Salad Of Tips

Written by Carmen Moreno-Díaz and Louis K Epstein. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young.

Salad of Tips (with encouragement dressing)

This recipe combines some tips mixing experience and wisdom based on failed attempts and past conversations.

Questioning ingredients

‌- Assess your project before starting doing anything on a map. Ask yourself questions like:

What is the end game of my collected data?

• For publication / presentations / talks

  • consider presses like Lever press

  • Online resources - create your own webpage to display your work (wordpress?)

  • Also, how much of your map are you up to sacrifice to publish in “old-fashioned” venues?

• For teaching purposes

  • Consider how collaborative is the tool that you picked.

  • Consider how accessible is the program:

    • Free?

    • Access through your institution?

    • Help from IT? Are they familiar with this program?

    • Does it publish to the web, or is it only accessible through a desktop version?

  • Pace the progress and establish your teaching goals

  • Design a rubric

How many locations I am going to pin?

• If you have a lot of points:

  • Consider elaborating a dataset through google sheets / airtable. Then, export it as a .csv file. If you start manually placing markers and then you have a lot, it might be more difficult for you to reorganize that data or excerpt from it later.

  • You need to be consistent introducing data. See our recipe on “how to clean data.”

• If you don’t have a lot of points:

  • Maybe My Maps is a tool that might be helpful for you.

  • Maybe projection of a map in a white board is an option to be considered.

What do I want to do with the points? Movement? A story? Documentation? Annotation?

• If you are recreating a path in which movement is crucial, you might consider tools such as:

  • Carto, QGIS, ArcGIS storymaps

Potentially integrating other recipes here

TRICK: If you want to collect data, you can install in your phone a gps tracker (like the ones that count steps) and allow it to register space.

If you are documenting / annotating historic places, then you might wonder…

• • To georectify or not to georectify… that is the question :)

  • Where to find historical maps - (David Rumsey Map Collection for example)

Which features would help me support my espacial point / argument in the map?

• 3D

• Consistent legend

• Colour coding

How many layers am I considering in my project?

• Be aware that some programs won’t support more than 10 layers. Ex. Google Maps. Some programs only support a single layer, like StoryMapJS

How picky are you about aesthetic?

• “Out of the box” or “plug and play” platforms like Google Maps, ArcGIS Online, and Carto essentially force you to use their preferred styles, base maps, and other features. QGIS allows more customization but is less intuitive to use. Most of the most beautiful maps you encounter within other DH projects are the result of custom developper work rather than the use of existing mapping platforms. If your goal includes high degrees of beauty and functionality, you might choose to work with a designer or developer.