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Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. >> TomI'm Tom Zinnen. be in I work here at the UW Madison.
Biotechnology Center and I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension.
Wisconsin Alumni Association and On behalf of our partners, the
Wisconsin Public Television, thanks for coming again to
We do this every Wednesday Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Tanya
Buckingham who's the assistant
director of the UW Madison Cartography Lab which is housed in the geography department,
which is housed in Science Hall,
which is one of the great buildings on campus, strategically located within
walking distance of the Terrace.
Before leading the team of students at the Cartography Lab,
company here in Madison called Tanya worked at a private
maps for people of all ages and XNR Preaches of the globe.spent Her professional work extends to talented cartographers creating
societies. her cartographic professional
Cartographic Information For example, she is currently the president and executive director of the North American
fall. There's an old saying that one will be bringing its annual conference to Madison in the
ten thousand great words, and one bad map is worth picture is worth a thousand words, one good map is worth
about a million curse words. [LAUGHTER]
It's an old saying, about three seconds old.
[LAUGHTER] So those of you who
have used one of these things to
thing that whole area dthat Tanya is working in.d I'm really looking forward to Hhearing what she has tonight.d
Please join me in welcoming Tanya Buckingham to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Tanya Buckingham: Hello, [APPLAUSE]
everyone. Thank you for coming out tonight.
As Tom said, I'm Tanya
Buckingham and I currently work in the geography department at the Cartography Lab.
We are located on the third and a half floor. That building has all sorts of
So some information about the lab. interesting rooms like that.
We're staffed entirely by students, I'm the only full-time We're a full production cartography shop.
And this is a supplement to the course work that they do. pSo my goal in coming to theo trauniversity was to trainphy.
cartographers to be more
This is going pretty well. prepared to start as production cartographers once they graduate.
We currently have 10 students working in the lab, and that's a mix of undergraduates and PhD
candidates and master students. Before that, as Tom mentioned, I
worked at XNR Productions, and that's about a medium sized
cartography shop. They're at about seven people right now, and they do work for people all over the world.
They're contracted by publishers
and a lot of people that you would recognize to work on maps with those people.
And we'll see some of the maps
change that's happened in about midway through my career so far: employment. So there's been an interesting
what this is going to mean for Google Maps came out. And we're still starting to see
us. At first there was this big fear that we would all be out of a
job.
That hasn't really happened but the field is changing and it's changing quickly.
But it's still not quite there. So some of the programming is getting better, but what we need
options, for style and design, is the ability to customize map
get and I still get, which is surprising to me, is haven't all And when I tell people that I'm a cartographer, the question I
Both in my experience, which the maps already been made? No, they haven't.
information, and some harsh fneogeographers, which are sort specialty really focuses on static maps, thematic
of this new age of programming geographers, call these dead
maps. I choose to call them maps with longevity.
of these maps as the types that come in the National Geographic magazine. And tThey're fold out maps.think
They tell a story.
exist for a short period of They don't chtime.as quickly as And as we go through here, I'll tell you where these things were
published so that you have an idea of where you can see some
work that I've done. So this one was published for a
general reference book. This is a book that you can actually find at College Library
stacks. The maps tell a story beyond just in the regular reference
just location. So thematic maps tell a story
showing data or a theme,
therefore the thematic map, in geographic space. They accompany stories and books
and they help to teach students about, like this one like history.
for a textbook for high school This is a map that was published
students. Or mineral deposits. This is also an example of a
thematic map. Other examples would be population maps or maps showing weather patterns, versus a
reference map which is a map
that focuses on general spatial distribution of features, roads, cities, etc.
In doing research for thematic
maps, I was frequently surprised to find that not only had many
some were nearly impossible to topics not been mapped at all,
find the data at the scale that I needed or data at all that had any sort of space related to it.
This map was made for a children's reference book at the
little unconventional for mapping, and the reason is that it needed to match the style of book that it was published in.
One of my favorite types of projects are atlas projects.
I learned a lot while working on This is from a project that I worked on about three years ago.
not only had certain sets of world atlases about phenomena that haven't been mapped. Frequently we're shocked that
data that we assumed would be easy to find but they didn't exist at all.
An additional challenge with
world atlas is finding consist sets of data for the entire world.
