30 Day Map Challenge – GISforThought

This November I once again took part in the 30 Day Map Challenge started by Topi Tjukanov.

I had done it the first year (30 Day Map Challenge 2019), and had made a few maps for 2020 as well.

This year I wasn’t really sure I would take part, as I had no plans and nothing prepared. But it is a great challenge. It challenges your creativity, problem solving, and map making skills. It also sets a time limit so you don’t have to worry about being perfect. And making maps is good fun.

There were a few datasets that I had come across that I thought would be good subjects, and I got a lot of mileage out of them.

Dublin neighbourhoods

These included the Dublin Inquirer neighbourhood survey.

Will You Draw Your Dublin Neighbourhood for Us?

neighbourhoods.dublininquirer.com

I think this is a great initiative, and hopefully they get a real large set of responses. They are at over 2000 already so a great start.

I did something similar for Glasgow (here) but only got 367 responses in total. So the power of having a well read paper behind the initiative is great. They are also reaching out to areas that have not had many responses, which is really great work.

OpenStreetMap

I also wanted to do some maps around OpenStreetMap in Ireland. The community here has had a large push to map all of the buildings in Ireland, which has progressed well.

But it is very much a work in progress.

OSM Ireland Buildings poster from State Of The Map 2021

Selected Maps

Hexagons:

First of the Dublin boundaries series.

Final interactive version: Here

OpenStreetMap:

For OSM day I wanted to try and make the data a bit easier to use for #QGIS novices.

I created styles that can be applied to the GEOFABRIK Shapefile extracts, from here.

The styles are available: https://github.com/HeikkiVesanto/QGIS_OSM_Styles

Red:

Mac vs Mc.

Supermac’s is an Irish fast food restaurant chain, who have had a few trademark disputes over the years with McDonald’s over the use of Mc and Mac in burger names.

3D:

This turned out a lot better than I expected.

Was pure QGIS. Create grid (5km x 5km), zonal statistics on CORINE (Majority) and DEM (Median). New field for height rounded up to the nearest 40:

to_int(ceil((“_h_median” / 40))) * 40

Set colors. Create centroids with same colors. These become the Lego nubs.

Rendered in QGIS2threejs plugin. The grid is extruded, with a height of height * 50. The centroids are cylinder rendered height * 50 + 30 * 50, so they come a bit higher, radius of 1800.

The “rayshader” export makes it look realistic.

Interactive: https://maps.gisforthought.com/LegoIreland/

Might be better to not use landuse, but elevation for the colours.

No Computer:

Nice to get away from the computer. Definitely promotes some creativity. But I just took it as an opportunity to walk on the beach.

Land:

My favourite of my maps.

Land use vineyard across Europe from CORINE 2020, with the major regions labelled.

GHSL:

Seasonal population of the Balearic Islands.

Data clipping in QGIS/GDAL, rendered in Aerialod, with labels with GIMP afterwards.

This was my second favourite of my maps. I think the topic is interesting and the execution is pretty good. Was however quite manual and probably needed more exaggeration to see the differences.

Historical:

A time lapse of 1,831,044 buildings in Ireland being added to OpenStreetMap.

If you want to get involved see: OpenStreetMap Ireland Buildings

Globe:

Simple spinning globe in QGIS, but I was happy that I was able to automate the export: Gist

All maps:

See here

Last November I took part in the 30 Day Map Challenge. An excellent project suggested by Topi Tjukanov on twitter:

I perhaps had a bit of an advantage. I had already completed a very similar challenge in 2014. Mapvember.

Where I made a post on this blog every day for all of November, primarily maps.

And a summary:
https://gisforthought.com/mapvember/

There are a lot of advantages to this style of map creation and a few down sides.

Advantages

It puts a time limit on the maps. This forces you to put them out there no matter the status. It is easy to leave maps half finished because they are not perfect. I know the internet can be a harsh critic sometimes, but you are making a map a day, it won’t be perfect.
You can revisit some older maps that have been discarded in the past. Perhaps they didn’t look so good, weren’t so interesting. That doesn’t matter, you are posting a map a day they don’t have to be perfect.
There are a lot of ideas out there. I use a Google keep note to store map ideas I have. The list keeps on getting longer and without some pushing it never gets shorter.
Collaboration. There were some great maps made, and every day you could enjoy them as well, feeling part of the community. Sharing ideas and techniques.
Increase your talents. The only way you are going to get better at mapping is by making some maps. No better way to do it than pushing yourself.
Work with new data. 30 maps is a lot of maps. You can explore new datasets and new software.
Grow your following. As the challenge is on Twitter it is a good way to build your following. I got 139 new followers over the month. Now for some people that isn’t much. But I only have 600 in general so it’s a sizeable amount. Although I’m not sure there is that much value to followers. But 197k impressions is good? 1 follower per 1000 who saw a map.

Disadvantages

30 maps is a lot of maps to make. A day is a short time to make one. My tactic, based on my previous experience, was to make a few upfront and ready to go. So by the time November started I had a few maps ready, so I could be ahead of the curve.

I used tweetdeck to schedule the tweets. I didn’t map on the weekend for the most part. I had other commitments, so scheduling and making some easy maps was crucial to completing the challenge.

There are no real rules to the challenge, interpret it how you wish. Do a map a day, or a map a week, but the important part is enjoying it.