Andy's Maps

Maps by Andy Bradford. Occasionally I reblog things with credit. Avatar image from Messages Received

[whenyoustudygeoinformatics]

Use QGIS more often.

[fyeahgis]

What say y’all? ESRI is still more common in the workplace.

Either way, fyeahgis.

[andysmaps]

ESRI is definitely what’s used in the government/for-profit workplace. 

And if you ever see GeoMedia in the job requirements, run.

[andysmaps]

This was a research project for my Principles of GIS class, and so far I’ve presented it at four conferences. From 1850-1959, the Census of Agriculture measured land value, in dollars per acre, averaged by county. To see the effects of the Civil War on the national economy, I obtained the 1860 and 1870 datasets, and ran them through a model that rasterized both and compared them to produce a raster that expressed the percent difference between the values, and adjusted for 40% inflation between the two years. This rasterization was to overcome the broad boundary changes between 1860 and 1870, where a lot of counties changed boundaries between the Census years.

I haven’t figured out what caused the widespread property value loss, but I have some theories. What I was looking for with the original study was the effect of war damage centered around the primary theater of Northern Virginia and the Mississippi River Valley, maybe seeing a tranche of destroyed counties across northern Georgia and South Carolina to represent Sherman’s damages, but I never thought I’d see such widespread property loss. Quite a few counties in the Cotton Kingdom went from $40-50 an acre (inflation-adjusted) to $2-3 per acre. Something in the war bodyslammed land value in the South in a systemic way, and a follow-up statistical examination produced very little in the way of significance.

[sopphistries-deactivated2016080]

? The ending of slavery? White people could no longer exploit free labor out of slaves and thereafter had to pay them?

[andysmaps]

That’s actually still my leading theory, but there was no significant statistical correlation between property value loss and prewar slave population. Or I may have done the study wrong. With a question of this complexity, I refuse to take a firm stand on what caused this trend, even when I have some pretty strong ideas. I want to be certain before I say something like “the end of slavery caused a massive decline in property values.”

At the time I posted this, because I had no idea how the value of land was assessed, I was also considering possibilities ranging from the distribution of lands to freed slaves, to less land being under cultivation, to the collapse of the Confederate economy during the war wiping out the planter class’ assets. If value was assessed as “last sale price” as it is for property taxes in some US states, then lands distributed to freed slaves would have been counted as $0/acre or for their sale price, regardless of what their “market” value might have been. Since moving and starting my new job, I haven’t had time to really dig into these questions, but if anyone knows a researcher who wants to build on this, they can contact me and I’d be glad to answer questions and share what data I have left.

[rachelpasser]

ArcGIS issues: Exporting Map Layouts with Rasters & Vectors in the Same Data Frame

If you have a map layout with multiple data frames (like a 2-view map, or a map with an inset map like the picture shown above), adding a raster surface layer causes exporting issues in ArcGIS. This is a known issue in ArcMap with handling data frames that have raster and vector layers. Apparently ESRI isn’t in a rush to fix it either. Here’s a GIS Stack Exchange thread discussing this issue as well.

What happens is a transparent data frame background exports as opaque white if you have a raster surface as a layer with your other vector layers. For example, if you had a map of a state with all its counties (polygons) and underneath you had a nice raster surface showing kernel density or something, the supposed transparent background exports white. If the data frame with these layers is overlapping another data frame you will notice immediately, like in the above picture. Super annoying, right? It will not export transparently no matter the file format, even PNGs aren’t above this. Obviously this is a problem…so what can we do to work around this?

Until ESRI gets it together, I know of 2 workarounds:

Rearrange in ArcMap

The most straightforward solution is to rearrange the overlapping data frames so that they minimally overlap and their respective layers won’t cut each other off. Then, when in layout view in ArcMap, make sure all your data frames are sent to the very back (right click Order –> Send to Back), and make sure to remember the order of all the data frames on your map layout. Despite them all being sent to the back, which did you command to the back first? One may still overlap another, so make sure the overlapping areas don’t cover the data in the data frame you’re trying to show. Make sure all your map elements, like labels, scale bars and legends have been sent to the very front (Order–> Send to Front). If you have an inset map though, this may still not help and you can try the next workaround.

