════╡ ✱ Links & finds ✱ ╞════

Everything about this thread is wonderful. Rasagy Sharma and Arun Ganesh run a digital cartography module at National Institute of Design, Bangalore and this repository contains all their course materials and resources. What is even better is that student discussions and assignments are also public! You can see progress being made and iterations happen. The other ‘Issues’ on the repo are also worth strolling through.

As someone who restricts themselves to ‘available’ shapefiles for work and doesn’t really map from scratch, this is really educational for me too.

By far the coolest classroom I can imagine.

The Milestones Project is a comprehensive, visual compendium of significant events in the histories of data visualization, statistical graphics and thematic cartography. This new version features an interactive timeline, an interactive map of authors’ birthplaces, and a calendar of significant events in this history.

Amazing timeline tool. When did the first line chart or network diagram appear? How did we get from Edmund Halley’s contour map in 1701 to ggplot2?

Michael Friendly, the author of this project, also posts regularly on Bluesky in form of ‘Today in History’ posts, like this one.

I spend a lot of time at the IKEA in Bangalore since the restaurant is great to work from, but I rarely, if ever, actually wander through the store. The store’s lack of windows and the general sameness of the environment has confused me many times and until very late, I was not aware of the shortcuts I could take to get out faster.

Experienced IKEA shoppers may have noticed ‎that the shortcuts change over time. This is to prevent too many consumers from learning about and using them. And as part of the general retail principle of changing up the layout to keep repeat shoppers stimulated\ …\ The new IKEA line map dispenses with reality altogether – it is a purely abstract one dimensional representation of an intensely non-linear, two dimensional space. As a result, trans‎posing the map to the physical reality of the store now requires significant mental effort. Hence most shoppers give up and stick to the flow of the shopping path.

The author makes some valid points, but perhaps I wasn’t the audience this was written for because whenever I do roam the store, I love to do it. But it still has some great observations about wayfinding and the use of maps within the stores (I also didn’t know that the general layout is almost the same for every IKEA).

Being able to recognize which parts of a data visualization produce barriers for people with disabilities can be tough. But Chartability has compiled existing standards, research, and community best practices into a comprehensive set of things to look out for. Ideally, it can help folks who create visualizations really think deeply about accessibility when they design.

I’d like to get better at accessibility this year, for my websites and especially visualizations. I don’t think I can ever definitely arrive at a point where I can claim to do it perfectly but getting exposure to such ideas and incorporating them slowly is a start. Chartability is a set of heuristics to help do an audit for your visualizations, and comes with a ton of resources including a full example audit to help you understand how you can use it too.

A collection of concise write-ups on small things I learn day to day across a variety of languages and technologies. These are things that don’t really warrant a full blog post.

I’ve never been much of a tutorial guy, and the best way for me to learn something is either by encountering a problem on my own and working through it on a need-to-know basis, or watching someone else describe their own process of tackling specific problems. This repo is doing the latter very nicely.

I recently discovered the David Rumsey map archives and spent an hour or two looking through all the various tags and keywords. These maps and charts by Survey of India, mostly from 1895, are fascinating. The visualizations are clear, the maps are well-designed, and it is a pleasure to browse through. Not to be one to hark back to the supposed greatness of the past, but this is clearly leagues better than the kind of work we see come out of government publications today.

They have a habit to ask conductor about bus timings, and my map did not mention the timings- Instead of asking “does this bus goes to XYZ stand?” people ask “What bus is this?” followed by various questions. Most of the time the driver and conductor answered but when they are busy or tensed they tell people to ask their queries at the enquiry window.

\ We’ve been discussing making schematized, London-style spider-maps for BMTC bus routes over on the Bengwalk discord (which I definitely recommend joining if you live in Bangalore and are interested in public transportation) and that has sent me into a rabbit-hole of learning about octilinear, hexilinear and all those other kinds of transit maps. Professor Mundar Rane’s (IDC) blog is quite a nice find for me, and this particular post discusses their process and observations on making such a bus map for Pune. It’s easy to get caught up in the tech and design of things while missing things like the questions above because we take that for granted. Good read.