Maps

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.

There is a great website that collects all the maps created by theme and creator:

https://david.frigge.nz/30DayMapChallenge/index.html

I have posted all of my maps here.

With a select few favorites:

Day 1 – Points – Ireland’s population mapped as one point per person. 6,572,675 points in total:

Day 2 – Lines – 1 week of flying for Ryanair EI-DYP Boeing 737-800:

Day 5 – Raster – Total rainfall in Ireland in 2018 from Met Eireann data:

Day 10 – Black and White – Register of renewed liquor licences: Publican’s Houses Dublin:

Day 19 – Urban – Perhaps Dublin’s most confused street:

All in all I whole heartedly recommend taking part when November rolls around again.

Ireland has a great single transferable election system. It means that every vote is meaningful even for smaller parties and candidates. It also means mapping the results is difficult. As each constituency has more than one seat, ranging from three to five.

One way to map the results is to have the constituencies split up. Either geographically, so split into parts based on how many seats it has. Or into equal sized pieces, like hexes.

Since I had not seen an election hex map for Ireland yet. I thought I would attempt to make one for the February 2020 General Election.