Cartography.

MOOC

Section 6
Mapping Movement and Change
Dr. Kenneth Field, John Nelson and Nathan
Shephard

Dr. Kenneth Field: Hi and welcome to Episode 6 of Cartography. This is the set of episodes
that accompany our Esri MOOC on cartography, where we're enthusing you to think a little
bit about maps and how to become a smarter mapmaker. And joining me this week for our
final episode so it's John Nelson again.

John Nelson: Hey.

Ken: Hey, John.

John: Thanks for having me.

Ken: Welcome back.

John: Happy to be here. Pleasure.

Ken: And Nathan Shephard. Thank you for joining for us.

Nathan Shephard: Thank you. Thanks, John. I really like that shirt. You should wear that more
often.

John: Thank you. I like it too. Ken: It suits you, don't you think.

Nathan: It really does, the eyes, everything.

John: Oh, my goodness, thank you.

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Ken: So, in this episode, we're going to talk about mapping time, temporal geography, think
about movement and change and how we can create map products that display that
information. So we're going to be talking about time series data and how we can make maps
using temporal information. So we dealt with the Z dimension, I guess, in the last episode,
and now we can deal with the T dimension, things that change over time. And that's, I guess,
increasingly becoming really important data, sort of how we look at things over time, how we
measure things over time.

Nathan: Yeah, and there's lots of different ways of doing it too. It's like there's 2D ways and
there's 3D ways and there's ways with animation.

Ken: Wait, there's 3D ways?

Nathan: Of course.

John: 3D?

Nathan: There's always a way to do it in 3D.

Ken: We've done that. Okay.

John: Animation, static, lots of ways to apply symbology to show temporal change.

Ken: Okay. So let's think about how data might change over time. So conventionally, you've
got a place and you take a snapshot. You might survey it or maybe take an aerial photo or
Landsat imagery or aerial, whatever it might be. And then, at some future point, you do it
again. So how do we map that? How do we map the change between?

John: Change detection. So what I would do, I would take those two layers of imagery and
then run them through a change detection algorithm. It would look at all the pixels and give
me a variable output, saying this has changed a lot and it's changed in this direction or this
direction.

Ken: Sounds complicated.

Nathan: It does sound complicated but there's an algorithm so ...

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John: It's so easy because it's all this. [clicking sounds]

Ken: Oh, you're doing that again. So that's kind of a raster imagery, right?

John: Yeah.

Ken: Yeah. What about thematic data in polygons?

John: It can't be done.

Nathan: It can't be done?

Ken: But you can do it by processing the data. So you might have let's say population density
for one year, and then maybe there's a census taken ten years down the road and you've got
another set of data. Of course, you can do some pretty simple maths.

John: That's the interesting stuff.

Ken: The rate of change between areas over time.

John: Change maps are a lot of fun.

Ken: But it ends up creating one map, right? So you don't have your starting point map and
your ending point map. You're actually processing the data in order to create some
information about what changed in between these points of time.

John: That could be a choropleth map encoded with a rate, in this case the difference
between A and B, so a change map, which is static. But it could be something else, right? I
mean, you've got a static visualization of that, but you could also have a version that morphed
in front of your eyes and tweened from point A to point B.

Nathan: Oh, yes.

Ken: Like moved.

John: Moved, like a movie, moving map.

Ken: A moving map.

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Nathan: Yeah.

John: Yes.

Ken: In biology, actually what you're reading is kind of a difference in shape over time. You
would expect maybe the shape to be growing or the trend to be decreasing. If it's linear, let's
say we could do small multiples of graphs on a map. You know you can see over time trends.
I guess that's what you're really trying to pick out, if you're looking at change over time, is
what are the trends? How has something changed in state?

Nathan: Yeah. Well, I think consistency across each of them is really important. So like if
you're using a color scale for one of your elements, you need to make sure you're using the
same minimum and maximum for all of the maps, because you're going to be using that
across all of them.

John: And the same view extent and the same scale.

Nathan: Exactly.

Ken: Yeah.

John: So isolate the variables so that the only variable that's being changed is the variable
that you want to talk about.

Nathan: Exactly.

Ken: Putting things in a sequence and making a map movie I think is a really great way of
showing something in a very encapsulated form.

Nathan: Yeah, and then the flow of time becomes really important. So if you're making a
video of time changing, you need to keep the time flowing at the same rate. You can't have it
going at different rates. And maybe you'd want to add some little onscreen text saying the
year or the month that's going on with it, so as you go through, people can not only see it,
but they're kind of getting this little, out of the corner of their eye, they see oh, 1988, '89, '90.