We may have a fantastic data set
for one area but completely no data for another set. And then you have issues of
maybe you do have an entire set of data for the entire world but
Somebody's collected by county they've been collected at a different scale.
to resolve or maybe we don't but somebody else has collected by province or state. So these are issues that we have
This is map that was created for trust the data from one country as much as we trust it from another.
National Geographic's Visual Atlas of the World. It was published in 2004.
And then frequently there is
elements together to adequately detailetell a story. that a This is a project that is going andto press this summer.iple
The Cartography Lab, students in
the lab have been working on this project with Florida State University.
And we've worked in a couple
different ways with Florida State on this. We've worked as consultants to
help them prepare this book for press, and also we've worked in general production to prepare the maps.
In addition to customization, data customization, there's style.
to do is to do some of these And so one of my favorite things
artistic maps. This is a general reference map but you can see that it's
prepared in a way that it looks hand-painted, and it has a more organic looking font for the
This is really fun for me because I get to use entirely different software. lI get to use thingse.
that mimic real art.
These things are, it's like painting with watercolor but I get to do it on a computer.
I use a tablet and a stylus in
Yeah, so this was a map for a book directed at middle school >> Can I ask what you're trying to show in that one?
to help the students understand the geography of the region that students. And the purpose of this was just
as I talked about each of those maps, I also talked about what the book was focusing on. A brief side note, you'll notice
they were made for, what the age of the student was or what the
age of the intended audience is.
There are several basic style specifications that we have to consider for every map.
Will it be in color or black and
white? What will the size be?
That will determine whether or What's the quality of the press?
not we can have really thin lines or if our type needs to be really big.
However, there are less specific
but very important questions that we have to ask.
is the map intended for? We have to ask things like who
What will their use be? What understanding will they bring to the map?
And how will the map be consumed? That will determine the density of the detail and of the data,
the complexity of how these things are represented and
things as simple as how detailed does our coastline need to be
because if we're doing something
maybe for children it's much more simple than it is for
This is an example of that. Two maps of the same region, and adults.
intended for a book for an older this is actually the same publisher, it's just that one is
audience and the other for a younger audience. And it shows the level of
customization that's also necessary.
So you can see even on a basic map that's been mapped before
many times, there are a lot of
opportunities to make a custom map that fits the purpose well. Beyond unmapped thematic
content, in 2010 the world
learned that even in a reference map, data are not available everywhere.
And I'm going to go to this link
Okay, so watch this. for a second.
teams didn't have a good map to This is treference.ake that happened in Haiti, and what happened after this is rescue
And so rescue teams on the ground were having difficulty
navigating through the city in
order to find people and continue with their rescue
So what you see there with the mission.
flashing lights, those are areas that people are editing.
and then they're updating that They're editing those on the fly
information and then this is getting relayed back to rescue
And there's a group of people doing this type of work, they've teams on the ground.
And the way they do this, this been come to be called crisis mappers.
is actually a group of people, it's a very coordinated effort, it all came together very
haphazardly.
There was this need for it and people responded and there are
on this project and they used aerial imagery and other sources teams all over the world working
that they could get a hold of. And they assembled an up-to-date
map that was usable on the
ground. And then what they also did with this is they combined things
like Twitter, they would scour
Twitter to find reports of people saying I'm trapped in a
locate that based on the tweet building, and then they would
help them find that person. thThis phenomenon of crisisnd mapping is not new to the Haiti that to peosituation. ground to
In 2008, a group called Ushahidi
a group, also very involved in the Haiti response, was formed
in Kenya after the post-election to map the reports of violence
fallout. And there are groups on campus
There are groups called The Hackers Within and the who also participate in these.
Now they're neogeographers. >> Are they supposed to be doing people who started hacking into the maps were called geohackers.
started, but it was celebrated that? >> It wasn't intended when they
once people started to realize the potential that was there. Another project that has had a
profound impact is Map Kibera.
Previously it had been a blank And in 2009, for the first time ever, Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, appeared on a map.
spot. People didn't know where the hospitals were.
