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
2.2. Data
What data do we need to tell our story? In the case of the Paris cinemas, I needed the cinema locations, the streets, and the subway lines. In some cases, this is easier said than done. Data processing is pretty common at this stage to isolate just the pieces of a data you need or to convert the data into a different format. For the cinemas, I had addresses and those needed to be geocoded to create points. I had OpenStreetMap data for the line work, but that includes a lot more lines than I needed so I had to subset to the larger roads (excluding foot paths) and subways.