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Kenneth Field shows you how to create great maps
199 Plays5 years ago
Kenneth Field is a ‘cartonerd’ with a Bachelors degree in cartography and PhD in GIS. A former academic who grew tired of admin, he ditched his 20 year career, moved to the US, and talks and writes about cartography, teaches,...
The post Episode #160: Kenneth Field appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Apology
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I hope everyone's well. I hope you're having a good kickoff to fall. Apologies for the lateness of this episode. I decided to go camping with the family last weekend and that took precedence because sitting around an open campfire is quite lovely, even in Western Maryland, where it was a little bit cool, but we did have a good time.
Guest Introduction: Kenneth Field
00:00:32
Speaker
Anyways, I'm excited to be back and have a new episode for you.
00:00:36
Speaker
This time we're going to be talking about maps. I'm really excited to have Kenneth Field on the show. I saw Ken speak at the Tapestry conference last year. He gave an amazing talk about maps. He has an unbelievably great book. It's like the Treatise on Maps cartography. I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You should really check out the book. I mean, it is a tome, but it is a beautiful book and it really does walk through everything you really need to know about data-driven maps.
Discussion on Maps: Data-Driven and Personal Views
00:01:05
Speaker
So Ken and I talk about the stuff that he's working on now, the biggest challenge with data driven maps, his favorite map, his least favorite map. We sort of try to cover the broad range of what's going on in the world of cartography all in one 30 minute conversation or so. So we try to pack a lot in. Before we get to the episode, just a quick note. If you're interested in supporting the podcast, please leave a review on your favorite podcast provider.
00:01:32
Speaker
iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, even Spotify now. The show is now on Spotify. If you'd like to support the show financially, please head over to my Patreon page. I support the show on my own with my handful of folks who are graciously supporting me and I'm really thankful that they take the time out and their funds to help me pay for the transcription services and audio editing and web services and all the things that are needed to bring this show to you.
Podcast Support and Workshops
00:01:59
Speaker
Also, if you are interested in attending a data visualization workshop, I have two public workshops left this year. I will be in Denver in early November and I'm teaming up with the University of Minnesota IPMS team. If you don't know what IPMS is, you should check out the show notes page and you can learn more about it. It's a combination workshop where I teach data visualization. They talk about how to use, download and analyze the data from the IPMS tool. So you really sort of get
00:02:26
Speaker
all the things you'll need to download, analyze, and visualize your data. And then later in November, I'll be in London to team up with my friend Stephanie Posovic. We'll be doing another one of our data design workshops in London. That week, I'll also probably be attending the Information is Beautiful Awards. I'll also be giving a talk for Sage Ocean and both of those.
00:02:47
Speaker
will be announced very shortly. I'm sure the Information is Beautiful Awards folks are about to announce their plans for their award show and Sage Ocean will soon put the announcement up for the talk that I'll be giving there in London the week before Thanksgiving. And then I come home and I'm taking a few weeks off. We've got some big family events coming up.
00:03:07
Speaker
here at the Schwabisch household in Northern Virginia. So anyway, back to the show with Ken Field. I hope you'll enjoy this interview. I really enjoy talking to him. I really enjoy learning more about maps and I hope you will too.
Ken's Academic Background and Career at Esri
00:03:20
Speaker
So here's my interview with Ken. Hey Ken, how is it going? How's the wind down to your summer? Hi John. Yeah, doing good. Beautiful weather out here. Yeah.
00:03:36
Speaker
Lovely. It's like in the like high nineties here. And it's like walking through soup when you go outside. Yeah. I mean, we're in the nineties pretty much permanently over here until it hits triple figures. But for a Brit, that's kind of a different difference to, you know, sort of gray, cold, wet, you know, I did 40 years of that. Now I think I'm going to do 40 years of this. And then on average, on average, you get that line.
00:04:05
Speaker
Um, so I'm excited that we're able to chat. I really liked your talk from tapestry last year. And I think I bought your book like on my phone as you were talking. Um, so I want to talk all about the book and about maps, but, um, maybe we'll just start by having you talk a little bit about you, uh, your background, what you're doing now. And then we can, we can chat about some maps. Okay. Yeah, great. I'm glad you, I found out finally who the person was that bought the book. That's great. Thank you. Um, so.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, that was fun. Tapestry was great. I like to challenge myself by going to sort of conferences and events that are a little outside of my normal bounds, you know, the sort of groups that you normally go to. And I guess that's really characterised what I've always done. So I mean, I'm an ex-academic. I spent 20 years in the UK as a sort of lecturer, principal lecturer and leader of various GIS and cartography courses at different universities. And that was fun. That was great. And
00:05:05
Speaker
loved helping students develop their skills. And it's so fulfilling to see some of them now in the industry and doing great stuff themselves. But then I just sort of, the truth of the matter is I just got a little bored of all the bureaucracy and admin, like a lot of academics do. And I had an opportunity to move out to sunny California and kind of do an academic's job at Esri, the GIS company in Redlands, Southern California.