Fix in Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop

Another potential option is to export the map layout either in .PDF or an .AI format, and open up that export in Adobe Illustrator. Once in Illustrator, also open Photoshop. Create a new blank, transparent work area in Photoshop. Go back to Illustrator. Try scrolling over the area where the raster surface is, you should see that the raster surface is selectable, but in several bands. If you click one, you may be able to select all the bands (I think the first click selects them all and a double click selects just one). Right click after selecting them all, and click “Isolate Selected Image” so that only the raster surface bands are selectable. Copy all the bands, and paste to the blank work area in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, select all white areas (RGB value = 255, 255, 255), then find the drop-down menu to Select –> Inverse, and you should only have the raster surface as your selection. Copy and paste this into another new, blank, transparent Photoshop work area (File –> New –> Paste). Save this as your replacement raster surface as a .PSD file (that’s like the Photoshop equivalent of an MXD).

Go back to your map layout in Adobe Illustrator. Do you still have those bands selected? If so, go to File –> Place…, then it will prompt for a file. Add the PSD file of the raster surface you just made in Photoshop. It should add in the surface sans white opaque background, at the correct scale as it should be on the map layout. You may need to drag the placed raster surface back to the spot it belongs in. This currently will get the job done correctly, but it is a little extensive to complete. I would only recommend this for now if you cannot manage to find a way to move the data frames so they don’t overlap.

[andysmaps]

Option 2 is roughly what I did to produce the pseudo-bathymetry effect in this map. I didn’t have Photoshop or Illustrator at home, so I put the data (the raster inside the US, cities, points, etc, in a data frame called Payload, and the pseudo-bathymetry effect (which was a Distance raster emanating from the coastline) into a second data frame, called Layout. I exported each data frame, with layout elements, to a separate JPEG. Then I opened them both in GIMP, put Payload over Layout, and one by one turned the ocean areas transparent. A bit clumsy and labor-intensive, but it produced a map that I’m still really proud of.

[andysmaps]

The Dangling Shoes of Athens, Part 1

A while back, I saw an article about shoes dangling over power lines in the city of Athens, Ohio. Being into rumors and urban legends, I contacted Athens’ Public Works department and asked for any GIS data they had on the shoes. They replied that they didn’t have GIS shapefiles, but they had addresses. With those addresses, I put together some maps of each sweep, which the city did at roughly six-month intervals.

Here’s an animated GIF of all 6 sweeps that they sent me, with standard deviation ellipses showing the primary concentration of shoes. The numbers are approximate at best, as many of the sweeps used “many” or “several” instead of integers. I used 10 and 5 as approximate numbers, respectively.

I’m going to be doing more maps on this topic as I integrate more data, but I just got permission from the Athens PW department to share these maps, so I’m excited to show off my work.

[andysmaps]

Me: *Prepare ArcGIS field calculator for large dataset*

Me: *click*

Me: *tab over to Tumblr to while away the waiting time*

Me: *Tab back to ArcGIS several times to check if it's done yet*

Me: Why aren't you done yet?! *back to Tumblr*

Me: *notices that I forgot to start the calculator*

Me: Damn, I'm good. *click, starts calculator*

Computer: Done!

[clintonistaa-deactivated2016091]

I’ve got 99 problems and ArcMap is like 50 of them

[andysmaps]

My mantra whenever I’m having ArcMap problems: “At least it’s not ArcIMS, at least it’s not ArcIMS...”

[andysmaps]

I MAKE MAPS (for money)

Hi, I’m Andy, and I graduated college in December, and I’m looking for a job doing cartography and GIS. Because I’m looking mostly at local government, where the hiring process is very, very long, I’m taking freelance cartography jobs. You can see some of my work at andysmaps, and I have almost a decade’s worth of professional and academic maps I can’t show on the Internet, as well as an award from the California Map Society.

If you want:

A statistical map

A map of a route

A map of locations

An animated map showing change over time.

I can do this… for the right price, and with the right data. I do not do maps of fictional worlds; I don’t have the skills or software to put together a detailed map of a place that doesn’t exist. But many developed countries, especially the US, make their data available on the Internet, and I can work with that. I also have access to the county-level records to every US Census going back to 1790 and can work with that data as well.

If you have an idea for a map, send me an ask or an email at [email protected] and I’ll give you a time/price estimate within a day, with my standard rate of US$20/hour. I don’t have a clear price list because I’m not sure what people will ask for, but I will give you a price and time estimate for your approval before I start working, and minor changes would not be factored into the final product.

