As Robert Smith once said, it's Friday and I'm in love...with all of our #DailyBrainCandiii posts! Experiencing too much excitement about your upcoming weekend plans? Need to look busy at work while you wait for that clock to strike 5? We have you covered with this cure.
Check out our round-up of articles and posts from this past week as well as the #MapOfTheDay that caught our eye and the eye of our inner kid.
Looking to get cartographic without actually opening ArcMap? This article introduces you to a few cools to accomplish this, showing you how to create a thematic map from the command-line using d3-geo, TopoJSON, and ndjson-cli.
If you're a hunter or even Bear Grylls, tracking an animal may mean sneaking quietly through the wilderness trying your best to look like the oddest tree the forest has ever seen. If you're a geographer though (or really, anyone other than Bear), this may look a bit more comfortable. This article talks about the uses of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and tracking devices to locate the paths specific animals take and where they tend to live or migrate.
When developing maps and apps, we place a great deal of importance on the hierarchy of the data we are representing or gathering. Do we always make sure to place this same level of expedience on the visual hierarchy as well? This article talks about this process, taking you through defining both for enhanced usability on the reader's end, and why this is such a big deal.
What this article lacks in joy, it makes up for in insights. Recently, a series of loan and mortgage maps created in the 1930s by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) were made available online to showcase the housing market during the Great Depression. Although these maps were initially designed to aide in determining investment risks, they inadvertently allow us a look into views of African Americans and minorities at the time. The collection is available through Mapping Inequality is an interesting look into how things created for a specific purpose may be used to help further study aspects for which they were not intended.
I will go ahead and warn you. Just like our society's wait for personal commuter planes like you grew up seeing in the Jetsons, this article is rather lengthy. However, if we can't get from Starbucks to work by flying, we are in an age where it is possible to do so with a car that at least drives itself. An interesting read, this post explores how cartography may need to be reinvented for a time when our navigation apps do not necessarily need to help us navigate. Some people believe the jobs you dream up as a child are not what you will do as an adult. Those people, of course, are haters and obviously jealous of my future career as a ballerina on the moon. The cartographers mentioned in this article also came to the same verdict, keeping up with their map-love long past the days of crayons.
More Fun on the Horizon
Did you catch our #MarcoMonday post? This week, we covered how (and why!) to categorize your data with the help of Integrated Marco Commander and Integrated Marco Mystic.
#DailyBrainCandiii and #WeekliiiRoundUp are inspired by brain candiii, a division of Integrated Informatics that develops Geographic Information System (GIS) training for Energy and Natural Resources professionals.