turning reality into a map

After working with the EDGE project for about a year and a half, it was still difficult to envision the island in a global, geographic perspective. I envisioned a map of Lingira. Simple but relatable. I knew that making a map of the island would require quite a bit of research and cooperation from the ladies who have travelled there in the past. Fortunately, they are awesome and have really helped me get all of the spatial topography together so people can see where SHIM actually is in relation to the other villages and where the primary school is in relation to the secondary school. Even more important, new members coming into EDGE will have an idea of Lingira's location within Uganda and Lake Victoria. As well as new members, interested donors and collaborators will have a simple idea of the island since it is going into our brochure that will be handed out by a couple EDGies at the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU) conference in San Diego, April 1st-3rd.

I have always found it difficult to understand everything about the EDGE project. It is sometimes quite frustrating to try and work on a project without knowing the place where you plan in implementing it. This is a major reason why traveling to the island will help me out with my research for the environment team. The map will hopefully help people relate to the island in a geographic manner.

To my surprise and appreciation, Google Maps had recently updated some of their satellite topological images of the earth and Lingira happened to be in this update. Now you can literally see the space between homes and the paths people walk on the island. This incredibly detailed image of the island has really helped with the production process. I began with a simple outline of the island and then created another data layer for different types of land-type on the island. I chose four "easily" definable categories: urban/village, agriculture, forest, and infertile/rocky. This part of the map is highly subjective and really just depends on my evaluation of what is forest and what isn't forest. If I spent the time, I could get every single tree onto the map but that would require too much time for an unnecessary amount of detail. Agriculture is what I perceived to be fertile land. It very well could be old plots that aren't productive any longer. Again, this map is a general look at Lingira for a simple purpose: so people can relate to the island in a perspective necessary for understanding its environment and global place.

I'm starting to sound like a soundboard for my geography department's mission statement.

Screen shot of Lingira from Google Maps

Thanks to the help of Abby Beissinger I was able to get information about the socio-cultural part of the island. We spent some time just looking at the image and she pointed out places on the map that were worth labeling. Most are buildings but there are even some highly subjective, perceptive areas such as "the rocks" that represent a rugged pathway from the Kyoya village to Lingira village. This is the part of Lingira that the map is truly about. It is nice to know where the forest is and where people's cropland is but more importantly, knowing the relationship between cultural and political aspects of the island are what people really relate to. As a non-traveler, you wouldn't know the route across "the rocks" children from Lingira village have to take to get to the secondary school by looking at a satellite image. This is a map of information that only a person can get by living and experiencing life on Lingira.

Final Product

A close up

One of my favorite design aspects of this map is the ripple effect radiating from the coast. A simple offset path program with increasing polygon sizes of 1.5X_offset allows for the dissipating water look. I want to thank Daniel Huffman, originally my TA for introduction to cartography and now teacher for the class, for showing me this effect, amongst many other things that I now know about mapmaking. His portfolio, SomethingAboutMaps and blog, Cartastrophe are here for anyone interested in checking out his newest thoughts and creations.

Let me know what you think about the map, all comments are appreciated!

Toodles from your local shapefile junkie