Anything for a Map - Part 1

04 Sep 2015

On The Heels of The Pioneer Corps

Mapping the footprints of the men who faced the thicket, built drifts across rivers, played the debut soccer and rugby matches in a country.

Background

So, as I was working on some project and the corresponding write-up for a blog post, I got a ‘technology’ interruption. The key data for the project was ready now and the other processing was still ongoing TileMill, GDAL, ASTER.. what not.

CartoDB was the interruption and particularly Odyssey.js. My (initial) intention was to make a pannable map with an ‘old’ theme. Since this was going to be a spatio-temporal kind of a map I decided to give Odyssey.js a go.

Tire-kicking

So in one afternoon I had a reasonable visualisation going! Having a CartoDB account was one of the requirements for this exercise and I had long back signed up for a free account when CartoDB came on to the scene. I went with the Torque Template on Odyssey.js. The point data I uploaded to my CartoDB account, simply added a ‘integer’ field to represent time. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how the story could be put together using Markdown. And after two hours or so….voila!

The Map Story

#postscript

• The experience I had with Markdown helped me to quickly compile my story.
• I used a great tool by Ben Balter to upload a document of the narrative I used to plot the points in the visualisation to my GitHub account via the browser!
• Apart from the expediency with which one can make a animated visualisation of one ’s data, there’s somewhat a restriction on the cartography front. Thus I will still continue with my initial intention on creating an old map.
• Take away from all this is that there are great tools out there to help one do great things with minimal effort.