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| September 11 · Issue #10 · View online |
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Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.
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You may have noticed that this issue has slipped slightly from the new bi-weekly schedule. It’s been a rather hectic few weeks with very little free time and unfortunately as a hobby-project the newsletter fell victim to that. On the plus side, it was my birthday over and weekend and I got to spend some of it visiting Bletchley Park for the first time (think code-breaking and Alan Turing), which I highly recommend. Still, I’m hoping this issue has been worth the wait — there are so many great things to feature that it’s been hard to cut them down. In other news, I’ll be at the British Cartographic Society Annual Conference at Ordnance Survey this week. I’m part of a panel discussing the difference between visualisation and cartography, though I’ll be around all day. Please introduce yourself if you see me, or send me an email or tweet if you plan to attend and want to say hi. So with that, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋
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MonoCarto 2019 Winners
The winners of Daniel P. Huffman’s MonoCarto competition have been announced (previously named the Monochrome Mapping Competition). The winning entries are all fantastic, with my particular favourite being the hand-drawn map of Ireland — so much attention to detail. I’d love to see the non-winning entries too as I’m sure they are a gold-mine of mapping inspiration. |
Spaghetti Junction — 1m LIDAR DSM
This visualisation of LIDAR data was put together by Owen Powell. The colour scheme is bold and beautiful and results in an artistic representation of the underlying data. It was created by passing the elevation data through Blender. |
Long shadows using 20 hill shade layers
I think it’s great when people take commonly-used mapping tools and bend them to do interesting and obscure things that you wouldn’t expect them to support. This shadow map by Jonni Walker is one such case, taking Mapbox GL JS and (ab)using it to create lovely long shadows. If you follow his feed you can see all sorts of other examples of this technique. |
See which nations are claiming parts of the melting Arctic
This map and accompanying article from National Geographic illustrates the complex situation in the Arctic. With so many countries bordering the region, the question of who owns what is not a simple one to answer.
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Have you made an interesting map recently? I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh
MARTINI is a new library from the prolific Vladimir Agafonkin, providing a method for generating RTIN meshes from terrain data. And of course — being an Agafonkin library — it has a focus on performance, to the point where it can be used to generate 3D terrain in real-time in a Web browser. The linked Observable notebook provides detailed insight into the library and how it works. The interactive examples are a perfect way to demonstrate the theory.
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Ordnance Survey maps and styles now on MapTiler Cloud
If you’ve wanted a way to consume and use the new Ordnance Survey Zoomstack dataset then you’ll be glad to hear that MapTiler have made available both the underlying data as well as the styles though their MapTiler Cloud product. They also provide a free tier for non-commercial use that seems quite generous.
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Mapbox GL JS v1.3.0
The latest release of Mapbox GL JS brings with it a slew of updates, including a number of performance improvements. Of particular interest is the increase in performance of panning and zooming through more aggressive cancellation of superfluous tile requests.
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How a 16th century scientist drew a map of the world that we still use today
This beautiful article by TASS is a love letter to Geradus Mercator and the fascinating history behind his famous work. It’s a long read, sprinkled with well-designed illustrations and interactive elements — definitely set aside some time to read and give it the attention it deserves. Fantastic! |
Colouring LIDAR in Mapbox GL JS
Mapbox GL JS has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years, especially when coupled with the enhanced 3D layers provided by Deck.gl and others. This tutorial by Allan Walker shows you how to make your own coloured 3D point cloud visualisation from free public data. |
NYT-style urban heat island maps
I’ve always admired the maps created by news organisations such as The New York Times — there’s something about the balance between telling a story and keeping things simple yet beautiful. This tutorial by Katie Jolly details how to create maps in a similar style using R and existing public data. Very cool! |
How PostgreSQL 12 can improve your performance
There’s not long left to wait for the release of PostgreSQL 12 and — if my own experience is anything to go by — it brings with it a huge amount of new features and general improvements, particularly around performance. The great news is that a lot of the improvements come by default and won’t require you to change anything aside from upgrading your database.
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Updated NZ Building Outlines data with 128,715 more outlines
The LINZ Data Service have released an updated dataset containing 2D building outlines from across New Zealand. The new dataset includes nearly 130,000 more buildings than before. I’m constantly impressed with both the quality and quantity of what the LINZ team are getting up to. |
New version of the ASTER GDEM (v3)
If you haven’t used ASTER GDEM data yourself then you’ve probably seen a map that used it in some way. NASA have recently released a new version of this global elevation dataset that contains less voids as well as less errors over water bodies.
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Videos from FOSS4G 2019
I wasn’t able to make FOSS4G in Bucharest this year, which was gutting as it looks like I missed a fantastic event from what I could see online. Fortunately the whole event was recorded so everyone like me can catch up on what they missed. Such a quick turnaround too!
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Presentation slides from FOSS4G
Coupled with the FOSS4G videos is this collection of slides from various talks, curated by programmerpunk. A perfect companion to the recordings. |
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Geoawesomeness jobs portal
While I like featuring some of the more interesting jobs that I come across, it’s worth mentioning that there are a huge number of others around right now. What’s great is that Geoawesomeness have done a lot of the hard work for you — there are roles from all sorts of companies and skillsets, definitely worth a look.
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Cartographer — Apple
Apple are looking for a cartographer to join them and work on their map product. You’d be taking complex spatial data and turning it into information that can be used to solve everyday problems. Not a role you come across very often!
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Director of Technology — Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are looking for someone to fill the role of Director of Technology. You’d be guiding their thinking around open-source tooling and workflows, advancing the overall technology strategy for the organisation.
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Daniel O’Donohue (@MapScaping)
The MapScaping Podcast has quickly become one of my favourite podcasts. Daniel has been great at getting interesting and varied people from the spatial community to come on and share their experiences. It also helps that Daniel is a natural host and gives the guests plenty of space to tell their stories. But Daniel doesn’t only host a great podcast, he also has a store where he sells a variety of lovely spatial prints created from elevation data. |
Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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Call for help mapping roads and buildings in the Bahamas
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are looking for help mapping the roads and buildings in the Bahamas to aid in the response to Hurricane Dorian. There’s also a list of many other tasks from around the world that you can help with.
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FOSS4G Europe call for venues for 2020
Do you know of a venue that might be suitable for FOSS4G? If so, they’re currently looking for one for next year’s event. The deadline for submissions has been extended until the end of September.
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Interview with Craig Taylor on The MapScaping Podcast
I highly recommend listening to this interview with Craig Taylor on The MapScaping Podcast. I found it really interesting getting insight into his experience and his approach to creating compelling and stunning spatial visualisations. He’s also one of the winners of the MonoCarto competition!
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So what do you think about this issue? What did you like? What didn’t you like? What did I miss that I should cover in the next issue? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going. Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter, where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one. 👋
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