Mapping with CartoDB
Maps look fantastic. Let’s face it - be it old maps from times gone past that bubble up through social media into our timeline as some library publishes them online or the newest remix of Henry Beck’s infamous tube map, maps are visually striking and can convey insights to locative data that can be hard to see when just a collection of spreadsheet columns. They are also a great way to liven up reports and theses while conveying large amounts of data quickly and easily.
There are a number of tools that can be used for mapping, depending on your needs. CartoDB is one of the easiest to learn with broad applicability across a range of low level needs - a simple list of years and countries can be enough - here we can see the striking effect given exactly that dataset, representing the years that nation states developed constitutions, as presented by Anna Dziedzic, Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School.
Any data can be used so long as it has some sort of location information - a column each of latitude and longitude, a list of countries, states, provinces - in some cases local government areas will suffice.
For our workshops we used some Southern Rock Lobster data that was collected by Dr. Caleb Gardner and Peter Walsh at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, at the University of Tasmania. This data was collected for general purposes, with
thousands of different pot sets over many years, each with location, and with data on lobster catch (size, sex, damage to limbs, shell colour, tag number) and bycatch. There’s also habitat mapping data from that site.
With this data we can build a map quickly, and see straight away that there are two separate areas used to collect the data - just off the coast of Hobart near Taroona, and a much smaller data set at the south end of Marion Bay. We can also see that the lobsters have been measured and tagged in a regular pattern near Taroona, so presumably these are lobster pots. We can then start looking for patterns in the data visually.
All of this can be seen with a few minutes of work. The workshop we have developed gives users more experience configuring, customizing and presenting the data.
This work was made possible by funding from the Australian National Data Service to develop training materials showcasing Australian research data. We are very grateful for this support.
