Tutorial Cartography for Map Figures in Academic Journals & Books
This workshop will discuss approaches and guidelines for creating map figures for academic books and journals. I will use QGIS to illustrate one workflow in a graphical GIS. This general workflow can be applied to other graphical GIS programs or even non-map figures.
This workshop was developed by Dr. Michele Tobias from UC Davis (GPL 3.0 license) and updated to QGIS 3.22 with some minor changes by Dr. Hans van der Kwast, published on GISopencourseware. The original workshop can be found here.
2. Steps in Making a Map for a Journal Figure
2.1. What Story Are You Telling?
The very first thing you need to do is understand what story you need to tell. Why are you making this map? What should the reader learn from this map?
Here's one real life example. I made a set of maps for a professor in Sociology. He was writing a book about cinemas in Paris. He needed readers to understand the location of the cinemas he wrote about in relation to other key features like subway lines and streets. So that's the story - where are the cinemas in relation to the streets and subways?
