Digital Cartography 101

An introduction to the art and science of modern cartography

Duration: 5 days

• 5 demo lectures
• 4 explorations
• 2 assignments

Courseware

• Cartography and Visualization - Penn State GEOG 486

Day 1: The Fundamentals

• Psychogeography
  • Exploration 1 Create a dérive
• Geography
  • History of Cartography
    
  • Great Trigonometric Survey of India and the Bangalore connection
    
• Mapping
  
  • Geoid
  • Coordinates: latitude and longitude
  • Positioning: trigonometry, remote sensing, GPS
  • Scale: 1:250,000 small scale (world map), 1:10,000 large scale (street map)
  • Projection: cylindrical, conic, azimuthal
    
  • Video There is no correct projection
• Types of maps
  • Pictoral
  • Thematic
  • Topographic and Terrain
  • Chloropleth
  • Cartogram
  • Topological
• Map symbology
  • Ordanace Survey symbol sheets
  • Data abstraction
• Exploration 2 Create a map of the Bengaluru Airport Bus Network. Focus: utility, data density, clarity

Reading

• Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

Day 2: Map design

• Data primitives: [points](), lines, areas
• Cartographic elements
  • frame
  • metadata
  • layering
  • pixels
  • symbols
  • lines
  • fills
  • text
• Cartographic styling
  • Raster
  • Color mapping
  • Composting
  • DEM
  • Vector
  • Data series
• Exporting maps
• Create a series of maps for your state(A)
  • A political map
  • A physical map
  • A chloropleth map
• Assignment 1

Reading

• A Rare Interview With Graphic Design Legend Massimo Vignelli

Day 3: Working with Map Data

• GIS Fundamentals
  • Coordinate system: WGS 84 Mercator projection and Web Mercator projection
    
  • Data Formats: [GeoJSON](), [Shapefile]()
• Existing data sources
  • Natural Earth
  • Bhuvan
  • OSM
  • NASA
  • Map scans
• Working with OSM
  • Creating data
  • Extracting data
• Converting
  • Formats
  • Projection
  • Geometry
• Combining
  • Joining
  • Geoprocessing
• Spatial analysis
• Exploration 3

Day 4: Publishing a web map

• HTML, CSS and JS

  • Display your map using Mapbox GL JS and test locally using the Python SimpleHTTPServer
  • Host your map using GitHub Pages
  • Style your page using Mapbox base.css
  • Add the Mapbox geocoder and url hash
  • Explore the Mapbox GL JS API using the browser console

• Interactive coding

  • API
  • Jquery
  • Callbacks
  • [AJAX]()
  • JSON

• A simple map

  • Creating a map view
  • Adding map layers
  • Adding data layers
  • Customizing map controls

• Using Github pages

• Assignment 2: Create an interactive tourist map of your favourite place

Day 5: Data driven maps

• Turf.js
• Tippecanoe
• Mapbox API
• Exploration 4

Software

• QGIS
• [Mapbox Studio]()
• [Mapbox.js]()