00:05:34
Speaker
all the fun of being an academic and you know writing about maps and teaching and workshops and you know helping people who use the software make better maps and I got to do all without having to grade coursework so and sit in endless committee meetings and you know bid for funding monies to support some obscure piece of research that would never really get done and yeah
00:05:59
Speaker
Uh, yeah, I've been here eight years now and I'm, I'm loving it. It's, it's great. That's great. And so is your role there to direct research and then train people both on like general cartography skills and also in the tool itself? Well, you saw, I'd love, I'd love that to be the case, but the truth of the matter is for a mapping company, we have maybe, I don't know, probably a dozen cartographic experts, you know, people who would call themselves cartographers. And I guess I fit within that, um,
00:06:27
Speaker
that bunch of people, but there is no sort of cartographic unit. There's no, there's no fundamental mapping core group of people. We're kind of spread out throughout the company. I actually work on a team that's responsible for the development of one of our core products, ArcGIS Pro. And I work on what's called the map authoring team. So my job title is senior cartographic product engineer, which is kind of
00:06:54
Speaker
I've never engineered anything in my life. And we have great developers who actually build the software. But what I do, along with a lot of others, is help direct what they need to be building and to define what map makers and cartographers want to be able to do with the software and how they want to be able to use it. And I guess I'm sort of colloquially referred to in-house as the resident cartographer, which
00:07:24
Speaker
Sounds a bit temporary to me, but, you know, you have to, who's next? Who's the next resident? Yeah, right. Who's the next guy? Yeah. I was looking over your shoulder. Yeah. But it's good because I can, you know, I can sit and help. I also get to a lot of what I do in terms of making the maps has done really primarily test the software to try to test it to destruction. Right. So, you know, there's a lot of testing goes on in-house on small data sets and, you know, it's a tick box thing. All right. Passes the test. Therefore,
00:07:53
Speaker
the software is fit for purpose. But what I try to do at the same time is throw several gigabytes worth of stuff at the software and see if it passes those sort of tests, the tests of making a real map and going through a lot of the pain points that people would have to in the real world. And then the side aspect to that is obviously I can publish the maps, I can talk about them, I can explain how they were made and what the tips and tricks were and
00:08:22
Speaker
In that way, it generates sort of educational products and stuff to support people in their own work. Right. Are most of the people that you work with making those really data intense maps, or is it on the other side of the spectrum where it's the, you know, not as data heavy, you know, smaller data? I think, I think at a company wide level, it's everything. I mean, we, you know, the software supports national mapping agencies doing topographic reference sheets all the way down to.
00:08:51
Speaker
you know, just just a small, you know, one person new shop who's just got some interesting data about something and they're trying to create an interesting web map. And, you know, our sort of product range, I guess, falls across the spectrum, I tend to, I tend to dabble in a bit of all of that stuff, you know, sometimes I'm keen to make a nice looking top graphic map and to explore those sort of cartographic challenges. And other times, you know, it's like, right, how
00:09:21
Speaker
How weird and wonderful can I corral this data set into some bizarre visualization, just as an experiment sometimes? Perhaps just to, I joke around here that I'm a bit of a 3D skeptic, but I'm forever trying to challenge myself to put data into a 3D view mode, just to see whether it offers anything different or whether 3D brings something new or gives us new insights to something. So I can sort of shape shift a little bit between the sort of mapping
00:09:51
Speaker
tasks that I take on. And what I'm really grateful for is the freedom of flexibility to basically pick my own tasks. So if a new data set appears on the scene, I'll grab it. Let me see what I can do with it. Or I sometimes have challenges with some of our other guys here, like John Nelson. And we take the same data set, right? What are you going to do with it, John? Or what am I going to do with it? And let's see how
00:10:19
Speaker
how different people can approach the same thing. And that to me has always been a fascinating part of the job is, you know, you give a data set to 10 different people and you will more than likely as not get 10 different outputs, 10 different maps, some maybe not even maps, you know.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you have this great book cartography and obviously spend your days working in and thinking in maps. What draws you to maps? I don't actually know how I mean that question, but it's not like people are like, Oh, I'm a bar chart person. I like bar charts. I think, you know, maps or maps are sort of like this, like this kind of separate thing because they are so complicated and there's all these different representations. So, you know, what draws you to trying to unlock the mystery and the magic behind maps?
