To mark a new school year, Andy and Mike revisited the Web Maps 101 presentation from all the way back at our very first meetup, with a few updates. Andy covered some basic concepts of web maps, and Mike provided some tips and tools for finding geographic data and making maps.
For our September Maptime, Kent Johnson gave us an introduction to mapping with R, from working with geospatial data to creating a simple Leaflet map. The data, project, and presentation materials are on Kent’s GitHub account.
For our July Maptime, Carolyn Fish (@cartofish) led a session on hand-drawn maps. She showed us some examples of different types of beautiful hand drawn maps old and new, and then we all drew our own maps. At the end we all shared our maps and stories with the group. There were some maps of important places to people, of daily commutes, of fictional places, and many other things. There were many amazing maps!
Here are Carolyn’s slides:
Below are some of the maps people drew. Keep ‘em coming!
Hand drawn map of my reality Oct 2014-Now #maptime. Thanks @cartofish and @maptimeBoston pic.twitter.com/5dAosv9H6a
— Lilit's Gone Mappy (@LilitLeet) July 16, 2015Pizza plate oblique projection, EPSG:276597. Thanks @maptimeBoston for a great evening! pic.twitter.com/YHwnogzuTE
— Bill Morris (@vtcraghead) July 16, 2015Saw a ton of creative hand drawn maps tonight. This a route map of my 10 year old self watching tv @maptimeBoston pic.twitter.com/dClu0mF2Fm
— Peter Damrosch (@PeterDamrosch) July 16, 2015Doodled a conceptual map of the meetup (complete with pizza) at my first @maptimeBoston 🍕📐 pic.twitter.com/lR4j8BnbsT
— Emily Garfield (@EmilyGarfield) July 16, 2015Nothing special, but here's what I drew for @maptimeBoston. pic.twitter.com/5jxXEkrLA7
— Andy Woodruff (@awoodruff) July 16, 2015My commute. Mapped. #maptime pic.twitter.com/gsA5WDlLmE
— Mike Foster (@mjfoster83) July 16, 2015This one was left behind last night. That "road to the freeway," potholes and all. Can someone remember who drew it? pic.twitter.com/2YEW1rsKHG
— Maptime Boston (@maptimeBoston) July 16, 2015See you next month, mappers!
Just look at all these mappers! pic.twitter.com/ZTmqXlEDY3
— Maptime Boston (@maptimeBoston) July 16, 2015It’s #maptimeBoston’s first birthday so let’s do a show-and-tell night! Bring your projects at whatever stage (finished, in-progress, unformed idea) to share with the group and get friendly, supportive feedback.
Whether for fun or for work, your first map or your 1000th, we’d love to see what you’ve been up to! As always, beginners are very welcome and especially encouraged to show anything they’ve learned at Maptime.
If you just want to come to see what others are doing or you’re looking for inspiration, show up!
Anyone planning to show something will have about 5 minutes or less.
For our May Maptime, we worked with Mapbox Studio, a powerful tool for designing global basemaps driven by vector tiles. Mapbox Studio allows you to style maps using a world of OpenStreetMap data provided, or use your own data. We went through the basics of the software, the CartoCSS styling language, and how to share maps.
We followed Mapbox Guides for much of this:
“Getting started” guides
Getting Started with Mapbox Studio
Data sources
CartoCSS and styling