[andysmaps]

About a year ago, I created a set of animated GIFs out of US Census data from 1790 to 1860. A fun little project, and I thought I'd share how I did mine. I didn't make screenshots at the time, but I have some time on my hands so I can redo the process and make some if anyone's interested.

First I created a JPEG for each decade-layer, 8 in all, with a consistent extent. This I did through ArcGIS' Time feature and uniting all the separate year-layers into a single time-enabled shapefile with the decade as the date field. Then I used its Export feature to export 100 sequential JPEGS. This may have been a little too much, but I wanted to be sure I got every single decade in the set. ArcGIS' time feature doesn't seem built with Census data in mind.

Once you have your mass of JPEGs, it's time to forge them into an animated GIF. For this stage I used GIMP, a free Photoshop clone; Photoshop's procedure may be different.

In GIMP, open the first JPEG you want to use, make sure it's looking okay, then add each other time-frame you want to the image as layers, going from the first sequentially on the bottom to the last on the top. I also added a little bit of text showing the year and my blog URL to each layer-image. Make sure you merge any text into the year-image it's supposed to be with.

Next, go to the layer list and add a comment for each layer listing how long in milliseconds you want that layer to show as a frame. This should be formatted like so:

[1500ms]

The final GIF will slide each new frame "on top" of the old one like a layer. I used 1500 milliseconds, but more detailed maps might require more time per frame.

There's an Animation Optimization tool at Image > Filters > Animation > Animation Optimize, but I didn't use it for this project. Instead, I just saved my file as a GIF, and GIMP asked if it should save it as an animation, which I told it to do, and specify a location. Then save it.

Before closing your workspace, check your work by opening your GIF in a Web browser. (this is because animated GIFs are meant for web browsing and many photo-viewers might not display them correctly.) If you've done it right you have a glorious animated GIS-GIF!

[maptitude1]

General Sherman’s march to the sea, Nov-Dec 1864

[plotbunnyfarm]

So there’s a line in Uptown Funk that goes, “Ride to Harlem, Hollywood, Jackson Mississippi,” which I initially found odd because Harlem and Hollywood are on the East and West Coasts, respectively, and Jackson, Mississippi, is in the Deep South.

The thing is, the Harlem in New York and the Hollywood here in Los Angeles are not the only places with those names. In the US, Duplicate names are ev-ery-where - just look at the 30 Washington Counties we have in different states. Harlems and Hollywoods are all over the country. 

Below, I have highlighted Harlem, Georgia, several Hollywood candidates, and Jackson Mississippi. The distances are a bit long for a road trip, but they’re certainly easier than cross-country and back. The Hollywood, Georgia, right outside of Atlanta, puts it in the middle of a 513-mile drive along Interstate 20.

I have no idea if this was Mark Ronson’s intention in writing the line, or it just sounded nice, but it’s either a nice bit of geography in music or a neat coincidence.

[plotbunnyfarm]

ArcPy tutorial exercises: Taking all day to figure out how to do something I could have done in 30 minutes in ArcMap, and most of that waiting for geoprocessing to complete.

Sigh

At least I am learning a tiny tiny bit.

[andysmaps]

I MAKE MAPS (for money)

Hi, I’m Andy, and I graduated college in December, and I’m looking for a job doing cartography and GIS. Because I’m looking mostly at local government, where the hiring process is very, very long, I’m taking freelance cartography jobs. You can see some of my work at andysmaps, and I have almost a decade’s worth of professional and academic maps I can’t show on the Internet, as well as an award from the California Map Society.

If you want:

A statistical map

A map of a route

A map of locations

An animated map showing change over time.

I can do this… for the right price, and with the right data. I do not do maps of fictional worlds; I don’t have the skills or software to put together a detailed map of a place that doesn’t exist. But many developed countries, especially the US, make their data available on the Internet, and I can work with that. I also have access to the county-level records to every US Census going back to 1790 and can work with that data as well.

If you have an idea for a map, send me an ask or an email at [email protected] and I’ll give you a time/price estimate within a day, with my standard rate of US$20/hour. I don’t have a clear price list because I’m not sure what people will ask for, but I will give you a price and time estimate for your approval before I start working, and minor changes would not be factored into the final product.