Maps as Art and Design Process
00:11:05
Speaker
What a great question. How long have we got? I mean, I think I'll just let you go. I'll just, I'll find my headphones. I'll come back in a little bit and see if you're still talking. Coffee. I think. All right. I mean, so I can look at this on a couple of different levels. If I think, think about it personally. You know, I grew up around maps. My father was a geologist and, you know, the house was full of these really bizarre, abstract maps. And what are these things? These
00:11:35
Speaker
these geology maps, you know, we'd go out and he'd knock bits of grey lumpy stuff off a cliff and then you'd go back into the university and suddenly it's this bizarre multicolored thing on a piece of paper and it's like, how does that work? And so I think I was always enthralled with them. I enjoyed geography and art and technical drawing and so on at school. I looked for a degree course at university that would give me the opportunity to basically take those loves
00:12:05
Speaker
further forward. And that's, by the way, I really wanted to be a surgeon. But I was terrible at chemistry. I never knew you needed chemistry to be a surgeon. But there you go. And then I thought architecture, but it's like a seven year course. And I want to earn some money before that. So there's practicalities. And I found a course called cartography in the UK at Oxford Polytechnic, as it was. And it seemed to me to be a great way to spend another three years basically just doing what you enjoyed.
00:12:36
Speaker
And I kind of fell into it, I fell into the teaching aspect of it, because just about the point at which I graduated, this thing called GIS came along and basically killed professional cartography. So you know, those old office drawing labs, they all sort of went. So I fell into teaching and just ended up trying to use others to have that same passion.
00:13:01
Speaker
So that's on the personal side. I think on the why do people love maps question and why is it so interesting? I think basically they're pieces of art. I think people always gravitate to art of some form or another, whether it's film, music, you know, painting, whatever it is. But even within each of those genres, you know, we all have likes and dislikes. You know, some people like heavy rock music. Some people like rap. Two very, very different forms of
00:13:31
Speaker
basically the same thing. And you could see, you can see that parallel in mapping, you know, you basically got data that you can create something visual out of. And it creates an interesting visual system and an explanation of that data. And you can have very, very different representations of that same data, which yields different impressions, different interpretations,
00:13:56
Speaker
And again, neither of which may be correct or incorrect, but they are facets of the same visual conversation. And that to me is always interesting. So every day you come to work and you can create a new map. You've got a blank screen or a blank piece of paper. What are you going to come up with today?
00:14:18
Speaker
And do you still work with pen and paper when you're designing a map? Even if it's, you know, ultimately going to be on green? Are you working in the analog world first to sketch out ideas? Yeah, I do. Maybe that's a function of my age a little bit. You know, I come from a hand drawn cartographic era. That's what I did in my in my university days, you know, drawing and
00:14:45
Speaker
photographic film and negatives and print plates and all that other sort of stuff. And I still now I get a piece of paper out if I'm thinking of a new map and I just jot down ideas, sketch and not very well, but just just visual ideas. And I guess some people would do that digitally, you know, some people might naturally go straight digital, but I still think sketching, sketching out and wire framing and, you know, getting a whiteboard and just
00:15:15
Speaker
messing about is a great way to think. And that's where I think the art in cartography is. And what a lot of current maps, I guess, might be missing is that sort of time that you spend drafting and sketching and thinking, rather than just going straight into your favorite software, dragging the data in, hitting a few buttons, and seeing what the software can do. I prefer coming at maps of what do I want it to look like, and then how can I
00:15:43
Speaker
crack the software to make it do that. And it doesn't always work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's interesting that, and it doesn't surprise me given that that's where you, you're, you started your training, but it is interesting how it sounds like you take a bit more of, um, if you thought about making a data map, uh, and split into sort of a design side versus a data driven side, it sounds like you start by coming from the design side a little bit more in the data side and then move together.
