Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Tanya Buckingham Isn't Everything Mapped Already?  Jun 8, 2011 UP596    cc >> Tom Zinnen: Ah, to be in Madison now that June is here.  Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center and I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension. On behalf of our partners, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and Wisconsin Public Television, thanks for coming again to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday 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, Tanya worked at a private company here in Madison called XNR Productions where she spent many years with a team of talented cartographers creating maps for people of all ages and reaches of the globe. Her professional work extends to her cartographic professional societies. For example, she is currently the president and executive director of the North American Cartographic Information Society, an organization that will be bringing its annual conference to Madison in the fall. 

There's an old saying that one picture is worth a thousand words, one good map is worth ten thousand great words, and one bad 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 drive around and have found yourself on the other side of Hades, you know what a splendid thing that whole area that Tanya is working in. I'm really looking forward to hearing what she has tonight. Please join me in welcoming Tanya Buckingham to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE] >> Tanya Buckingham: Hello, 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 interesting rooms like that. 

So some information about the lab. We're a full production cartography shop. We're staffed entirely by students, I'm the only full-time person there and my job is to train students in cartography. And this is a supplement to the course work that they do. So my goal in coming to the university was to train cartographers to be more prepared to start as production cartographers once they graduate. This is going pretty well. 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 from both of my places of employment. So there's been an interesting change that's happened in about midway through my career so far: Google Maps came out. And we're still starting to see what this is going to mean for 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 is the ability to customize map options, for style and design, more than already exists. And when I tell people that I'm a cartographer, the question I get and I still get, which is surprising to me, is haven't all the maps already been made? No, they haven't. Both in my experience, which focuses on things like this, my specialty really focuses on static maps, thematic information, and some harsh neogeographers, which are sort of this new age of programming geographers, call these dead maps. I choose to call them maps with longevity. 

And that's because you can think of these maps as the types that come in the National Geographic magazine. They're fold out maps. They tell a story. They don't change as quickly as some of these things you're seeing online that are maps that exist for a short period of time. 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 just in the regular reference stacks. The maps tell a story beyond 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. 

This is a map that was published for a textbook for high school 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 topics not been mapped at all, some were nearly impossible to 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 upper elementary age. And the style of this is a 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. This is from a project that I worked on about three years ago. I learned a lot while working on world atlases about phenomena that haven't been mapped. 

Frequently we're shocked that not only had certain sets of 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 they've been collected at a different scale. Somebody's collected by county but somebody else has collected by province or state. So these are issues that we have to resolve or maybe we don't trust the data from one country as much as we trust it from another. This is map that was created for National Geographic's Visual Atlas of the World. It was published in 2004. And then frequently there is detailed information that a state or country will collect and we use to bring multiple elements together to adequately tell a story. This is a project that is going to press this summer. 

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. And so one of my favorite things to do is to do some of these 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 labels that are there. This is really fun for me because I get to use entirely different software. I get to use things 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 order to do that. 

>> Can I ask what you're trying to show in that one? >> Yeah, so this was a map for a book directed at middle school students. And the purpose of this was just to help the students understand the geography of the region that the book was focusing on. A brief side note, you'll notice as I talked about each of those maps, I also talked about what 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? What's the quality of the press? That will determine whether or 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. We have to ask things like who is the map intended for? 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 adults. This is an example of that. Two maps of the same region, and this is actually the same publisher, it's just that one is intended for a book for an older 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 for a second.  Okay, so watch this. This is the earthquake that happened in Haiti, and what happened after this is rescue teams didn't have a good map to reference. And so rescue teams on the ground were having difficulty navigating through the city in order to find people and continue with their rescue mission. So what you see there with the flashing lights, those are areas that people are editing. They're editing those on the fly and then they're updating that information and then this is getting relayed back to rescue teams on the ground. And there's a group of people doing this type of work, they've been come to be called crisis mappers. And the way they do this, this 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 teams all over the world working on this project and they used aerial imagery and other sources 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 building, and then they would locate that based on the tweet that that person had made and they could then, again, relay that to people on the ground to help them find that person. This phenomenon of crisis mapping is not new to the Haiti situation. In 2008, a group called Ushahidi a group, also very involved in the Haiti response, was formed to map the reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout. And there are groups on campus who also participate in these. There are groups called The Hackers Within and the people who started hacking into the maps were called geohackers. Now they're neogeographers. >> Are they supposed to be doing that? >> It wasn't intended when they started, but it was celebrated once people started to realize the potential that was there. Another project that has had a profound impact is Map Kibera. 

And in 2009, for the first time ever, Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, appeared on a map. Previously it had been a blank 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 officials accountable to take care of issues that the people of Kibera were facing. [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. Now they could say, they could go to the government and they could say we have 200,000 people 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 and everything. They were also trained in proper mapping symbology. 

So examples like using red for danger and maybe blue for something that's less dangerous or things like that. 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 something that somebody had come in a done for them, they created this themselves and they then owned it. They now own it. And all these projects rely on a 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, Steve Coast started this group. He wanted to map his neighborhood, he wanted to have a map of it, and so out of this became this movement to create these maps and now we can use this open layer system to build maps on top of. 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 quickly, and you no longer have to be a cartographer to put these things together. The tools are available more readily. Creating these maps became parties. They were very social events. Novices and map-lovers alike joined together and between beers, they would exhaustively map an area. 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 on how to go about it, and it's been very successful. Google is actually now following 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 working for the Washington Post. And the students in the lab worked with them on this project and what it is, is it's three sets of data and the problem 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. You don't want the coast of California to not match the state outline of California. 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 what happens is if you took that really big map and you scaled it 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 the point of your map clearly. You could probably still understand it but it would just be distracting. You'd have these elements that would be distracting. So they made the medium size one and then they went even further and made a small size scale. And just a side note about this project, this was really 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 two-hour conference call. It was great. The people leading this, they thought of every single last 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 people? I really talked to them? 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. And the next step, this is sort of the what comes next. 