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John: Yeah. So, Ken, you had mentioned earlier this aspect of temporal mapping and
resolution. Resolution and the fineness of the picture that you're showing somebody has a lot
to do with how well they can interpret it. So people's eyes aren't very good at detecting
change if it's happening slowly and there's not a lot going on. But that same amount of
change, if compressed into only a few frames, let's say instead of every year you show every
decade, boom, boom, boom, boom, we're very good at seeing abrupt shifts and noticing:
Oh, it's increasing. Oh, it's decreasing. It's moving over here. It's moving over there. Whereas
if it's too fine and too slow, then you miss it.

Nathan: We haven't talked about space-time cubes yet.

Ken: No.

John: Space-time cubes.

Nathan: Space-time cubes.

Ken: Space-time cubes, they're like a special case of dealing with spatiotemporal data.

Nathan: Are they 2D or 3D, Ken?

Ken: Oh.

John: They're TD.

Ken: They're TD.

Nathan: Whoa.

Ken: Well, I mean, you know, you're dealing with three dimensions again. You're dealing with
the X and the Y, because there's a spatial component, but things have changed in time.
Whatever is being mapped has changed in time. So instead of perhaps illustrating a height or
elevation on the, I'm going to say it again, the Z axis.

John: I thought he was going to say heighth.

Nathan: Oh, no, no. He wants to live.

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John: I was waiting for that.

Nathan: He wants to live.

Ken: We can turn it into a T. Can we agree on a T?

John: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Ken: Or do you want to call it "tay"?

John: No, T.

Ken: So T can be on the vertical axis. And if you imagine let's say moving through space or
walking through a city and you've got a day on the T-axis, then you might begin over here
and then you move and then you move again. And the lines are going to move in different
orientations depending on your speed, your velocity. And they might be vertical when you're
fixed at a particular location. I mean, this is kind of nothing new. This was done in the 1960s.
But, you know, we're starting to be able to operationalize this in an interactive 3D
environment and create some really interesting stuff.

Nathan: Absolutely.

Ken: 3D space-time cubes.

John: Space-time cubes.

Nathan: ZST.

John: Plus, it sounds amazing, space-time cube?

Nathan: It does, very futuristic.

John: Check out my space-time cube.

Nathan: Yeah, shiny.

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Ken: So maybe, when somebody asks you "What are you doing?" and you say, "I'm a
cartographer." Now, you're a space-time cube scientist.

John: I make space-time cubes.

Nathan: Cubist? Space-time cubist.

Ken: Cubist? That's a different thing.

John: Yeah. It sounds arty.

Ken: Sounds very arty. Yeah, I like space-time cubes. They're kind of cool. So I've just
explained a little bit about lines, I guess. What about areas in space-time cubes?

Nathan: Temporal analysis, you want to understand what's going on at each slice. So let's go
with some water usage data. We've messed around with this before. So you've got an area.
You've got a large area, and within that you've done some analysis about how much water is
being used in each area. If you imagine each one of those extruded up as a block and stack
them up through time, you've got a space-time cube that actually looks like a cube, very nice.
But the problem is you can only see the outside of the cube. So, as soon as you're doing
space-time cubes or areas where the thing is going to be hidden, you have to think about
other ways to get inside the cube. So do you slice through it in time? Again, you have to
animate your space-time cube so each one turns on in time. Or do you kind of like filter out
where you're just left with the worst, you know, the people who use the most water? But they
shrink down and you just get left with the worst areas of water usage and maybe there's a
column. And what this is, is this is one area where there's high water usage for a long time
through time. If there's just a little one, you go, "What happened this year?" Maybe there's
one year where everybody used more water for some reason. So you can understand things
by putting it into a space-time cube and just look at it visually.

Ken: It kind of works.

Nathan: Absolutely.

Ken: Okay. So that's kind of taking cartography beyond 3D and beyond time now.

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John: Beyond time?

Nathan: Everything.

Ken: What about that?

John: Wow.

Nathan: We're forwarding.

Ken: This week's map is another great historical piece of work. Actually, it's maybe not even a
map. This is a famous illustration by E.J. Marey, from 1885, on graphing the movement of
trains from Paris to Lyon. Nathan, you particularly like this.

Nathan: I love it. It's kind of semi-obscure. You kind of google it and you don't find that much
information about it, but it's just amazing. It's one of these maps that you look at, like a good
joke, you look at it and if you get it, you feel smarter. It's one of those kind of maps.

John: That's what I was going to say.

Nathan: No, no.

John: Actually, when you proposed this map, it was the first time that I actually took a good
look at this map, because initially I look at the map and I'm like, "Okay, I don't get it. I'm
moving on" But when I actually found myself having to understand it a bit, it was fascinating,
because you've got this amazing display of geographic proximity and time proximity in the
other dimension, and you've got these lines connecting rail stations. If it's steep, then it's fast
trains.

Nathan: Faster, exactly.

John: And there's these little gaps where the train will start in a station and end in a station,
and then there's this long pause and it's not a nice, consistent stroke throughout. And it took
me a moment to figure out what that was. That's just how long the train is waiting at the
station before it takes off to another station.

Ken: It doesn't look like a map, but it is.

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Nathan: Yeah.

Ken: It's got space.

John: There's all kinds of things that are actually maps.

Ken: It's got time and it's got a lot of information.

Nathan: Yeah, it's a travel map. It's like if I want to go to this town and then come back, but I
need to spend two hours there, you look at it, I go up, here I go one direction, couple hours,
here's the next one, it comes back, and you can look at exactly where you're going to be. In
fact, if you look where they cross, so there's trains coming one direction and trains going the
other direction, where they cross, that's when you can wave hello to that train going the
opposite direction.

Ken: So the graph or the map can be read from top-down or bottom-up ...

Nathan: Exactly.

Ken: ... because actually the trains from the other direction are also plotted.

John: That's fantastic.

Ken: Yeah, but it's great.

John: It's the same kind of dimensional cleverness as the Minard piece that we talked about
in a previous week.

Ken: This week, I'd like to propose a guy who works back in the U.K. His name is James
Cheshire, Dr. James Cheshire. He works at University College London. He's a senior lecturer
in all things geo, and he's a pretty cool guy.

John: Prolific.

Ken: Well, the interesting thing that James has done recently is published popular books on
cartography. And if cartography is all about enthusing, engaging the public, then let's make
books for the general public. So two books, first one, London: The Information Capital and

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the second one is called Where the Animals Go. These are the two sort of products that he's
most known for.

John: And I like his approach in taking a very specific idea and then making many, many
maps on that idea instead of maps with a lot of themes and a lot of topics. He'll pick a topic
and just map the heck out of it.

Ken: Yeah. So his first book with his coauthor, Oliver Uberti, just took a lot of information
about London, just obscure stuff and showed a slice of time. The second book, Where the
Animals Go, is pretty much all about time. He's taken animal tracking data and mapped it.
Where does an albatross go around Antarctica? Or where does a particular lion or a tiger go?
What's their habitat? It's fascinating. I encourage you to go and check out James Cheshire's
work, fascinating, interesting work.

Nathan: I will go check it out too. Sounds great.

Ken: I'll lend you the books.

Nathan: Thanks very much.

Ken: Let's see what's in this little crate of cartographic curiosities.

Nathan: Ooh.

John: Yes.

Ken: What's possibly in here that we can deal with animation? It's a book.

Nathan: It's a cute book.

John: How can a book be animated?

Ken: Yeah, there we go.

John: It's ridiculous.

Nathan: Are you're going to put me in charge of the flip? So this is a flip book. This is a flip
book, and let's see if we can capture this.

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Ken: Oh.

Nathan: Here we go. Good frame rate. So each one of those is actually an individual little
image of a horse, and then as it goes through, it's changed slightly through each one. And
yeah, so now you get the perception of movement. It's like a movie. It's a modern day movie.

Ken: So this is like a collection of small multiples but organized as a stack instead of as a flat.

Nathan: Exactly. And you flip through them and you get to see it.

John: Did you guys ever make these when you were a kid in school with a notepad?

Nathan: Oh yeah.

John: Just [makes sound].

Nathan: Absolutely.

John: The little guy runs or something? I did a pole vaulter once springing over.

Ken: A pole vaulter. Hey, guys, there's more in here.

Nathan: There's more? More?

Ken: There's more in here. So ally to the flip book is ... there's debate about who invented
what first, but this is also the sort of mid-19th century. What is this?

John: It's an ashtray you might find at a bowling alley.

Ken: Actually, it probably is. It moves. It spins.

Nathan: It does.

John: You need to look at it at just the right angle. It's basically the same thing.

Nathan: What's it called?

Ken: It's a zoetrope.

Nathan: Ah, amazing.

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John: A zoetrope.

Ken: Yeah.

Nathan: Yeah.

Ken: So this is kind of like a kid's toy version of it, but this was a device that also allowed you
to animate. And actually the key to it is a sequence of small images.

John: It's the same thing as this, really.

Ken: It's the same thing.

John: They're just stitched together.

Ken: But instead of stacked ...

John: Into a loop.

Ken: These are in a sequence, maybe like a film strip. And as you spin the zoetrope, then
these little slivers act as frames, and your eyes can't keep up with the movement of the sort of
slices. But they give you a little slice of the image at a different point, and that creates the
illusion of movement. I guess, really, this is all about how do we generate this illusion of
movement using stills? That's a lot of what we've been talking about. So these aren't really
cartographic tools of the trade. They're just almost the forerunner ...

John: Cartographic concepts of the trade.

Ken: Forerunner to how we animate things.

Nathan: Well, if each one of these pictures was a change of ...

John: That's a map.

Nathan: Yeah, a change in population through time, then it would be.

Ken: Yeah. We're going to end it by thinking about a few of our pet peeves and cartofails
surrounding animation.

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Nathan: I'll go first.

Ken: Go on.

Nathan: So, for me, it's like animation, you've got to look after the viewer. They're gentle
people. Their eyes are going to hurt if you fly them too fast down a corridor, things going
past them, if you jerk the camera around, you show things on and off too quick, people are
going to fall over. You can't do that. You've got to be gentle, take your time, tell a story, have
a point, but make a nice little video that people want to watch. Think about it like you're
trying to get it into Hollywood. Take your time.

Ken: Yeah, and I guess it's still about the map, right?

Nathan: Yeah.

Ken: It's not about you as the director of your map. It's really just not about that. It's about
keeping that individual sense of the importance of the product. Do you have any pet peeves
about animation?

John: My biggest pet peeve of an animation is a herky-jerky animation that goes too quickly.

Ken: But what I'd like to do maybe is wrap up with sort of a single, overarching pet peeve,
something that encompasses a lot of what we've spoken about across these six different
weeks, these six different episodes. And that's that we're trying to encourage people to think
and put a lot of time and effort into the map. I tend to see a lot of maps where actually you
know that it's pretty much default and it's pouring your data in and expecting software to do
all of the jobs of the cartographer for you, and you either hit print or you hit publish to web
map or whatever it might be or export to an animation.

Nathan: Right.

Ken: Software gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility and support and freedom and
everything that's got to have defaults, right? You can't just give people a blank nothing and
expect them to go and do everything.

Nathan: Yeah.

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Ken: But I would like, you know, my pet peeve is people who treat the defaults as the
endpoint.

Nathan: Yeah, I would agree 100%. It like it should be on purpose. Whatever you do, do it on
purpose. If you like the blue that comes up by default, make that decision, "I like that blue. I'm
going to keep it." Just make your decisions. It's your map.

John: Every aspect of the map ought to have a decision behind it. Choose that this is there.
I'm presenting this.

Nathan: Comic Sans.

Ken: I think that every map ultimately is made ...

John: Including Comic Sans.

Ken: ... is made by a human, right?

Nathan: Exactly.

Ken: Every map is made by a human. So that human has to make decisions and put a little
piece of them in the map. Make your map a little bit different from everybody else's map and
it's going to stand out a little bit more. Personally, I try to make my maps a little bit more like
John Nelson's because everyone likes his maps.

Nathan: I don't make maps.

Ken: So that's my overarching ... oh, I guess it's not really a pet peeve. It's just a sort of a bit of
encouragement to try to go a little further with your cartography.

Nathan: Making maps is fun. It should be fun. You should enjoy it.

John: That's right.

Nathan: It's fun.

Ken: It's fun.

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Nathan: Well, making the scenes is fun, but maps are…. But it should be fun.

Ken: I'm going to try some more 3D animated maps now.

Nathan: Excellent.

Ken: Okay. So we've come to the end of Episode 6 of our small miniseries of cartographic
discussion points. I'd just like to end by thanking my colleagues, John, who's joined us for all
six episodes with exactly the same shirt.

Nathan, thanks for your help with the 3D and the animation.

Nathan: You're welcome. I brought a couple shirts.

Ken: And for the guys that aren't here, Edie and Wes, who also joined us to share their
knowledge and expertise, but it's a good job they're not here, because there's only three
biscuits remaining.

Nathan: Ooh. Ken: And I'd like to offer you guys final biscuits.

John: Thank you, Ken.

Nathan: I'll take that one. That's mine. I got a bit hungry earlier. I apologize.

Ken: I like the Garibaldi. The Garibaldi biscuit is great. So thanks very much for joining us.
Enjoy your mapping.

Nathan: Thank you.

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