00:16:11
Speaker
Possibly, but I mean, most of the maps I make are data driven in the sense that if the data changes, I can switch the new data in and re-render it and it'll work. I was never one of these people who was satisfied with, you know, pulling data into something like Illustrator, making the map and saying, there it is, because two weeks later, it's out of date and you've got to start again. But I think what that kind of training did for me
00:16:40
Speaker
And let me be clear, I wouldn't want to go back to those days whatsoever. I mean, three months to make a single choropleth map is not fun. But what it made you do was really think very, very hard because you really only got one chance to do it. Otherwise you've got to do two months worth of work again. And the cost of materials and time meant that
00:17:06
Speaker
you really didn't have opportunity to screw up, you had to get it right, or as right as you could. And I guess now, you know, you can, it doesn't matter if you mess up inside your software, you just sort of, all right, delete that layer and rerun it or do something else again. So I think that element of time that has been compressed massively these days, I mean, it gives us wonderful opportunities because
00:17:36
Speaker
We can experiment and we can try things out and we can do all sorts of things and there's no real great harm or cost involved. But yet, if we're setting out to make the map the best we can make it, that time spent sketching and thinking and working stuff out, I still think is critical, even though the technology is now massively improved and allows us to be much more rapid in our
00:18:09
Speaker
When I talk to students about maps, I sort of couch the whole thing or frame the whole thing as two competing instincts. I want to get your take on this. On the one hand, people love maps because they are familiar. They see a map of the United States and they recognize it and they can find themselves on the map. We know that people like to find themselves. But on the other hand, the data maps are not always the best way to actually show the data.
00:18:26
Speaker
map making.
00:18:36
Speaker
Um, you have these distortions that the example that I always like to show, which you have a bunch of these on, on your website is, um, you know, the electoral college where, you know, a lot of the big States and square miles don't actually have a lot of people in them. So they're not particularly important for the, for electoral college. So this is my perspective is that there's this tension that people like maps, but they're not always great at showing data. And to adjust one of those things, you have this offset on the other, on the other one. So I'm curious about your.
00:19:04
Speaker
Your take on that and sort of an extension to that question is when you're teaching people about how to make maps, how do you start and frame this whole discussion about making data-driven maps?
Teaching Map-Making and Balancing Design
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you're spot on. I think there is a tension. And I think it begins with the fact that we're often making maps for people who have very little experience in how to interpret those maps. So they really
00:19:32
Speaker
rely on familiarity, which is why you get a lot of the same type of maps a lot of the time. And talking about election maps, you will get a choropleth, you get the red-blue choropleths, you get the maps that people are familiar looking at, hopefully because that means they've got less of a barrier to interpret them correctly.
00:19:57
Speaker
So the problem comes then when you're trying to use a data set that's a little bit obscure maybe, or you're trying to make a point that's a little bit hard to tease out of the data. And then maybe there's nuance in the map that is difficult to find. So sometimes you exaggerate it, you modify the map to tell that story, you do things cartographically to really punch out that message. And sometimes that can really knock people off balance because
00:20:25
Speaker
they expect one thing and then they're challenged visually to try to see something they're not familiar with and try to interpret it. So how do I start telling people how to do this effectively is basically just to impress upon them that there is no right and there is no wrong way to make the map. So you're making the map based on all sorts of choices and constraints which
00:20:52
Speaker
create this sort of soup. And after that soup, you've got to create you've got to sort of pull out the map that is going to do that particular job for that particular user group for that particular set of conditions and environments and for that particular message and so on and so forth. And sometimes it might not be the map you think you're going to make. And that's okay. So it's it is a perpetual challenge. It's a perpetual tension. And I think the best
00:21:21
Speaker
best thing that anybody making maps or, you know, just database in general can do is, is step back from it and have an appreciation that the person that's going to read that is going to read it a particular way. And we can mess around with graphics and graphic signage to tap into people's sort of subconscious perceptual and cognitive characteristics, things that we know that the brain does that people aren't necessarily aware of, but nevertheless,
00:21:51
Speaker
That's what it's doing. That's how it's making you read something. And we can do that, and we can do that objectively, or we could do it to make a persuasive map. We could play with those things in lots of different ways, but to be aware that that's what we're doing, and to maybe step back from the map and ensure that you're meeting the objectives you want for that particular user group. And experiment, because it's very unlikely that
00:22:19
Speaker
the first map you make is going to necessarily be the best. I mean, there's sort of maps I would default to as a quick and dirty test. But, you know, I'll probably try something different. And then there's a whole spectrum of maps from the very simple to the obscenely complex. And they can work in different ways, you know, proportional symbol map is going to go lovely in a report. But not on the cover of a
00:22:47
Speaker
book or a poster, you know, you want something a little bit more impactful. So you might go for something just a little bit more challenging visually. So when you're going through that process, are you thinking about both the projection of the actual map and then to all these other classes of cardograms and objects and things we can put on the map? Because the projection thing is something that I just, I kind of ignore.
