Advanced TileMill: Taking Mapping to Places It Has Not Gone

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What are people wanting to make data out of?

  • Offices of an existing org (600 places with 12 categories)
  • Commutes to public schools
  • Story telling app with a map
  • Journey

Setting up a spreadsheet

Header rows - Name, Country, State, City, Type

Google Refine is pretty great. (have to know regular expressions, but will give you back days of your life)

Have to have a lat/long. Geocoding services

Doing Geocoding Straight into Google Docs

Script Gallery! Geo by MapBox

menu adds in Geo to File Edit View Insert Format Data Tools Help go to Script Manager if it doesn't appear

Highlight address details, run script. Can do up to 10k with Yahoo.

Lat Long not accurate enough?

OpenStreetMap search - permalink on the bottom right will render lat long in URL

Mapbox Design Side with TileMill

Provides examples to look at. But let's do our powerplant examples.

Add a link to a CSV file.

Can do design that means it's not just red dots.

Auto-fills and gives options for what you can do.

The manual is hella useful, takes about 90 minutes to read.

Can add in mouse-over by using the "Teaser" function

Joining the Two

Publish to the web, automatically update, do as CSV, link spreadsheet to that.

Set bounding boxes, set zooming levels

The layers you build become a part of a library, can overlay them on top of each other

First map will take 4-5 hours. After that it's easy!

Can embed it somewhere else. Pulled into publishing space.

github.com/mapbox

Sample Templates

mapbox.com/map-sites

Learn about code by looking at other people's. Take a couple sets of open data and build a narrative.

  • Pulling live tweets as an example.
  • Markers API

Timelines are set up by fading layers in and out over each other

Questions and Examples

  • Set of dots that need to be dynamic (working on it every day) - what is the closest to automation you can do without code? You have to write code. transform via geojson example at data.nai.org.af - Fast and slow data (socioeconomic vs real-time requests)
  • maps.mixmarket.org/nigeria as an overlay of internet and mobile access, literacy rates, unemployment with * microfinance etc. Building a site like this is now a couple-day task (last year it would have been $20k +
  • Analytics? postGIS and cartoDB

Suggestions to post at mapbox

  • Possible to do geolocation
  • Downsampling tiles while you have bandwidth - can do a test of how long your browser takes to download a pixel, live update which resolution to send you. This is awesome

Silent history as an awesome book. All georeferenced.

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