Maps and Mappers of the 2019 calendar: Chris Van Pollard

Q: Tell us about yourself.

A: What’s up! I’m Chris, and I’ve been making maps and tinkering with GIS for over 19 years in the GIS Department at a Regional Planning Commission in the City of Brotherly Love (Philly, Philly!). I spend most of my days focusing on all aspects of geospatial technology, cartography, spatial thinking, and hacking away at web maps. I’m a huge ice hockey and coffee enthusiast, which helps fuel that passion to learn and improve my cartography and web mapping skills. Since 2012, I’ve been an adjunct professor at Rowan University, in Southern New Jersey, teaching young minds about GIS, the mystifying transformations of map projections, and cartographic design.

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: This map allowed me to combine my passion and love for ice hockey with that of cartography. I was inspired by the amazing work, map design, and GIS tools that carto-wizards John Nelson, Ken Fields, and Johan Adkins have been sharing with us lately. John’s series on Air Mile Index  gave me the initial idea that I wanted to map how far each NHL team travels throughout the season. I wanted to determine if there was a correlation between performance (wins) and how much travel affects the players throughout the season. I was able to find the 2017-2018 NHL Travel Super Schedule in a user-friendly spreadsheet listing all the games for the season. Next, I added the Latitudes and Longitudes for all of the “Home” game teams, and included a sequence/order so that I could generate an Origin/Destination pairing between games. Once I had the data prepared, I utilized ArcMap’s XY-to-Line Tool to generate the paths. I wanted to learn more about the layout tools and capabilities in ArcGIS Pro, so I decided that I would make this map within that platform. Before diving into this project, my ArcGIS Pro skills were limited, but through this process I was able to learn, fail, try again, and have fun while doing it.

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

A: Shapefiles, Shapefiles, and more Shapefiles. This map was made using ArcGIS Pro with a little data creation assistance from ArcMap. The symbology and transparency tools in ArcGIS Pro are incredibly exciting to work with, making map creation fun. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the Old School hockey mask to add that extra flair. Initially I needed to create a point shapefile, then I used the hockey mask as a marker symbol layer in Pro to allow me to adjust its transparency so that it faded into the basemap.

 


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