00:23:12
Speaker
Because, you know, it's not, it's like, it seems like a rabbit hole that I just don't want to get into, but I suspect that it's something that you and others, people that you work with take it really seriously. And so how do you balance these two and make these decisions as you progress through a project? Well, I mean, the projections issue is interesting. I think people, people are frightened about it because it's fundamentally about, about math, you know, and I balk at that. I don't want to get involved with all of that.
00:23:41
Speaker
Well, I mean, the beauty these days with most software packages, you don't have to worry about it. You just have to make a decision about which is the most effective projection to act as the scaffold for your map. And that's what it is. It's the scaffold, it's the framework. And without a correct framework, it doesn't matter what you're going to show, you can make a real mess of it. I mean, fortunately in the US, you've got a size and shape that just works well with Alba's equal area projection.
00:24:11
Speaker
which, and I know you have to move Alaska a little bit in Hawaii and so on, but it just works. It's a nicely balanced shape. It works great in landscape. And crucially, the data, it works as well. So whenever you're making maps of population-based data, the fundamental issue is you need an equal area projection. And without that, you are going to introduce all sorts of visual
00:24:39
Speaker
issues into the map that make interpreting it a lot harder and will force people into seeing the map a way in which the data actually doesn't support. It's just that the projection has morphed it into something that says something slightly different. So I guess, I mean, it's important, particularly with smaller scale maps, the larger you go, as in the smaller area, if you're just making a map of a town or a city, no.
00:25:08
Speaker
projections are irrelevant largely because it doesn't matter. But if you're making maps at a country or a continental scale or a global scale, then they matter very much. And I guess I'd be foolish not to comment on Web Mercator at this point, because everyone knows to hate it, right? I mean, I would counter that. There is nothing wrong with Web Mercator.
00:25:35
Speaker
I mean, from a technical point of view, it made a lot of sense to go down that route for making web maps way back when. I say way back when. We're only talking 15 years or so. But they don't support every type of mapping that you might want to publish on the web. And this isn't so much a problem of Web Mercator. It's a problem of people not being willing to just go that extra mile to change the projection to suit the map that they're making.
00:26:04
Speaker
And pretty much every major mapping platform allows you to do that now. We've gone beyond having to be forced to use Web Mercator for data maps. And really, they should be consigned to history now. If you're going to make a data map with Web Mercator now, you're frankly just being a little bit lazy these days. So Web Mercator is fine if you want to navigate the globe in a canoe.
00:26:33
Speaker
That's his purpose. That's why it was made for navigation, but it's not for showing population data and so on. You mentioned that the Albers projection, at least for the United States, are there other projections that you think people should use or maybe don't get the attention that they deserve? Not explicitly. I don't have a favorite projection.
00:27:01
Speaker
I don't go down to most photographers have a favorite. I think some would say, you know, they like things like the bond projection, which is the heart shaped one. But they're really they're really just curiosities. You know, you can't do anything particularly useful with those. I think rather than saying which projections good and which is not so good, I would just scrape off a layer. It's not about trying to find a projection. It's about employing the special property of a projection.
00:27:30
Speaker
So properties such as equal area or conformality where angles are equivalent across the map. You know, these properties are what drives the projections purpose and its usefulness to you. So I got a colleague here called Bojan Soric, who was one of the authors of the viral hit the equal earth projection from last year. And he's also created a tool called Projection Wizard.
00:27:59
Speaker
if you just google projection wizard it'll it'll pop up and it's great because what it allows you to do is just zoom into a part of the world you're interested in mapping and it will give you choices for that part of the world at that particular scale and say here is your best projection for for mapping data for equal area here is your best projection if you're doing a let's say an aeronautical charter or something else so it it's not difficult to
Projection Choices and Iconic Maps
00:28:29
Speaker
to just select an appropriate projection these days. So it's not really about a favourite or least favourite or it's about selecting the special property of a projection that makes most sense to you.
00:28:44
Speaker
Um, your book is massive. It's like a tour de force of, of math. Um, and so I want to ask you two quick questions before we go. So I want to know, maybe you don't have specific answers for these, but do you have a favorite map of all time and a least favorite map of all time? Either yours or others. Yeah. Okay. Um, and by the way, thanks for
00:29:05
Speaker
Thanks for constantly bringing the book up. That's that was supposed to be my job. Yeah, that was supposed to be my job, I think. Yeah. Yeah, what it is a monster. I was privileged to be given the freedom and flexibility to basically just write the book I wanted to write. And that was that was that was a wonderful opportunity. So my favorite map, my all time favorite map is Harry Beck's 1933 London Underground map.