Now you have base maps, what comes next? So now we're seeing opportunities to not only map our information but also to begin to analyze the data that we have using free or inexpensive online tools. 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. You can have it as an Excel document and you can have location tied to your data and you can represent it spatially. But not only can you just map it, you can also ask it questions. You can analyze your data. It's really exciting and every time I hear more about them they have even one more feature. So we're getting... >> Can you explain these maps? >> What's that? >> 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 added. They have maps of Starbucks locations. 

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 would find in census data, demographic information about people. And you can start to combine those things like where's the highest concentration of people to Starbucks or something like that. You can start to ask those sorts of questions. And however, with this explosion of geospatial technology, I had this great hope that people would start to understand how they can map their information 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 every year towards a mapping project. And then we would go out to these nonprofit organizations and we would say we'll make you a map. And we did that. And they said, great, we need to show where our building is. 

And we said, well, we can do 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 to check on their own performance but they can also then justify their existence to people who fund them. A constant battle for nonprofit organizations. But our goal was to provide a map to them to help them do their jobs better. So what we found with this is that our mission of this group very quickly became about education, very quickly became 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 map to be in your report. It's fine and it's very appropriate for its uses. What you want is you want the map on the right. 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 continue until the tools become stronger and we can make these changes. In a recent visit from the head of another university I was asked, I don't know if you're familiar with the campus map, but I was asked why we didn't create the campus map on Google. Why we didn't just use the Google interface or some other 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. So users who love the Arboretum and they want to show an area that's very special to them or maybe they've seen a certain 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 export the proper file format and that information can actually be added to this map. 

So while it's not built in Google, we have our own design of the map. We can utilize some of the tools 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 default colors offered by Google so that it complemented the look and feel of the base map. When we first started this we had horrible colors coming up on this map that we have spent so 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 doing a lot of experimenting. So for a really complicated project like this, it can be a big mess because they're learning as they're going. So my goal, again, is to prepare these students to go out and 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 from the foundation up. 

It's also good for me because in five years when all these students are gone this map is actually editable. What we find is that these 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. Additional changes for maps include the development of tablets like the iPads or similar devices. 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 to be then you can't read the detail of where you actually need to navigate. So the iPad and other tablets offer solutions to that and I think we're starting to see 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. It is a really exciting time to be part of the geospatial world. I do have hope and a pretty strong belief that a need to custom maps, in the traditional sense of maps with longevity, will continue. 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 help to tell a story. 

I'll scroll through a couple of them. They're able to set a mood and a tone and we'll see this with the digital maps, we'll see this advance. 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 State University. And these are marking natural areas, and the people who were putting this together wanted this to look like somebody's field notebook so they've taped in photos and it looks like they've handwritten things and they've used a highlighter to show the area that they're interested in. That's the sort of thing that I find really fun to create also. >> Is this like a general atlas of Florida? >> Oh, yeah, thank you. It's an atlas of biodiversity, showing the biodiversity of Florida. 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. 

And answering that long-standing question, yes, there are plenty of things to map. I encourage you to look into a project out of Penn State called the Geospatial Revolution which will give you a glimpse into all the incredible work going on that geography is exploring. What they've done is they set up a series of episodes and once they're done they'll put this together in one full episode. These are each, I think, 20 minute segments, but it will be a full episode when it's all done. And this project is similar to 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 created a very widely used software for geography that geography and science are going to make a difference. They are going to help 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, Tom said, later this month. 

He works directly with this group SAGE on campus exploring health related to the environment. Two things as fun as, that probably doesn't show up very well, things as fun as showing swearing in Twitter. So one of the students in the lab, one of the former students downloaded Twitter data for a set period of time, and then he mapped where people swear the most in their tweets. So that's what this map shows. >> Did he come up with any conclusions? >> Well, he did. There's some spikes, the idea is he wanted this to be pretty smooth so you can't go in there and say exactly this is how many words but you can see some patterns. This is also online. The title of it is Profane Mountains and Polite Plains. And it's actually not referring to the plains, the physical plains, it's referring to the data. So it's explaining that the areas where you see it stacking up with a lot of red, which 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] >> But to be able to move forward, this is an image from Tom Patterson, the person we had worked with on Natural Earth Data from the National Park Service, we are going to need this wave of digital cartography to improve their ability of creating better maps for decision makers and offering 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 cartographer from the beginning to think about the work spatially. What I've come to find is that not everybody thinks space first, which really required some resetting of my brain. But I've worked with people, especially since coming to the university because I've worked with a lot of people who haven't ever really had to request a map 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 and asking the question, do you need a map? Would this be better to show with a graph or a chart or an image because sometimes you just don't. Sometimes you're not pulling out a pattern or anything like that. 

So it's important to make the maps a priority not an afterthought. 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 or regional development organization that people can see what can be built, they can envision then their data in that 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 power of communicating with maps. This is a project that's run by the International Cartographic Association, and this is a map that a student in Iran had put together for the 2005 competition, I believe. And if you can't see it, the bucket down there says peace, and he's painting hearts 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 meetings of this. And it's really great to see what comes in. So you can actually visit this online. There's a link, you can just 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. So that's all I have. [APPLAUSE]