One of the great joys of working here at Esri is the opportunity to collaborate with amazing people. Recently I had the opportunity to present at the User Conference about thematic mapping, with Sarah Bell and Kenneth Field. It was a lot of fun and we all surprised each other with what we made from the same source data. One of the most beautiful aspects of cartography is there is no one right way to make a map. Here is what I made with some election data that Ken supplied us with.
The title of this blog post says “How to” but actually it’s more like why to make this map the way that it is. There’s a lot to consider when making a thematic map, particularly election maps. This takes a pretty narrow look and mercifully uses data from Great Britain, which it turns out is not my home country. This was a nice change. Fresh eyes.
Here’s the video…
0:00 Rootin tootin introduction
0:32 Compared to what?
1:02 Explore the data
1:25 We ask too much of one map
1:47 Reveal information progressively
2:11 Sneaky legends
2:27 Complexity requires an investment
If you’d like to dive deep into all manner of thematic mapping techniques (it’s an endless path, my friends) I encourage you to check out Ken’s book on the subject.
Thanks for watching, and happy thematic mapping! Love, John
Is there a way to access older NAIP imagery through the Living Atlas, or does it only provide the most recent imagery? We are mostly interested in NAIP imagery over shallow water coastal areas and water clarity usually determines the usefulness of the imagery. I am trying to determine if there is a straightforward way to cycle through and select from mulitple iterations of the biennial NAIP imagery. Thanks – Tom
Hi Tom, you can use the Living Atlas NAIP image layers noted in this article to cycle through the years back to 2010.
Natural Color – https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=3f8d2d3828f24c00ae279db4af26d566
Color Infrared – https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=e4da3b6720f545aeaaf3fe8141da1e21
NDVI – https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=aa9c87d6f17b452296252bd75005f6a4
NOTE: If you are working in Online, you will likely want to use the ‘Image Filter’ capability available for image layers in Map Viewer Classic (the new Map Viewer does not yet have the ‘Image filter’ capability).
Hope this helps! – Rob
Is the metadata layer the same for both NAIP Imagery and NAIP Imagery Natural Color? If not, is there a metadata layer for Natural Color?