Maps and mappers of the 2019 calendar: Tom Chadwin

Q: Tell us about yourself

A: I live in deepest rural Northumberland, close to the England-Scotland border. I studied Middle Irish at university (coincidentally becoming friends there with Richard Fairhurst of OpenStreetMap fame), and then started work as a printer (not a successful one). I worked as a web designer in the days of version 3 of both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and then a web developer in the days of classic ASP, before .NET was invented. I’ve been in the public sector for over fifteen years now, most of them at Northumberland National Park, working on networking and open-source telephony, among many other things. We made the switch from MapInfo to QGIS many years ago now, and have never looked back.

I got involved with QGIS when I started to help out with the plugin qgis2leaf by Riccardo Klinger. Since then, I created qgis2web, which I still develop and maintain. I try to help out with QGIS and OSGeo events in the UK, and co-chaired FOSS4GUK 2018 with James Milner. Please come along to FOSS4GUK 2019 in Edinburgh this autumn!

Q: Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know)

A: In 2018, our local council proposed the closure of our local first school. Our daughter was in her last year at this amazing place, so we resisted. I thought that some striking maps might help our case, so I made one map of the proposed increase in journey-to-school time (below), and a second map of the signatories to the petition to save the school. The signatories map is the February 2019 GeoHipster map:

Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.

A: The map was built almost entirely in QGIS. I used GIMP to add the tilt-shift blur, and because of this blur, I had to use GIMP for the text as well. The data was scant to the point of naivety, being simply the postcodes of around 400 petition signatories.

The idea behind the map was to try to use this scant data in an emotive way, in what was an emotive argument. Visual appeal was of greater importance than spatial analysis, which is just as well, since I’m no spatial analyst. The scant data and the intent to grab attention led to my using the height of the styled points to denote not number of signatories, but proximity to the school. My hope was that this visualized how highly localized the support for the school was, a fact not immediately apparent from the raw data.

Technically, the overriding technique and principle behind the map is the separation of data from style. No processing at all was done on the data, which was a necessity because I was designing the map while the petition was still gathering signatures, so the data was changing all the time. All the heavy lifting is done by QGIS geometry generators, creating squares around the points, rotating and skewing them into faux perspective, and then extruding them into 2.5D symbols.

I had a huge amount of help from the Twitter carto community, without which I simply could not have built the map. I wrote about both maps in much greater detail on my website: tom.chadw.in/wrote/MappingEmotion.

The school was saved from closure, but further unwanted changes to our rural schools are ongoing, and the fight continues. Who knows whether this map had any effect on the Council, but it did result in a very old friend describing it as the “worst game of Risk ever”.