They didn't have, there was a general knowledge of safety concerns within this community. But until these things were
mapped they didn't have the tools to hold government
of Kibera were facing. officials accountable to take care of issues that the people
[INAUDIBLE] Yes, it's a collection of, I think it's 13 villages with
200,000 people. No facilities were mapped or anything like that.
go to the government and they could say we have 200,000 people Now they could say, they could
here and we don't have access to basic necessities, what are you
going to do about it? And before they had this all
documented, they didn't have those tools to adequately
communicate with the government.
So the people were trained, there's a group of people that went to Kibera and they trained
the people living there to use a
GPS to plot their routes or to plot their roads and their paths
They were also trained in proper and everything.
mapping symbology. So examples like using red for
something that's less dangerous or things like that. danger and maybe blue for
And once the map was complete, the data were given to the
people. The people owned that data, they
created that data, and the result of that is that in some
of these areas that they had
identified as being unsafe places, they were able to add a police officer there.
And there's also a real sense of
pride when you hear them speak of this that this wasn't
in a done for them, they created something that somebody had come
And all these projects rely on a this themselves and they then owned it. They now own it.
project called OpenStreetMap. And this project originated in the UK because as is the case
with maps for quite a long time is the maps in the UK were
traditionally owned by the wealthy, educated, or people in
power.
And the ordinance survey owned the maps and somebody,
He wanted to map his Steve Coast started this group.
these maps and now we can use this open layer system to build a map ofmaps on top of. of this And there are more customization
and you actually can have an
impact on the way that things are represented in these maps. And this has changed the role of
the cartographer which we are still figuring out. We're very much in a state of flux right now.
Everything's changing so
The tools are available more quickly, and you no longer have to be a cartographer to put these things together.
readily. Creating these maps became
They were very social events. Novices and map-lovers alike parties.
map an area. joined together and between beers, they would exhaustively
And these tended to occur over weekends. And they have a Wiki here.
You can throw your own mapping
party if you like. They have all the instructions
been very successful. Google is actually now following on how to go about it, and it's
this same model because Google has gone to a more proprietary
form of their data instead of purchasing their data from
somebody else. They're following this exact
same model now. In a similar project on a completely different scale, cartographers led a creation
process of data as well.
This project, Natural Earth Data, consisted of a team that was spread across the world, led
by Tom Patterson of the National
Park Service and Nathaniel Kelso, who at the time was
And the students in the lab worked with them on this project working for the Washington Post.
with cartographic data for as long as I've been doing this, the data sets don't match up. So you could have the outline of
your countries and then you have
your states that fit in and they don't match exactly.
California to not match the state outline of California. You don't want the coast of
So this project was created to have this really nice set of
data, and then what they did is they made a really detailed one.
So you can make a really big map, world map.
And then they made a medium scale one where they've simplified the line work because
really big map and you scaled it what happens is if you took that
way down, your coastline would be so detailed that you would not be able to see any of your
data. It would just be so distracting that you wouldn't be able to get
You could probably still the point of your map clearly.
would be distracting. So they made the medium size one be distracting. You'd have these elements that
And just a side note about this project, this was really and then they went even further and made a small size scale.
exciting for the students in the lab because these are people
that the students learn about in
their class and I actually had students, we got off of our first conference call and I just
thankful to be done with the
thought of every single last two-hour conference call. It was great. The people leading this, they
detail, it was a really good experience. But the students got off the
phone and they said, did I just get off the phone with those
So they were just so excited to have this opportunity to work with these people that they respect their work and had
learned about their work in classes.
Now you have base maps, what And the next step, this is sort of the what comes next.
our information but also to begin to analyze the data that So now we're seeing opportunities to not only map
Until the last few years, mapping had been something that required special training and access to really expensive
software, but we're starting to see things like this, this
particular one is by GoIQ, a service that allows to upload
your own data.
You can upload it as a spreadsheet.
document and you can have location tied to your data and You can have it as an Excel
it, you can also ask it questions. you can represent it spatially. But not only can you just map
You can analyze your data. It's really exciting and every
time I hear more about them they have even one more feature.
What's that? So we're getting... >> Can you explain these maps?
>> Would you explain these maps or what these maps mean? >> This particular one?
This is just the snapshot of
their website, but they have maps, whatever people have
They have maps of Starbucks locations. added.
