Now for some whiz-bang polygon generation! I used the “ generate Thiessen polygons” tool. Fortunately for me, a cartographer, this means I marvel a lot. I marvel at the goodness of visualization every time a table is accribitzed into a map. While Craigslist shows their own point-map of sites, we need to be more specific, since we’re turning them into polygons. I went to Craigslist’s sites page, and copied all the sites for the United States, dropped them into an Excel table (splitting up all the multi-city sites) and geocoded them. Let’s take a crack at generating some new states, based on pragmatic economic zones. If you’ve ever read this book, or watched this show, you are keenly aware that the United States were carved out in a surprisingly arbitrary, and sometimes accidental, fashion. Ok, time to start dragging our fingernails down this map… How These States Got Their Shapes This will save you lots of time! Also included is the over-the-top-skeuomorphic image overlay with cute little pieces of chalk and dusty corners, etc. It’s not easy making a texture image that repeats without obvious edge patterns. This is the green chalkboard texture used for the background. Chalkboard Image Assets (a zip with two PNG images).I’ll show you how it was made, but in the meantime just cheat and download the results. You are welcome! This represents lots of dissolving (for multi-location sites), and manual crafting (so orphaned peninsulas actually get assigned to the most drive-able site). The United States of Craigslist (link to polygon shapefile download page).So there was lots of manual placing, and heaps of site-duplication to represent the shotgun pattern of multi-city sites. Tons of Craigslist sites are combinations of named places (“saginaw-midland-baycity”), generic places that imply specific places (“mendocino county”), and geographically broad generic places (“northeast SD”). A Geocoded table of Craigslist Sites (an Excel file of places, site URLs, and their coordinates).Here are some resources to get us going… Data & Resources The second is in hacking that stippled chalky line style. The first is using a nice seamless chalkboard texture. There are only a couple key tricks to getting the chalkboard style rolling. Sure, this post will show you how to make these boundaries, but more interestingly, it will show you how to make a chalkboard-style map! Now pay attention or teacher will rap your knuckles with a ruler. But at least I was a relatively early adopter (the original version was made in…yikes!…2011). Ah the trusty old, well-worn, United States of Map.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |