How I Go From Zero To Map
Behind the scenes of one mapmaker’s quest to map Great Britain’s cat population
A year ago I was in an interview for a newsroom graphics job and the head of their graphics team asked me how I made maps like the ones in my portfolio. I started talking about my different processes with Javascript, D3.js, R/Python, QGIS, Mapbox, and/or command line GIS — how I used tools depending on what kind of map I was making and what kind of data I had.
The interviewer said my workflow sounded difficult to reproduce and to track from project to project. I was a little thrown by the comment because I always use the tools at my disposal that help me get the project done. Simple, right?
Since then, I’ve tried to challenge myself to make my process more transparent and reproducible. Making work reproducible for yourself and others is important because it holds us mapmakers and datavizers accountable for our actions behind the scenes. It helps weed out errors and inconsistencies that you might not notice without that layer of additional attention to what steps you take and what tools you use.
I still find it hard. I’m not a developer by training; I’ve built reusable map code in R and Python before but I always end up feeling limited, like I need that one join tool from QGIS, and that one…
