Polish cycling matchbox labels
A selection of matchbox labels featuring cycling, from a larger collection at the catalogue of Polish matchbox labels
Parallels
Mostly maps.
Latest posts
Typography in space #1
I ve been going down the rabbit hole of the NASA photo archives on archive.org and enjoyed these two photos showcasing the use of Helvetica on the Atlantis space shuttle.
Humanitarian climate whitewashing
Irwin Loy, writing for The New Humanitarian, highlights the trend of humanitarian organisations removing references to climate change from their websites:
Geospatial cryptic crossword
Barry Rowlingson shared a geospatial-themed cryptic crossword in the newsletter of the Lancaster Data Science Institute s Geospatial group.
Data Workers’ Inquiry
How we made Data Workers Inquiry
Global video game history
Enjoyed this article by Felipe Pepe: The Gentrification of Video Game History .
John Snow cholera map wall art
Another post on a link I saved browsing 30daymapchallenge submissions on the Datawrapper blog: Alex Selby-Boothroyd s 3d-printed recreation of the famous John Snow cholera map. It looks way better than I d have thought if you d just described it to me.
Is it in London?
NTS King Tubby mix
Cracking 60 min King Tubby mix on NTS from back in December: King Tubby’s Dub Lessons w/ groundselector .
Kyle in Target Parking Lot
I came across this photo by Caroline Drake in an issue of Aperture in 2021 and it will pop into my head every couple of months. Probably with about the same frequency that I see a map of Idaho online.
Cartography / Typography #1
While doing some research on tyopgraphy in mapping, I found this table of cartographic lettering conventions on Jill Saligoe-Simmel s website :
2024 ▸ 23 ▸ Postcode area centres, API documentation, travel time to events
I’ve missed a few weeks of weeknotes, so bundling a few weeks together for a roundup of the top three things things I’ve worked on in May and June.
HDX launched data access API
The Humanitarian Data Exchange ( HDX ) has launched a data access API .
2024 ▸ 20 ▸Green View, the Art of Training and data gardening
In March, I contributed to Street View Green View , an American Red Cross project that classifies an area by the amount of greenery visible in Street View imagery. This week, I worked on some code to process the green index scores generated by package so they can be displayed on ...
Amnesty website open-sourced
Amnesty has open sourced their website - Wordpress theme and plugins: https://github.com/amnestywebsite.
NASA space shuttle orbit maps
2024 ▸ 18 ▸Training debrief, deprivation mapping and community gardening
Following the GIS training we ran last week, I had a debrief call with the other facilitators. We had good feedback from the trainees but also lots of input from us as facilitators on how to improve the training. We decided to take time to consolidate this feedback and implement ...
Cartography exhibition, Fotokino, Marseille
Fotokino in Marseille has an exhibition about cartography and graphic design, Toute latitude — La cartographie, c’est du graphisme .
2024 ▸ 17 ▸Climate risk and service user maps, GIS training
Our team received a request to make some maps based on data from the UK Climate Risk Indicators website, to be used in an upcoming report. It took me a long time to figure out how to download the right data — I didn’t find the website very intuitive — but ...
2024 ▸ 16 ▸ Health boundaries, ESRI dashboards and climate risk maps
This week we had a request from a colleague for a set of health board boundaries he could use in a PowerBI Shape Map . This ended up being slightly trickier than I expected — health board boundaries are published separately for each of the home nations, so step one was to ...
Bellingcat podcasts: detecting ships and building damage with SAR
Recently listened to an old episode of the Bellingcat Stage Talks podcast from summer 2023 with Ollie Ballinger talking about using synthetic aperture radar imagery to track ghost ships and detect building damage.
2024 ▸ 14 ▸ Geocoding and safety trainings
We had a call with a colleague this week who was interested in using Excel’s ArcGIS plugin to create some maps of addresses. When people are working with postcode data and need a quick way to batch geocode a list of postcodes and get back lat/long coordinates, we ...
2024 ▸ 12 ▸ Editing, data conversations, counting trees
The Economist’s mapping style guide
It s quite hard to find examples of good mapping guidelines online - not just the how to or generic advice, but comprehensive guidlines about a set of styles an organisation uses.
2024 ▸ 10 ▸ Weeknote
Squeezing in last week’s weeknote before it’s time to write this week’s.
Converting our EPS logo archive to SVG and PNG
IFRC maintains a GitHub repo with the official logos for ever Red Cross National Society. A good chunk of them were in the EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format, which is hard to use in non-Adobe software.
