#learninggis

TileMill – super awesome tile styling tool. Also helps to create interactive map. 

CartoTalk – a great source of resources about cartography

Tutuorials from CartoDB

What a difference the data makes!

Tonight I'm playing around with map things. First, I discovered that within a shape file there is really and truly data! The top image is produced in QGIS, simply by opening this data file and then turning on the Stamen watercolor layer. No alignment needed! (But here is the necessary attribution to Watercolor: Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA.)

Just the other day, Stamen released a project called Map Stack, which allows you to make similar images in seconds. I wondered if it would be faster simply to make the image on Map Stack. While indeed, it was much faster, the difference was in the data. As you can see, the data set from data.sfgov.org is far more complete that the one being used in Map Stack, which I believe is from OSM.

Last Thursday, a few of us gathered at the Stamen office to free form learn mapmaking. For about 2 hours, we sat together listening to music and working on mapmaking projects. Most of the people in the group are just learning how to make maps (Camille, Kristina, me). Mike and Chris know more and helped us a lot, which was great, especially considering that the very first steps of getting a map editor up and running can be a little cumbersome. Without Chris, I may still be hunting for links.

Here are the steps Chris shared with me, which will help get you up and running (if you have Mac). 

Get started with mapping!

Go to KyngChaos, and download and install GSL, GDAL, and QGIS.

Grab some Open Street Map data. If you want to download a whole city, check out Metro Extracts and bbbike.org. This will take a little bit of time. Good moment to grab a snack or answer that email (you know the one).

I ended up getting impatient and so I ended up at Natural Earth, where I downloaded the Natural Earth Quick Start Kit. 

Open Natural_Earth_quick_start_for_QGIS.qgs

Start playing with layers!

More notes and learnings

Kristina alerted me of the QGIS Open Layers plugin, which allows you to use styles from maps.stamen.com. 

KML files can be saved as KMZ files, which QGIS can read. Merge Shapes is a plugin that allows multiple KMZ files. Merged shapes end up as s vector.

DEM = digital elevation model

How to import data from a CSV into QGIS (which I haven't done successfully yet)

SRTM = NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission = source of elevation data of the whole word, in a slightly lower resolution.

Some quotes from the evening

"cartography is all about generalization"