[andysmaps]

This was a research project for my Principles of GIS class, and so far I’ve presented it at four conferences. From 1850-1959, the Census of Agriculture measured land value, in dollars per acre, averaged by county. To see the effects of the Civil War on the national economy, I obtained the 1860 and 1870 datasets, and ran them through a model that rasterized both and compared them to produce a raster that expressed the percent difference between the values, and adjusted for 40% inflation between the two years. This rasterization was to overcome the broad boundary changes between 1860 and 1870, where a lot of counties changed boundaries between the Census years.

I haven’t figured out what caused the widespread property value loss, but I have some theories. What I was looking for with the original study was the effect of war damage centered around the primary theater of Northern Virginia and the Mississippi River Valley, maybe seeing a tranche of destroyed counties across northern Georgia and South Carolina to represent Sherman’s damages, but I never thought I’d see such widespread property loss. Quite a few counties in the Cotton Kingdom went from $40-50 an acre (inflation-adjusted) to $2-3 per acre. Something in the war bodyslammed land value in the South in a systemic way, and a follow-up statistical examination produced very little in the way of significance.

[andysmaps]

TestYourVocab

I asked TestYourVocab.com for their data, because the survey asks for ZIP codes, and I thought it would make an interesting map. For these maps of the US, I first aggregated the ZIP codes to counties, because ZIP codes in urban areas can be less than a mile across.

All location data should be taken with a grain of salt - many ZIP code entries were nonfunctional or invalid, and I suspect some people gave false ZIP codes - the code 90120 (Beverly Hills, California) had more than twice as many entries as the next most entered ZIP code, which was in New York City.

Here’s a map of the mean vocabulary scores across the Continental US, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Alaska isn’t included because no scores were received from Alaska, or Alaskans didn’t include their ZIP codes, or gave false or invalid ZIP codes.

Here’s the same dataset with the counties displayed by standard deviation:

Most of the country should be taken with a big grain of salt, because TestYourVocab received a relatively small number of entries, identifying from most areas of the country:

Urban areas, of course, had many more entries than rural areas. I’ll be compiling maps of various metropolitan areas next.

The survey also included a question about birth year, which like location data should be taken with a grain of salt:

All maps prepared in ArcGIS Desktop. 

[andysmaps]

Animaps Part 2: Land Value

From 1850 to 1950, the government collected data about land values, averaged by county in dollar per acre.

I’ve studied this before, but as an exercise in using Quantum, I put together an animated GIF showing land value changes over time. To keep parity, all values are in 1960 dollars.

All data from NHGIS.org, a wonderful resource of the Minnesota Population Center that I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone studying US historical populations and statistics.

[andysmaps]

Animaps Part 1: Constitution to Secession

(reposted from my other Tumblr, since this particular pair of GIFs is part of my portfolio, and is likely to be looked at by people I'd like to have a professional relationship with.)

I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a while, but I finally sat down and did the thing.

US Population Density 1790-1860

Data source: Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 2011.

The website of the NHGIS: NHGIS.org, and NHGIS are great people hosting great data and if you’re into history or GIS you should know about them because they are great.

A few caveats about this map: the pre-1810 data doesn’t include Native Americans, and because I don’t have hard data, implies that areas to the West of the then-United States were unpeopled before White people did the Manifest Destiny thing and stole all the land. After 1810, I am unsure whether the data includes Native Americans, but I doubt it. And this wasn’t true, but as this map is focused on the United States and is supposed to reflect how the country looked to people in the American Government at the time, I didn’t look for data on Native American and Mexican populations during this time period. If anyone knows a good source for that data, let me know.

Now, the second map:

Slaves as Percentage of Population, 1790-1860

Data source: Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 2011.

There was going to have a companion map showing the percentage of populations that were free people of color. but the data for some time periods conflated free people of color and all people. That map is still in progress, once I figure out the right NHGIS data to incorporate.

Very interestingly, in 1790 the Northeast had a sizable number of slaves, and as time passed and the Northern states abolished slavery, their slave populations dropped to 0. However, the Southern slave population went up and up and up, until many counties, in the Carolinas and along the lower Mississippi River, had between 75% and 90% of their populations in chains. This, to my mind, lends an interesting support to the idea that Southern slave society was terrified of slave rebellions. When you’re outnumbered 10-to-one by people you’ve exploited, raped, and abused, it’s easy to be afraid of them.

I’ll probably make more of these as I compile data.