2024 ▸ 09 ▸ Weeknote
Fairly quiet week this week.
Creating postcode polygons from UPRN data
In recent years a lot more UK postcode data has been made free to access. Ordnance Survey gives free access to postcode centroids ( Code Point Open ) and the postcode of every address in the UK ( Open UPRN - Unique Property Reference Number).
2024 ▸ 08 ▸ Weeknote
This week I had calls with various communities of practice I’m a member of — on Python, Information Management, geospatial and data science. That’s a lot of CoP calls for one week! For the Python and geospatial ones, I facilitate the calls, for the others I just attend.
An plus naga squared
Went down a cuneiform rabbit hole and came across this beauty. No idea what it means.
2024 ▸ 07 ▸ Weeknote
This week I’ve been splitting my time between finishing off a webmap request, making progress on some data processing tasks and revisiting an older data processing project to udpate it. I also joined the second workshop of Third Sector Lab’s Open Working programme, which had lots of good ...
Video: QGIS feature frenzy
Watched John Bryant & Nyall Dawson s QGIS Feature Frenzy from the 2023 FOSS4G State of the Map Oceania conference.
Link: Four pitfalls of spatiotemporal analysis
Enjoyed this post by Gregor Aisch, co-founder of Datawrapper , about space-time analysis: Four pitfalls of spatiotemporal data analysis and how to avoid them
Design disaster response maps to be viewed on WhatsApp
Had a brief discussion on a call today about the pros and cons of static information products (images or PDFs) vs. interactive dashboards.
Geocoding Channel Islands & Isle of Man postcodes
Wrote up some work I did for BRC , setting up a system for basic geocoding of postcodes in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man.
Red Cross/Red Crescent geospatial community in 2023
At work we have a geospatial community of practice for people working on geo stuff in different Red Cross/Red Crescent societies - a fancy name for a regular Zoom call. It s a chance for us to hear what other people are working on, what they re using geospatial tools ...
Some things we worked on in 2023
Published a summary of things our team worked on in 2023 on the team blog . It s not necessarily the biggest or most important things that we worked on (although some of it falls into those categories) - I asked people on the team to give me the things they found ...
xmltodict now available in the ESRI Python repo
I hate working with XML and Python’s etree. So very happy to see that after updating the Python repo in ArcGIS Pro, xmltodict is now available. It makes processing API responses much, much easier.
Automating geodata processing and sharing at BRC
Published a post on the team blog on Automating geodata processing and sharing at BRC
Creating a Shaded Relief Map in QGIS
Published a post on the Learn SIMS site on how I add terrain visualisation to maps in QGIS .
Libya Storm Daniel infrastructure map
Most of the maps I make for work can t be made public, but I recently made a map for the IFRC s surge support team that has been made public . The surge support team was responding to flooding in Libya caused by Storm Daniel in September 2023. This was ...
GeoPandas: Convert GeometryCollection to MultiPolygon
I ve been using food security data from the the Integrated Phase Classificaiton API . As it s a work in progress, there are some quirks for how data is returned for different countries. When accessing the Niger data, I noticed my standard script failed as the geometries are returned as ...
Using plaintext changelogs for shared QGIS projects
Published a post on the Learn SIMS site on how I use plaintext changelogs for shared QGIS projects (with some helpful edits from a colleague).
Earthquake intensity colour scheme for QGIS
For a recent task I needed to show earthquake activity on a map. Since people have been making a lot of use of US Geological Survey maps and data, I wanted to use the same colour scheme they use to represent intensity:
Defra’s map design standards
A recent podcast from the Government Design Service about Maps in services spent some time talking about the map design standards put together by the UK Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). The standards are hosted on GitHub here . Perhaps calling them standards is a stretch it s ...
Hmong hand-stitched story cloth map
Running a humanitarian GIS training at the British Red Cross
Published a post on the team blog on Running a humanitarian GIS training at BRC - summarising the QGIS course I designed and ran with a colleague.
Python: Convert a folder of SVGs to PNGs
For a work thing I had a folder of SVG icons to use for map symbology that I wanted to also have as PNGs to use in PowerPoints, Word docs, etc. when needed.
Maps for report on airport project in Philippines
Some maps I made for a Global Witness report on the environmental and community impact of a new aiport near Manile are now online: Global Witness: Runway risk .
Maps for report on palm oil production and indigenous rights in the Amazon
Some maps I made for a Global Witness report on the effects of palm oil production in the Amazon are now online: Global Witness: Amazon Palm .