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.
3. Hands On
3.1. What story are you trying to tell?
The Premise of this Exercise
Let's pretend we want to a map for a journal article about the underpinnings of the distribution of cryptozoology sightings in the northeastern US and southeastern Canada, focusing on lake monsters, creatures reported to live in lakes that are mainly known from folklore and typically take on the the shape of extinct or extraordinarily large living reptiles. You want your readers to understand the relationship between the monster locations and also their location on the planet. In our imaginary scenario, we plan to submit our paper to one of the Nature journals.
What's the story? What should readers learn from this map? What data do you need to tell that story effectively?
The story I plan to tell is where are these monsters reported to live? What are their names? For reference, what lakes and states or provinces are they in? The story you want to tell might be different, so feel free to make adjustments as needed.