Mapped October 5th, written December 2019:
As I noted in my last Guerrilla Cartography Cartographer Spotlight (May 2019), my career has been a diverse mix of my two professional passions, cartography and participatory mapping. Cartography is about the place; it’s top-down, it’s authoritative, it’s scientific, and (as you shift from GIS to cartography) it’s artistic. Participatory mapping is about the people; it’s bottom-up, it’s representative, and it’s a form of intimate cartographic collaboration. The balance of these two decidedly distinct types of mapping is where I see myself fit as a guerrilla cartographer.
As a cartographer who works three jobs and finds it difficult to find the spare time to make maps just for fun, I was excited to help brainstorm what turned into the #CreativeCarto movement founded by the amazing Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel. #CreativeCarto is the response to “I NEVER HAVE TIME to try out/learn/create,” and is for all the projects you want to work on, but just can’t seem to make the time for. It’s been a really great initiative to help hold ourselves accountable with a set monthly time to work on a fun and exciting map. Once Guerrilla Cartography posted about the Atlas in a Day project, I knew it would be a perfect project for October 2019 for myself (and I even got a few other #CreativeCarto friends on board!).
As soon as the topic for the Atlas in a Day was announced as “Migration,” I started browsing through James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics and diving into the MoveBank dataset looking for data that struck my interests, as well as was available for download. I found the data by Ron Efrat, Ohad Hatzofe, and Ran Nathan from their research titled: “Landscape-dependent time versus energy optimisations in pelicans migrating through a large ecological barrier” particularly interesting as a bird nerd/conservationist (who had also lived in Egypt over a decade ago).
While the dataset was way too large to work with in its entirety (it crashed my software multiple times!), I pulled out four of the more interesting, individually tagged pelican migration routes to visualize on my map. I then worked with Natural Earth data for my basemap in Adobe Illustrator + Avenza MAPublisher to design my map. I was particularly inspired by Cheshire and Uberti’s use of connecting the colored lines/points on the map to little silhouettes of the animals in the form of a key. That’s probably my favorite part of my map, so shout out to my fellow cartographers for the great idea.
Pages from Where the Animals Go, featuring elephant (p. 37) and otter (p. 107) silhouettes as map keys
Unique to this mapping process for me was the short timeline from start to finish. I always appreciate being able to put down a map and come back and look at it with a fresh set of eyes, so it was difficult to finally hit send on the map, knowing that there had to be things I would still change if I could just notice them that second! I also would have loved the time to add more land cover data in the background of the map, such as I did after the map was published.
First draft of Great White Pelican migration map
Despite being too much of a perfectionist to want to do this on a regular basis, the Atlas in a Day project was a great collaborative exercise that I’m sincerely glad I participated in!
Special thanks to Movebank for making this incredible dataset (and many others) publicly available.
Mapped May 16th, written December 2020:
When I participated in the next Atlas in a Day, I tried to take it a little bit easier on myself and map someplace I knew really well, instead of a country (Egypt) where I’d just studied abroad a decade and a half ago! For this challenge, with the topic of “Community,” I decided to map my hometown, where I attended preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college (not to mention where I returned to get married!). I’ve mapped Middlebury, Vermont extensively over the years — as it was a common focus of our GIS class assignments in undergrad — but I hadn’t mapped it since I made my wedding invites.
2010 Middlebury Map for Undergrad Cartography Class
2017 Middlebury Map for Wedding
I spent the first part of the day going through the old data in my GIS Data folder and reviewing it carefully for changes to the town and campus over the past decade. Major changes that I had to digitize new data for included the roundabout in the center of town, a few small housing developments in town and dormitories on campus, and the new field house on campus. (I’m sure I’m not alone in half-believing/wishing my hometown to be “static” or “stuck-in-time” whenever I’m not home!)
I then worked with my normal cartographic workflow of Adobe Illustrator + Avenza MAPublisher to design the map, using color swatches pulled from the Middlebury College website. I made sure my map extent included (almost) all of the houses, schools, and local establishments (Ilsley Public Library, Town Hall Theater, etc.) where I spent the most time during the two decades this was my permanent address.
This map does not try to be anything in particular for the community, it’s just my way of sending a love letter back home!