Location is Personal: Issue 9, September 2019 – September 27, 2019 at 07:02PM

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Back to School

Location is Personal is a monthly newsletter by Mapbox, from the desks of Lo Bénichou and Amy Lee Walton. Want to get this newsletter in your inbox each month? Sign up here.

The Shape of the Earth — mapschool.io

Whether it’s the excellent utility or thematic visuals, maps have a way of drawing us in. Once you start looking closely, you can dive deep into projections, datums, and vector layers stacked like pancakes. A popular saying at Mapbox is, “maps are hard”. We’re constantly learning and teaching more about map-making!

This month, to honor the start of education season, we’re sharing our favorite geography lessons, the ones that gave us new perspectives on mapping and the world around us, and featuring the new education efforts from our team by way of Mapbox Education Lead, Megan Danielson.

The first spark

It’s been about 9 years (eek!) since I took my first GIS class. That first class was a spark for me — a small, fragile spark perhaps because I was using Arc 9-point-something, but a spark none-the-less — because it was from that first class that I fell in love with GIS, and that thrust me into geo-education as a profession. I’ve since been all around the world learning and teaching GIS concepts and I’ve had the privilege of meeting a spectrum of map nerds.

Whenever I meet a fellow map-lover, I can’t help but ask them about their own geo-education. How did they get hooked on maps? What’s your elevator pitch for describing what you do (it’s always harder than we think)? And lastly, what does your dream mapping class look like?

Mapbox supports the creation of our dream geo-education by providing learners with access to tutorials, documentation, ‘how-to’ videos, internship programs, and workshops. In addition, we’re hosting events and courses for geo communities such as Maptime and BayGeo, and offering support to university classrooms. Want to start a mapping program in your classroom? Reach out via our education page.

— Megan Danielson

Explaining Web Mercator With Orange Peels by Chris Whong

My first spark came when I began to see parallels between modern cartography and graphic design processes in a WIRED article in 2014 titled “The Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design.” The design process is about managing visual consistency at scale in addition to the visualization of information. “It’s all about matching perceptual dimensions with data dimensions,” said Cindy Brewer, Pennsylvania State University’s Head of Geography.

Brewer’s work systematized design processes with tools like the Color Brewer and ScaleMaster to help prevent cartographic blunders in color selection and help cartographers organize multiscale mapping decisions. Brewer’s work informed my approach to creating design systems in map design, a topic I discuss in detail in the Guide to Map Design. I also used this design systems approach in a graphic design course I taught in 2017.

So fellow map-lover, what are your favorite map lessons in thread form or otherwise, and what resources do you want to see made available? Raise your hand or just shout them out with #locationispersonal on Twitter.

— Amy Lee Walton

What we’re learning 📚

• How to map a slow-motion disaster
• The power of spatial joins
• How the fundamentals of how Mapbox GL works
• A look at the scale of things
• That mythical creatures walked the earth
• New York City almost looked completely different
• The beauty of procedurally generated maps
• Looking for a recent geo dataset, look here

Who we’re following

• Cindy Brewer, Professor and Head of Penn State Department of Geography
• Renee Wah, Student at The University of Chicago
• Ruth Miller, Transit at Lyft
• Renée Rigdon, Cartographer at The Wall Street Journal
• Blacki Migliozzi, Graphics Editor at The New York Times
• Daniel P. Huffman, Cartographer

Developer Spotlight

Dan Swick is a frontend engineer and documentarian at Mapbox. He’s been interested in how maps and education work together since he started running Maptime meetups in his hometown of Chicago. Since then, he’s been grateful to help mappers realize their mappy visions in other ways, whether that means working directly with Mapbox’s excellent customers, writing documentation for the Mapbox website, or teaching web mapping workshops through BayGeo’s GIS Education Center.

Events

Education & Courses:

• Javascript Web Maps | Mapbox SF | September 9, 18, 25 & October 2
• Intermediate Python | Mapbox SF | September 23, 30 & October 7
• PostGIS: A Beginners Guide to Spatial Databases | Mapbox SF | November 4, 11, 18
• RoboSat Workshop | Stanford University | November 14
• Intro to Mapbox | University of California San Diego | November 22

University Visits & Hackathons:

• Intro to Mapbox | George Washington University | September 11
• Intro to Mapbox | UC Berkeley | October 4
• Hacakthon | University of Iowa | October 12–13
• GIS Day/Open House | University of Oregon DREAM Lab | November 13
• GIS Day | George Mason University | November 13
• Intro to Mapbox Vision SDK | University of San Francisco | December 5

Conferences & Workshops & Talks:

• Return of the Map | DC Design Week | September 25, 2019
• NACIS Conference | Tacoma, Washington | October 16–19
• GIS Day Happy Hour & Maptime | Mapbox SF | November 12
• GIS Day Happy Hour | Mapbox DC | November 13

Jobs

• Senior Product Manager, Atlas — Washington, DC
• Backend Engineer, Maps — Washington, DC
• Engineering Manager, Logistics — San Francisco, CA
• Senior Data Engineer, Search — San Francisco, CA or Washington, DC

• Lo B. – Interactive Developer and Brand Advocate – Mapbox | LinkedIn
• Amy Lee Walton – Principal Designer – Mapbox | LinkedIn

Location is Personal: Issue 9, September 2019 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

John Jason Fallows

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