My second favorite is Justus Perthes’ Atlas Antiquus which is a pocket atlas of the ancient world. What is so great about this map is the fact that it has been scanned at very high resolution. The pdf is therefore >300mb! It includes some detailed maps of Rome and Athens as well as Northern Europe, North Africa, Spain and the Mediterranean. I have included the map of the UK and Ireland below. It would appear that this is part of a series of scanned atlases so there may be more to come.

***Not long after posting this, the “The Look of Maps” appears to have been removed from archive.org”***

ESRI Press have announced they will be re-printing Arthur H. Robinson’s classic book “The Look of Maps: An Examination of Cartographic Design“.  The book begins with the following quote from William Morris Davis:

“It is just as important to study the proper and effective use of various forms of graphic presentation, as it is to study the values of different methods, treatments, grades, and forms of verbal presentation”.

This quote, like much of the advice in the book, remains as relevant today as it did 50 years ago. I think it is great that ESRI Press are investing in re-printing “classic” works as it is often nice to own them as a printed version. However, books are expensive, especially if you are a cash strapped student and there is a free alternative available. In this case the book can be freely downloaded from archive.org. Download Link. Archive.org is a great resource and I am sure there are many hidden gems on there to be discovered.

Following a slightly critical post about the map featured on ESRI’s Geomedicine website I thought I would balance things with a post on a good example (in my opinion) of a mapping service from ESRI. I was really impressed with their Free Embeddable Maps website. Users can select from a number of demographic measures such as population density,  median age, average household size and population change between 2000 and 2009 and map them at a range of scales. Maps can be personalised using a title and direct links to the creator’s website or their email address. My map of New York Median Household Income is here. It would be good to get more data and coverage beyond North America. It would also be nice to enable multiple overlays (perhaps using different forms of representation on the map). The page is only beta so these additions may follow.

I know this kind of thing has been done before, such as with the London Profiler Website, but ESRI’s contribution is remarkably simple to use. Users with no GIS experience will be able to create a map in under a minute.  It can then be embedded in a any web page or linked to via bit.ly. The interface is well-thought out and users can read additional information from the pop-outs that appear when the map when they click on an area of interest. The maps deserve to be utilised by a range of users, but I expect educators and their students stand to benefit most from this excellent free service.

Much of the data downloadable from London’s Data Store have a spatial dimension. Mapping this, even in the simplistic way above, should be encouraged to raise awareness of some of the stories it can (and can’t) tell about life in London. One of the most important uses I foresee for this data is in an educational context. Like never before students can access the data and use it to test concepts usually taught to them from other people’s analysis in textbooks. The map above is relatively simple to produce and already begins to tell an interesting story about the working lives of Londoners.

The map can also generate discussion about what it doesn’t show. I doubt that these statistics include many of those who are employed informally or illegally. In addition how much information has been lost when the data were aggregated to Local Authority level? I think these questions become more obvious when you begin to engage with the data through even the most basic analysis- such as producing a map. I therefore think London’s Data Store alongside the other free data websites such as data.gov.uk and the Guardian’s data store should become invaluable resources in GIS and geography education.

The statistics can be found here.

Over the last couple of days I have utilised some excellent free GIS resources. I have listed these and some others below.

Geospatial Analysis: This is the free online version of de Smith, Longley and Goodchild’s excellent book by the same title. It provides full coverage of current GIS methodologies. It also provides extensive information regarding the various GIS software available.

Analysing Spatial Point Patterns in R: 200 pages of workshop notes written by Adrian Baddeley. These provide extremely detailed and comprehensive overview of the spatstat in R.

GeoDa Center Tutorials: A range of tutorial material provided by creators of the GeoDa Software. I would focus on the R tutorials as the GeoDa tutorials are awaiting an update in line with the software’s latest release.

Spatial Stats. in ArcGIS: A preview chapter from the Springer’s Handbook of Applied Spatial Analysis.

CATMOGs: A hugely successful series of publications that cover the basics of spatial analysis, they have been written by many of the pioneers in the field. Topics include The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Openshaw), Voronoi (Thiessen) Polygons (Boots), Spatial Autocorrelation (Goodchild).

CASA Working Papers: A shameless plug for my fellow researchers. The nice thing about these is you don’t need to be part of an academic institution to access academic research.

I am sure there are many others and I welcome your suggestions…