ramiroaznar

Three cartography tricks for making CARTO BUILDER maps

Almost one year from last blog post, here we are again. Lots of things have happened since then. I would like to mention some key events such as CARTO Locations, SIGLibre (where I gave a talk about A series of unfortunate maps) and several GeoInquietos Madrid talks and workshops.

This time I will give you some easy tips to elaborate very useful artifacts with BUILDER STYLE UI but also switching to a more pro mode with CartoCSS. Before reading further, I will recommend to have a look at CARTO’s Styling Guides. They were written by Mamata Akella, the real expert here. But if you want to skip go through those guides, log into your CARTO account and follow the instructions below. In doing so, at the end of the day, you will be able to create outstanding visualizations in a manner of minutes displaying markers as beacons and fireflies among others.

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How to use CARTO BUILDER analysis to create insightful map applications

Last Thursday CARTO released BUILDER, its new geospatial web application, for new signup users. There are several new amazing features such as widgets (dynamic filters), styling with Turbo Carto (a CartoCSS preprocessor) and version control (save/update). But my favorite is the possibility of adding geospatial analysis to layers.

Connect with lines

In this blog post, I am going to create a map application (with a visualization as the screenshot above), showing just a couple of analysis that BUILDER can offer.

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How to install the most common open-source GIS applications on Ubuntu

Since my home computer refused to boot up, I decided to format my hard drive and install Ubuntu 16.04. In addition to Google Chrome and Sublime Text, the only other applications I needed were all my favorite open-source GIS software. So this is how I spent most of the Saturday morning:

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How to create dashboards & widgets with CartoDB

Last weeks I have been working with DeepInsights.js, the “new” CartoDB’s Javascript library that allows you to create dashboards. This technology is so powerful that can be intimidating. But in this blog post I am going to demonstrate how easy is to create dashboards, widgets and add customized elements. Let’s start!


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How to map NBA player shots using CartoDB

A couple of weeks ago LA Times amazed us with their Kobe’s 30,699 shots visualization. Then they explained us how they made it. In this post, I am going to replicate their process. But in my case, I am going to plot Stephen Curry’s last regular season shots. A little bit of knowledge of the NBA API, few lines of Python and some SQL queries in CartoDB and… BOOM!

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Introduction to QGIS workshop

Last saturday a group of GeoInquietos Madrid organized a QGIS Introduction workshop at Medialab-Prado. It was a total success. Almost 30 people attended and almost every of them gave us a good feedback. Marco explained the QGIS’s user interface and basic tools, Jesús and me, vector analysis, Fran, plugins and Carmen, the printer designer.

qgis

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3D buildings with CartoCSS!

Sorry, I lied. You cannot make 3D buildings with just CartoCSS. You also need SQL. I promise you it will be quickly and painless. But first, you need a dataset from a city. This has to be made by polygons representing buildings areas and must also have a height field. I downloaded one of Brooklyn from NYC OpenData.

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PostGIS tips & tricks with CartoDB.js

It is been awhile since my last post. A lot of cool things have happened since then!  I continue to learn Javascript and PostGIS. In fact, with the combination of these two and a little help of CartoDB.js, you could make amazing visualizations. In this post, you will learn how to connect points using great circles and also how to stack your points as chips in order to solve the “overlapping points problem”.

I believe that everyone is familiar with great circles thanks to the Facebook friendship map. But in my case, I get completely in love with them when I learnt how to “paint” them in R. But maybe the most brilliant visualization is the one recently made by Carlos Matallín. Here we are going to learn the most basic SQL query used in the former viz that allows us to connect our points of interest and getting simple but outstanding cartographies:

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Torque visualizations using CartoDB.js

My #geopropósito for this year is learning Javascript. Quite useful if you want to know how to use all the APIs for webmapping. I started taking a very interesting course about understanding the weird parts of this language. Then I watched all the Javascript for GIS programmers free-tutorials made by Geospatial Training -especially, the one concerning APIs– and also attended the seminary about the ArcGIS API for Javascript organized by GeoDevelopers. But what I needed was practise. So I decided to instead of using the CartoDB editor, I would created my torque animated maps with the CartoDB.js library.

What is the code behind this map? First, it had Python at the backend. If you do not have yet read the post about how to capture data from the Twitter API, do it now! On the other hand, it has some interesting lines of CartoCSS and Javascript at the frontend. I am still working on it because there are some details to add such as title, legend and a better slider. But I believe the main skeleton is set up. First the CartoCSS:

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Mapmaking workshop for kids

As I mentioned in my last post, last 5th of December Carmen Langa and me, in addition to a small but very welcome help of other two GeoInquietos (Jesús and Beth), organized a mapmaking workshop for kids at Medialab-Prado which titles was “Taller de Mapas: del papel al digital. Una introducción al mundo de los mapas” (Maps Workshop: from the paper map to the digital one. An introduction to the maps world”). And it was 3 hours of fun.

workshop

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