Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each

September 25 · Issue #11 · View online

Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more. You can find the previous issues here

We’re back again for another dose of spatial goodness. As always, it was hard to narrow down what to feature this issue — there’s just so much amazing spatial content around right now. What’s been great is seeing the newsletter still growing steadily — even if I’ve not been promoting it as much as I probably should. We’re fast approaching 2,000 subscribers! I’d like to thank everyone who has been sharing it with your friends and colleagues, it’s appreciated. And another thank you to everyone who has reached out to me with kind words, suggestions and encouragement. I may not have had time recently to reply to you all but it means a lot to hear it. I’ll continue doing this newsletter for as long as it’s still useful to you. So with that, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋 — Robin Hawkes ( @robhawkes

Maps

The beautiful hidden logic of cities erdavis.com – Share This series of maps by Erin Davis colours individual roads by their suffix — street, avenue, etc. The result is an insight into the way cities are planned and structured. I’d love to see this applied to less grid-like European cities!

Viking Expansion 790-1066 AD www.reddit.com – Share A few days ago I didn’t know that I needed a map about the Vikings in my life, then I found this map by PisseGuri82 on Reddit and realised how wrong I was. Beautiful in its simplicity, it’s a great documentation of the Viking expansion. History is fun!

San Francisco taxi animations twitter.com – Share I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series of maps by Taylor Baldwin , taking taxi data for San Francisco and animating it in various ways. It’s been nice to see the progression as Taylor digs further into the data and refines his approach.

Have you made an interesting map recently? I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Software and tools

Mapbox releases Tilesets API beta docs.mapbox.com – Share If you’ve ever worked with Mapbox Vector Tiles then you’ll be aware that while powerful, it can be complicated and time-consuming to create and update tilesets. Fortunately, the new Tilesets API aims to improve this by allowing you to create ‘recipes’ for dynamically generating tilesets from source data using transformation rules. It’s well worth trying out!

OSM Teams medium.com – Share Development Seed have recently launched OSM Teams, an authentication API for creating teams and roles in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. It’s purpose is to allow for better management of groups and communities around the existing tools like iD.

OpenLayers now publishing a development version twitter.com – Share Want to try out the latest features in OpenLayers before they’re fully released, like the recent support for Mapbox GL JS layers? You’ll be happy to hear that you can now install the development version from NPM and stay up to date with recent changes.

Articles

Exploring geospatial data with kepler.gl medium.com – Share I was engrossed reading this insightful post by Shan He on how Uber’s own data scientists use kepler.gl to visualise huge quantities of spatial data to discover patterns and pinpoint areas of improvement. The fact that the maps are so pretty is an added bonus.

Debanding the world blog.mapbox.com – Share It may be from 2014 but this article by Amit Kapadia is just as interesting today as it was back then. In it he talks about the process behind removing banding artefacts in Landsat 7 imagery caused by malfunctioning hardware on the satellite. Fascinating!

Billions of birds migrate: Where do they go? www.nationalgeographic.com – Share Not only an interesting article, but the maps are beautiful too! I very much enjoyed this piece by National Geographic illustrating and detailing the migratory patterns of various birds.

Globe projections and insets in QGIS www.statsmapsnpix.com – Share This tutorial by Alasdair Rae shows how to create an inset globe view in QGIS, or if you’re a “proper QGIS boffin” (his words!) — azimuthal orthographic projection. Whether you consider yourself a boffin or not, it’s a great tutorial and one I’m looking forward to trying out in the near future.

Data

OpenGeoscience — British Geological Survey www.bgs.ac.uk – Share I’ve been on the lookout for decent geology data since I saw the beautiful USGS maps of the United States. It turns out that the British Geological Survey have released a whole bunch of sub-surface data for free under an Open Government Licence. Do you know of other sources for sub-surface data? I’d love to hear about them! I’m particularly interested in data with a 3D element to it, or data related to urban infrastructure like underground pipes, tunnels, etc.

DigitalGlobe release free high-res imagery of Bahamas www.digitalglobe.com – Share If you have an interest in Hurricane Dorian and its aftermath then you may want to check out the free high-resolution satellite imagery that has been released by DigitalGlobe. It covers both pre and post-Dorian.

Events

FOSS4G UK live stream recordings www.youtube.com – Share From what I could see online, FOSS4G UK was a big success and packed full of interesting talks. I unfortunately wasn’t able to make it but I’m glad to see that the live stream was recorded and is already available to watch. I’ve been informed that edited videos of each talk will be released in the near future.

Longitude — Manchester, UK (October 23rd) www.eventbrite.com – Share It’s been hard to speak to anyone in the spatial community within the UK who hasn’t mentioned Longitude at some point. Their next event is in Manchester and if the speaker line-up is anything to go by then it’ll be well worth attending.

Jobs

Full Stack Software Engineer — Esri, Zurich www.linkedin.com – Share The Esri R&D Centre in Zurich are looking for someone to help them build a new cloud-based application using modern technologies (like React and GraphQL). Another element of the work will be to bring CityEngine technology to the Web. I’d be interested in this one myself if I wasn’t contracting!

Senior Full Stack Developer — NYC Planning Labs medium.com – Share Want to help build the future of city planning? The NYC Planning Labs are looking for someone to work on data visualisations, analytics and mapping tools.

Junior 3D Modeller — VU.CITY vu.city – Share If you’re interested in 3D cities and have experience with modelling software then you might like this junior position at VU.CITY in London. I’ve worked with them in the past — they’re a nice bunch of people working on a cool product.

Who to follow

Nadieh Bremer (@NadiehBremer) twitter.com – Share I’d argue it’s impossible to escape Nadieh Bremer ’s work, especially online. She’s a fantastic data visualiser who is constantly releasing compelling and stunning visualisations. She recently released a piece on Planet’s satellite constellation — featured in a previous issue — that provides an innovative way of looking at how satellite imagery is captured on a daily basis. That work quite rightly broke the Internet, it was wonderful.

Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Community space

Women in Geospatial+ Mentorship Programme sites.google.com – Share It’s been great to see the Women in Geospatial+ community growing rapidly the past few months. They’ve just announced a new mentorship programme aimed at bringing together people who want to develop their professional skills. Two mentor models are planned — peer mentorship groups, and mentor-mentee pairing — and they are looking for people from all backgrounds to apply to be mentors.

OGC Vector Tiles Pilot — Phase 2 www.opengeospatial.org – Share A new phase is about to start for the OGC Vector Tiles Pilot. This time the aim is to achieve a “seamless online/offline” experience. I’m particularly interested in part of the pilot that isn’t mentioned in much detail — support for projections other than Web Mercator. I’m also curious about the relationship between this pilot and established vector tile ‘standards’ like the Mapbox Vector Tiles format.

Spatial Awareness on Slack

I’ve set up a Slack chat for the Spatial Awareness community to talk maps and help shape future issues of the newsletter. Please join if you’d like to be part of that community and have a direct channel of communication with me. We’ve already got a large group of people signed up with a wide variety of expertise. You can join here — I’m looking forward to seeing you!

That's a wrap

So what do you think about this issue? What did you like? What didn’t you like? What did I miss that I should cover in the next issue? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going. Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter , where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one. 👋

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