My classmates here at Redlands are big fans of the Fail! blogs. With a grading scale recently introduced to us in our cartography class we’ve been messing with the idea of a Fail! Scale.
Andrew asked if I could recommend some resources for GIS analysis and cartography. So, I went through my recent Amazon.com purchase list and put together a table. I could add all of the ESRI press books, but many of those are heavily ESRI button-centric. Instead, the books below are focused on theory and methodology. The ESRI books below are actually useful books about the science and mathematics behind GIS analysis.
I’d like to note that Elements of Cartography, may be a little dated since it was last updated in 1996. It’s a good read and one of those books that ties you to the art of Cartography.
There are some cultural geography books in the list too. Everything we do involves people and I’ve been working on some stuff involving mapping cultures. If you’re interested in activism or NGO mapping, these books can be helpful rounding your geographic education.
Why Geography Matters is on the list. Harm de Blij has written many human and cultural geography textbooks in America and this book, I feel is a good read about why having an understanding of geography matters. He focuses on climate change, the rise of China, and the effects of terrorism. You’ll feel that you have chosen the right line of work.
Finally, there are hundreds of books on spatial databases, GIS for the Web, and all sorts of different avenues that geography and GIS cover. As much as I’m trying, I can’t seem to read or buy them all. I would love to, but I like my work-life configuration right now. These are a few titles to get you started. I hope others make recommendations of their own favorite materials as well.
Here at the ESRI Polytechnic Engineering School for the Blind, we have a weekly colloquium where we (the students) and the ESRI staff meet to hear interesting presentations every Wednesday. Today’s colloquium was a presentation from another resident of The Gulag, Dr. John Kimerling of Oregon State fame, presented Dotting the Dot Map. Beware: there’s a dose of math with funny symbols in this one.
Dot maps show the geographic distribution of features in an area by placing dots representing a certain quantity of features where the features are most likely to occur. The fundamental steps in dot mapping are to select the dot size, determine the dot unit value, and place the correct number of dots in a random manner that correctly reflects the geographic distribution of features.
Selecting the dot size is a subjective decision, but the dot unit value has long been determined with the aid of the Mackay nomograph. Close examination of the nomograph finds it not appropriate for determining the dot unit value when dot placement is based on computer-generated random numbers that result in overlapping dots. A new graphical aid for dot unit value determination was created by modeling aggregate area of dots and amount of dot overlap using a truncated form of the unification equation from probability theory. Aggregate dot areas predicted by this equation were tested against actual random dots created for several common dot sizes, and high agreement was found between measured and predicted aggregate area. The new ESRI Dot Value Estimator was created by Aileen Buckley based on these results.
Pseudo-random dot placement with a maximum overlap constraint for dot pairs appears to better mimic how cartographers have traditionally placed dots. Pseudo-random dot placement can be thought of as similar to rigid random placement of circles in a square with maximum circle overlap limits from 0% (mutually exclusive dots) to 100% (totally random dots). Thinking of dot placement in this manner allowed a general equation for aggregate dot area to be devised as a linear combination of the mutually exclusive and totally random dot endpoint equations. Aggregate areas predicted by this general equation were found to closely match actual assemblages of pseudo-random dots with differing maximum dot pair overlaps.
The second part of this research focused on improving the guidance given for the placement of dots when mapping human population from U.S. Census data. MS GIS students [...] created a series of maps for San Bernardino county that illustrate the improvements in dot placement that result from using progressively smaller Census data collection units, and then using land use information to exclude areas unlikely to contain people. The final refinement was using road buffers as inclusion areas in rural areas.
I point this one out because it is rarely in the geoblogosphere we get techniques in cartography, especially with ESRI GIS technology. Fortunately, there’s the ESRI Mapping Center for those with the ESRI crutch. They even have a blog! I would reference the site quite often for the power GIS user who makes maps as it is chalk full of goodies (scripts) and tricks to get the most—cartographically—out of ArcGIS. As for the mega-cartographer, I would reference information aesthetics, John Krygier’s Making Maps: DIY Cartography, Tom Patterson’s Shaded Relief, and even Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T for more tips and techniques for cartographic and information visualization.
On the same note, and I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems as if there is little “art” in our science these days in the GIS and map services world. It could be just me? I’m writing more design and project documentation these days.
