a map of the town where I was born. I was nervously waiting my turn to perform some music on Zoom and parlayed that energy into drawing. Like #1 I tried this completely freehand, while looking at Apple Maps. I've only been through Red Bank as an adult on a train so I don't know the place at all. Someday I hope to visit. The river west of downtown is very wrong and there are other mistakes. Also the map monster and train station were poorly done.

Day 7 - Theme: Green 

Staying in the realm of the personal, Rittenhouse Square is around the corner from my grandmother's former building. As a child I enjoyed playing here, especially with the goat statue. I also lived in the area briefly as an adult. I'd been thinking about how the same places look in different map services so I made an animation of the square using Apple, Google, Bing, Mapbox, Carto, Esri, Stamen, Mapquest, OSM and the philly.gov web site.

Day 8 - Theme: Blue

I started out trying to get a list of blueberry names using the Day 5 OSM theme but the results were not great. Next, I tried using the Google Maps API but also had issues with that. Finally, I found an embedded Google Map from travel-mi.com. I wasn't planning on a Michigan focus but because the data set was there I went with it. I already had a blueberry symbol from my What They Drop on New Years Eve map so I was good to go!

Day 9 - Theme: Monochrome

I thought one of those solar potential maps would look good in monochrome but I'm not sure it works. I also thought that light should be more sun but usually darker means more so this ends up being a bit counterintuitive. I also was not really able to get the subtle gradations of grays with a watercolor pencil. I probably should have tried charcoal instead. I don't trust my drawing abilities to do a complicated outline like this freehand. I traced it right off the computer screen. The rest was done freehand, making it "charmingly inaccurate". 
 

Day 10 - Theme: Raster

I made a very low resolution version of a satellite image of Australia. Then I made a fuzzy version. I couldn't decide which I liked better so I made an animation: blocky vs fuzzy

Though this challenge has taken up way too much of my time and thinking process, it has also been a creative inspiration and a great learning experience so far. I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming challenges with a touch of dread but also excited to take them on.

Schematic Newton

I have worked in the City of Newton, Massachusetts for almost two decades creating maps of the City. As part thought exercise and part learning project for using Inkscape, I decided to try a very schematic map.

Newton's geography is very complicated. There is no downtown, rather 13 (or 14 depending on who's counting) villages, each with some central downtown or at least crossroads. The city outline was extremely simplified. The diamond shape I went with made it hard to fit in some major roadways in the far eastern (Hammond, Hammond Pond) and western (Grove and Lexington) parts of the city.  
The EST. and INC. are from the signs at the borders.

This evolved quite a bit after finding some mistakes (this was all done from memory) and some comments from city residents and even elected officials. I like simplicity of this early version, though there is a major mistake in not showing that Commonwealth Avenue crosses Interstate 90 in the western part of the city. Still there's always a level of accuracy that gets lost in the name of simplicity.

What I Did for a Living

When I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas in 1992, I was offered a job producing a map for disabled students. I recently discovered that this map is still actively used on KU's website.

I remember spending 13 hours uncompressing the original CAD drawing from Facilities Management to a useable format. Back then there were no status bars to tell you how long it would be or if it was even working. Just 13 hours of waiting and hoping something was actually happening. I converted the file to an eps format and brought it into Free Hand - a product that appears to be going out of use.

The map uses blue (I think they've darkened it a bit) to indicate the accessible buildings because it's the color of the handicapped signs as well as the color of the Kansas Jayhawk's uniforms. It's not the best color for sending a clear message but it basically works. The blue arrows point to the accessible entrances. My (misspelled) name appears in the credits at the bottom of the page.*

*Update (December, 2013) - They changed the web page. I no longer see my misspelled name but I'm surprised that they're still using it rather than some googly thing.

What I do for a Living-Part 1

Things are really busy for me this week. We have a big infrastructure evaluation project that I need to map and analyze every which way. Since I don't really have the time for an interesting, well researched post, here are some storm drainage pipes somewhere in Massachusetts. This is what I do in my non-spare time.

What is Map of the Week?

Today is the fifth anniversary of Map of the Week! Sort of. Actually it's more complicated than that as most things are. An exact anniversary date is tough to pin down so today is as good as any. Here's the boring history lesson:

Map of the Week started in or around 1993 when I shared a house in Lawrence, Kansas with fellow graduate student, frequent commenter and Renaissance blogger Michael5000. We started putting maps of the week on the kitchen wall (or maybe fridge I can't remember everything from those crazy college days.)  They were not exotic or special - just maps that we felt like posting and the practice didn't stick for very long because we had homework and life to attend to.

When I accepted a job in Seattle, a place I'd never been, I drew this mental map based on my limited knowledge and probably posted it as a final map of the week. The map suffers from the classic "figure ground" problem-the water looks like land and vice versa. The original is on yellow paper, printed on the back of a lost dog notice.

On occasion I would send Mr. 5000 maps in the US mail that I found to be noteworthy. Here is a map from a charity newsletter of a project they did in Moncton, New Brunswick. I clipped out the charity's name to spare them the embarrassment as they do some very good work.

The map is pretty tough to read from my poor copy but basically they didn't know where Moncton or New Brunswick were so they just plopped it right in the middle of the country. That's OK - Canada's a small place!

Years later (around 2004 or so) I decided to revive Map of the Week as a weekly e-mail with a map attached. Five years ago today I started keeping track of what map I posted on what date with an eye towards a possible blog. I finally created the blog in 2007 and began by back posting all my entries beginning October 5th, 2005. As of today the blog has reached over 150 countries!

Map of the Week will try to continue to bring a quality blog product every week, with the occasional extra map of the weekend or other special event. Map of the Week will not advertise your book, or map products but if something looks interesting, I may post it without the sales pitch. Thanks to all my readers for years of support!

The Daily Masshole Obstacle Course

I frequently complain about my commute. Yes it's "only" 8 miles but 8 miles of stress. It is much more stressful than my job and probably the main thing that leaves me drained at night. In addition to the usual problems of heavy traffic, construction, bad roads and "Masshole" drivers, the route itself is a crazy serpentine pattern-there is no straight line to get me there.
Below is a map of my route through eastern Massachusetts. I've generalized it a bit and left off place names to make it less obvious where I live and work. Green text indicates southbound issues, purple northbound and black means the problem is in both directions.

The 8 mile route takes me 25 minutes with no traffic, 35-40 minutes typically and can be up to an hour in bad traffic situations. I can ride my bicycle there in 40-45 minutes when I don't get whacked. Public transit is a 3 bus system and takes an hour and 20 minutes. Walking? I haven't tried that one yet.

MOTW #68

This past weekend I did lots of traveling in circles around the Northeast using all kinds of transportation modes. During one of the long rides I decided to see what it would look like to map out my travels so here's what I came up with. Well, it's sort of vaguely interesting anyway. Note that the walking distances are slightly exaggerated (but not by much) - otherwise they'd be invisible at this scale.