4 Cartography highlights: fires, pre-digital satnavs, Dakar rally, and sea turtles

With the fires affecting Australia and fire maps dominating the news, I've been acutely aware of cartography this week. Maps are always in the news, and here's some of the great articles I've been enjoying this week. Here are four cartographic highlights for your enjoyment. 

Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral (BBC, 4 minute read)

Clarity of information is always paramount. This is true in business but especially so in a moment of crisis. Rapid decisions need to be made by people in stressful situations. It is not helpful when cartography creates confusion. In this article, the BBC looks at various ways maps of the fires have been misleading. When you encode data on a map, are you distorting size? Is your iconography consistent across an organisation (or, in this case, between agencies)? How would you design maps to ensure information was understood in an instant?

Turn-by-turntables: How drivers got from point A to point B in the early 1900s (12 minute read)

How did drivers navigate pre-Satnavs? With a road atlas, right? Ok, but how did drivers navigate before road atlases? With turn-by-turntables. Displayed on the dashboard, but attached to the wheels, these turntables would rotate and display the next navigation turn as you approached it. What I love about innovations like these are how, given available technology (cars and wheels), people push at the edges to implement new ideas (navigation devices). The new ideas slowly get absorbed by that technology, allowing further innovation. This is an approach we have always taken at Tableau: our community hacks Tableau to make it do the things they want, and we incorporate the best of those as features (eg Dynamic Parameters, Viz in Tooltips, etc).

Navigating the Dakar Rally: Roadbooks (15 minute read/watch)

It’s the Dakar rally this week. No satnavs: just roadbooks, a whole world of visual encodings. If you’re bouncing over rocks, or sand dunes, or river gullies, your map needs to be readable fast. And, since you’re eyes and hands are bouncing around, the detail has to be big and obvious. This means large icons, vibrant colours, and big numbers. I highly recommend you watch the second video on the page, where an ex-winner explains his process for marking up a route map. These racers have a deep understanding of the power of data visualization, even though they might not realise it!

The best maps of 2019 (featuring Tableau) (5-30 minutes read!)

If you still want more maps (and why wouldn’t you?) the cartography community have written many great posts sharing 2019’s best maps. These are especially great this year because Tableau maps, built by Jonni Walker, got featured in several, with his Sea Turtle map being a particular highlight. Check out the lists from ESRI’s Kenneth Fields, Mapbox’s Elijah Zarlin, and the Ordnance Survey.

What's been your recent cartographic highlight?