00:29:35
Speaker
Um, some people might even call it a diagram. Um, it's a schematic map. It does a perfect job of showing the roots, uh, in and around London, simple lines, horizontal, vertical, 45 degrees, color coded symbol, so stations. That's it job done. And it's the basis for every subsequent Metro map. I mean, we can go into the history and we can basically prove that Beck didn't invent the schematic map, but that's by the by.
00:30:04
Speaker
I think he was in the right place at the right time to capture a sense and a mood of graphic design in London in the 1930s. And that map fitted very nicely into that overall aesthetic that was being pushed at the time. I hate the current map. So it goes to prove that an idea from the 1930s, if you just keep assisting with it,
00:30:30
Speaker
and basically just keep adding more data and adding more lines and adding more colors and adding more information. You end up with a complete mess. So, you know, it's not that I like the London Underground map. I think the current one, the current official one, I think is an awful piece of work. It's just way too cluttered. But yeah, that classic 1933 original one is my favorite. And you could argue that if Beck was making the map of today's
00:31:00
Speaker
massively more complex network, he may not even have taken the approach that he took because it doesn't necessarily suit the purpose of today's map. Since you had mentioned the change in technologies, how much do you think his decision making was driven by the technology he had at the time? Well, I mean, he was an electrical draftsman and his job was basically creating schematics of electrical wiring diagrams.
00:31:29
Speaker
So you can see that he obviously, literally, quite literally drew from his experience, the technology that he was used to using and made a map that made sense to him. Yeah, you maybe do it differently today, if you were starting from scratch.
Viral Maps and Quality Concerns
00:31:48
Speaker
My least favourite map, just to finish off that, really hard question. There isn't a map I dislike particularly,
00:31:58
Speaker
but there is a map type that I dislike. And that's any map that seemingly goes viral across social media when it has absolutely no qualities whatsoever. It's the map that's nonsense. It's the map you look at and you can see holes in it, you can see problems, you can see the way in which the map readers have been tricked into thinking it's great. And unfortunately, before you know it,
00:32:28
Speaker
half a million people have said, hey, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my life. And then it just goes crazy from there. And some little corner of the internet with a cartographer going, excuse me, this is, this actually isn't a very good map. That doesn't, that doesn't wash. So that's my, and of course, you know, the converse is true. I've seen people, you know, it makes them absolutely wonderful work. And no one ever sees it. It doesn't, doesn't
00:32:56
Speaker
cause even the slightest blip. So it's not really that there's a map I like. It's really the environment of today's rapid sharing, uptick kind of world and how that doesn't necessarily equate to the quality of the piece of work that people are taking. It's just stuff. There's a lot of noise. There's some great stuff in it, but there's a lot of noise. Yeah, the one map I do dislike is my own. I made a map in
00:33:27
Speaker
2009, a map of Irish surnames, and I hate it. It's it's one of those, it's one of those things I did for a particular reason and a particular time in my life. And it comes back every single year around St. Patrick's Day. And I look at I look at you know, it's just like that. I know it's like that band with that one classic single that they come to hate because they've got to play it every gig. And
00:33:55
Speaker
And they desperately want their fans to listen to their super cool new work that they've spent ages crafting. No, they want to hear the classic. They want to hear that one. That mbop is a good song. Wow, I never thought that a crop up today. I should try to get Hansen into every episode of the show. That should be a new goal.
00:34:21
Speaker
Well, I'll put links to all this stuff on the show notes so people can check it out, including your site and your book and the Projection Wizard. I'm sure people would like to play around with that too. So thanks for taking the time and chatting with me. Yeah, it's probably been fun. Thanks.
00:34:42
Speaker
And thanks to you for tuning in again this week. I hope you enjoyed the show. I hope you learned something. I do hope you'll check out Ken's website. He's got a lot of great tutorials and a lot of great examples on the page. Also check out his book. It's linked on the show notes page. Really check it out. It is an amazing book that will help you improve the way you use maps in your data visualizations.
00:35:02
Speaker
And if you'd like to support the show, please consider leaving a review. Please consider going over to my Patreon page or just give a shout out to the show on Twitter, Facebook, or your favorite social media platform. So until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.