DEM Brain Hacks | Réveillez vos neurones MNA Presenter: John Nelson, Esri Digital Elevation Models are a wonderful and ghostly information layer that enables all sorts of relief representation. Often we take this handy resource and extract realistic and practical incarnations of terrain and texture. But the life of a cartographer is perhaps too short to stay dutifully within the bounds of practicality. What if we were to thoughtfully stray from rote, albeit beautiful, applications of DEMs? What if we coaxed them into slightly more absurd, but engaging, representations of light, depth, and texture? In this presentation we'll cover an array of odd, but fun, contortions of Digital Elevation Models that span from useful, to interesting, to ridiculous.
National Geographic Magazine's Cartography of Antarctica | La cartographie de l’Antarctique par le magazine National Geographic Presenter: Lauren Tierney, National Geographic Magazine For over 120 years National Geographic Magazine has mapped Antarctica, and continues to visually illustrate the complex processes that occur on this remote continent. This presentation will focus on National Geographic Magazine's most recent map of Antarctica, featured in the July 2017 issue. Specific topics will include the initial sketch and design steps for the map, the visualization of climate change data, and the reworking of the print piece for digital.
Adding Context to Colors in Categorical Mapping | Ajouter du contexte aux couleurs en cartographie catégorique Presenter: Cary Anderson, The Pennsylvania State University Tools for building categorical color schemes (e.g., ColorBrewer) account for many perceptual constraints, such as color discriminability and colorblindness. However, when deriving color schemes, these tools do not consider the underlying data context. This is likely consequential. For example, in a study using bar charts, Lin et al. (2013) demonstrate that when color assignments are semantically-resonant (e.g., red for tomatoes), users perform graph-reading tasks with greater speed. This effect is presumably applicable to other data visualizations-such as maps. We extend upon the work of Lin et al. (2013) in two ways: (1) We discuss its implications for Cartography, such as its effect on rapid identification of spatial patterns, and (2) We explore the emotional connotations of color (e.g., calming blue), and how these connotations interact with color-concept associations in map perception. We then conclude with suggestions for utilizing semantically-resonant colors in categorical mapping contexts.
Open-Source Flow Maps with Cubic Splines | Des cartes de flux libres avec des splines cubiques Presenter: Paulo Raposo, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Satisfying flow maps have been notoriously difficult to automatically draw, both because they have diverse graphic requirements and constraints, and because naive curve-drawing methods run into geometric conflicts. We present new, open-source software for drawing flow maps in which route is unimportant, but origin-destination pairs and magnitudes of flow are. We automatically define cubic splines between origin and destination points by creating a third, across-track point, laterally displaced such that the spline passing through the three points in travel sequence creates a symmetric curve. The user can modify parameters to affect the curve shape. Several methods of geometric conflict resolution are used to ensure the rendered output follows cartographic design principles; relative magnitudes of flows are taken into account with these. The talk will discuss the geometric manipulations involved in the method, as well polygonization of flow lines for alternative display.