I was looking at Madison today and they had Walgreens locations
and just things that are of interest to people. There's also things that you
demographic information about people. And you can start to combine would find in census data,
highest concentration of people to Starbucks or something like those things like where's the
of questions. And however, with this explosion that. You can start to ask those sorts
would start to understand how they can map their information of geospatial technology, I had this great hope that people
to explain the work that they're doing.
And so in 2007 some colleagues
and I got together and we created this nonprofit group called Map Giving.
And our goal was to gather a
group of cartographers who would be willing to donate a few hours
project. every year towards a mapping
a map. And then we would go out to these nonprofit organizations and we would say we'll make you
And we did that. And they said, great, we need to
And we said, well, we can do show where our building is.
that but you also have this rich set of data that you could show are you reaching the audiences
that you want to, could you better target the audience you
want to reach? We can answer those questions
with the data that these
organizations have collected. And the really great thing for nonprofits with that sort of
analysis is not only do they get
people who fund them. A constant battle for nonprofit performaorganizations.an also then justify their existence to
map to them to help them do their jobs better. But our goal was to provide a
very quickly became about education, very quickly became So what we found with this is that our mission of this group
about how can you use a map to do these things better.
And our education includes not
only explaining what a custom map can do, but how they can look at their data and how they
can look at their data, but also
that there's a need for being able to design your map. So we can look at these free
maps and we can say great, you
know, but that's not necessarily, you don't want that
It's fine and it's very appropriate for its uses. What you want is you want the map map on the right.ort.
You want that map that clearly
defines what the topic you're talking about. You want to be able to turn
certain things off and highlight
the things that you want to see so that you can emphasize what's important in the map.
And this demand for well designed custom maps will
changes. continue until the tools become stronger and we can make these
familiar with the campus map, Ibut I was asked why we didn'td create the campus map on Google. asked, I don't know if you're
Google interface or some other Why we didn't just use the
online map. And we don't have the control to show things that we don't, to
take things off the map, which
is actually usually more important than even putting the things on that are there or that
we want to show, we don't have
that control. We want to be able to show the things that are important to our
university. Our campus map we can drill down
to several layers of data. And for this reason, when we
built the UW Arboretum map, we
created a custom base map. And this communicates, this map communicates with Google through
Keyhole Markup Language.
maybe they've seen a certain So users who love the Arboretum and they want to show an area that's very special to them or
type of flower is blooming and we want to share that, they can go to Google Maps and there's a
my map section of Google Maps and they can create their own map and from that they can
and that information can export the proper file format
actually be added to this map. So while it's not built in
of the map. We can utilize some of the tools Google, we have our own design
that exist in Google to do that. In addition to the custom base
map, we changed the, on the bottom right there, we changed
the look and feel of the base map. the default colors offered by Google so that it complemented
this map that we have spent so When we first started this we had horrible colors coming up on
much time designing. And, again, this was a really unique situation for students
working in the lab. We teamed up with Access Maps which is a private company. And the agreement was that they
would come in and train the students as they worked directly
with them. So what you find is that when
students are first learning how to program the maps, they're
project like this, it can be a doing a lot of experimenting. So for a really complicated
big mess because they're learning as they're going.
these students to go out and So my goal, again, is to prepare
work as full time cartographers, and so Access Maps came in, a couple of the guys came in and
worked with the students to develop the maps so that they were building with good skills
It's also good for me because in from the foundation up.
What we find is that these five years when all these students are gone this map is actually editable.
projects that as students are building if they're learning while they're going, it becomes
very difficult to update them several years down the road.
tablets like the iPads or similar devices. Additional changes for maps include the development of
These products change the game for digital maps entirely
because the screen is large enough that it offers solutions to some of the problems that we have with our phones or the GPS
systems where you have these
tiny screens because if you zoom into those, if you drill down into that information, you lose
perspective as to where you are on the map. You don't know if you're in the northern portion or the southern
portion, yet if you zoom out so that you can tell where you want
need to navigate. So the iPad and other tablets offer solutions to that and I think we're starting to seey
people use this more and more in
more applications developed for the iPad, more online maps developed so that they're easily
readable on the iPad or other tablets.
I do have hope and a pretty strong belief that a need to It is a really exciting time to be part of the geospatial world.
will continue. custom maps, in the traditional sense of maps with longevity,
They're beautiful, they're fun to make, and I think that they're fun to explore also.
