Labeling Maps: Hierarchies of Terms

Written by Victoria Morse. Edited by Alan Zheng. Reviewed by Austin Mason and Aaron Young

Introduction

As a prior step to making a map, you should consider what kinds of labels you will need: City names? Country names? Regional names? River‌ names? How many types or levels of information will you need? How will you distinguish one type of information from another? Font, size, color, and symbols can all be helpful tools.

Once you have your lists, you can decide whether they belong in different map layers (see the discussion of uncertain locations) or whether some labels would be better drawn on to the finished map in Adobe Illustrator or similar software in order to indicate places that have different kinds of geographical existence (that GIS can’t conceptualize).

Ingredients

What do you need to know or have set up in order to follow the recipe. An application installed, a plugin activated, familiarity with a certain programming language, etc.

Hints, callouts and or warnings can be highlighted here as necessary

How to do it

Step by step instructions required to follow the recipe‌

How it works

A detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section, so we are not perpetuating technology "black boxes" but helping people understand how to take control.

This section can include code snippets of CSS, JavaScript, Python, etc.

as appropriate

Further Resources

This section can be used to give additional information to make the reader more knowledgeable about specific aspects of the recipe, or provide helpful links to other useful information.