It's a piece of art and they
They're able to set a mood and a help to tell a story. I'll scroll through a couple of them.
tone and we'll see this with the digital maps, we'll see this
You can see here that this just offers a narrative that aids in setting the mood for relaying the type of information.
This is part of that atlas we were working on with Florida
areas, and the people who were State University. And these are marking natural
putting this together wanted this to look like somebody's
in photos and it looks like they've handwritten things and field notebook so they've taped
interested in. they've used a highlighter to show the area that they're
of Florida? That>> Oh, yeah, thank you.at I fIt's an atlas of biodiversity, >> Is this like a general atlas
Florida. showing the biodiversity of
In hopes that their Congress, their legislators will use it to make good decisions, more
informed decisions. But there are new things to map every day.
question, yes, there are plenty of things to map. I encourage you to look into a And answering that long-standing
the Geospatial Revolution which will give you a glimpse into all project out of Penn State called
the incredible work going on that geography is exploring.
What they've done is they set up
These are each, I think, 20 minute segments, but it will be ta full episode when it's all together in one full episode.
And this project is similar to done.
what I hope is that people will think about the possibilities of what can be mapped to tell their
story and to do their job better
because as, in episode four here you'll hear Jack Dangerman, he's
software for geography that geography and science are going to make a difference. crThey are going to helped
governments make better decisions, help people learn
things in new ways, and help citizens understand their
governments and get involved, help save the world.
And as we watch the awareness of location explode, we see people
applying this in new ways.
Ways we wouldn't have anticipated. From things as serious as the
crisis mapping that we talked about earlier or analyzing
global health. This is a project going on,
actually Mutlu will be here,
health related to the Tom saidenvironment. month. He works directly with this group SAGE on campus exploring
very well, things as fun as showing swearing in Twitter. Two things as fun as, that probably doesn't show up
downloaded Twitter data for a set period of time, and then he mapped where people swear the lab, most in their tweets.dents
So that's what this map shows.
>> Did he come up with any conclusions?
There's some spikes, the idea is >> Well, he did.
words but you can see some he wanted this to be pretty smooth so you can't go in there and say exactly this is how many
patterns. This is also online. The title of it is Profane
Mountains and Polite Plains.
data. AnSo it's explaining that theng areas where you see it stacking pup with a lot of red, whiche
would indicate mountains if this
were showing the Earth, it's actually showing mountains of swearing.
New York City would probably
be an epicenter. [LAUGHTER]
forward, this is an image from Tom Patterson, the person >> But to be able to move
Park Service, we are going to need this wave of digital wcartography to improve their Earth Data from the National
for decision makers and offering ability of creating better maps
support for good design which plays a critical role in how well your message is relayed to
your audience.
And we do this by working together, cartographers, programmers, people making maps,
people using maps, including a
What I've come to find is that cartographer from the beginning to think about the work spatially.
not everybody thinks space first, which really required
But I've worked with people, some resetting of my brain.
especially since coming to the university because I've worked
ever really had to request a map with a lot of people who haven't
before so they're not exactly sure how to do that. And sometimes I'll get a stack
of papers set on my desk and
they'll say just map it. And there's no space there. There's an idea there
but there's no space there. So there's a lot of talking people through that, how to think spatially about the
information they're looking at
with a graph or a chart or an image because sometimes you just need a map? Would this be better to show
don't. Sometimes you're not pulling out
a pattern or anything like that.
And it's important that we also create good examples for people to follow so that when I go out to speak with people, with a
literacy group, or a domestic violence center, or a school
what can be built, they can envision then their data in that or regional development organization that people can see
map and how it can be analyzed because just explaining it to
them sometimes is very difficult
to portray that ability. And finally it's important to show young people how they can
express themselves through the
the International Cartographic power of communicating with maps. This is a project that's run by
Association, and this is a map that a student in Iran had put
competition, I believe. And if you can't see it, the together for the 2005
out of peace. But it's a really great way for children 16 and below to try to make their maps, to become young
aspiring cartographers. And I've organized the US competition for the last three
And it's really great to see meetings of this.
what comes in. So you can actually visit this
There's a link, you can just online.
search international children's map competition. And there are maps from all the
maps that have been entered from
all over the world for several years.
[APPLAUSE]