30 Day Map Challenge (2021)

About the challenge

The 30 Day Map Challenge is a global social media (mostly twitter) event, where all participants make and share maps based on daily prompts. My first attempt to join the challenge was last year (2020), but I shared only few maps then, and mostly, I just looked at the hashtag entries. The challenge gives us the opportunity to learn something new, to exchange knowledge, and to get inspired. Many people were asking why I "waste" my free time instead of working on papers/proposals etc. First of all, I don't see it as a waste of time. Second, this year, I actually did something work-related, which did not have a "project number", so I could not do in my working hours. The idea was to look into the spatial distribution of the groundwater monitoring wells in Denmark (GRUMO wells). I have been using different water chemistry data from this network, but I've never really spent time exploring the spatial distribution of the wells. I also used the 2021 challenge to try different types of spatial analyses or visualization types, which under normal circumstances I would not use, or would not have time to use.

Click here for more info about #30DayMapChallenge (github link by @tjukanovt)

The beginning (day 1-8)

So, as planned, I used the same dataset and template during the first 1-2 weeks. I found out that using the same dataset is quite limiting and gets boring. Here are the first 8 maps I prepared (it is a slider, so click on the arrow to see maps 2-8).

Mid-November boredom & pre-election mapping (day 12)

By this point I was getting tired of mapping the same dataset, so I decided to do something related (at least indirectly) to the Bulgarian elections. We had to vote for parliament 3 times this year, so that's taking a lot of my attention lately. There have been a lot of discussions about the low voting activity, but actually I haven't seen that many discussions (and numbers) on how many Bulgarians live abroad (and where specifically). Thanks to Danmark statistik, we have pretty good idea on the official residents from Bulgarian origin, living in Denmark. The statistics is broken down by sex, municipality (based on the current address), country of origin, nationality etc. I downloaded the data and prepared a map and few graphs. I wanted to use the colors from the Bulgarian flag, so that's the result. It is questionable, if it works from a design point of view... but I did not want to spend a lot of time on this either.

The linocut attempt (days 14 & 15)

I have been experimenting with linoleum printing for the last year (on and off), so I thought it may be a good exercise to try to make a map. It all started with quite ambitious map (see below). I made the map in QGIS and finished the design in InkScape (adding the logos of the 3 GEUS departments that work quite extensively with the GRUMO data. Then I realized, I need to mirror the image before I transfer it on the linoleum. Then, I used a linoleum cutter for carving, and water-based ink for the print. Both the ink and the paper type were new to me. In addition, this was the first time I used softcut linoleum. Up to now I was using traditional linoleum, but I quite like the soft one because I find it easier to work with. I think I will continue using softcut in future. So, overall this was very experimental, but I think it turned out quite ok. I am planning to use the block to print invitations for family and friends. So, again - not a waste of time 🙂

1) The idea (outline)

2) Mirror the image

1) The linoleum cutter (day 14)

2) The result (first 2 attempts) - map without using a computer (day 15)

It looks like I miss hydrology a bit... (day 18: Water)

By this point I already gave up on the challenge, but could not resist doing something for the "Water" prompt. Since the GRUMO wells don't fit well within the prompt, and I could not get an idea how to fit them, I decided to use different data-source. Here I experimented with multiple buffers and a new color palette.

Back to the original idea (days 27 & 29)

I felt a bit bad for quitting the challenge too early, so this was the last attempt. I got back to the original idea, so I can close the circle...

Collection of my relevant tweets

I don't really want to repeat all the details for each specific day, so instead I have collected here all the tweets with my entries for the #30DayMapChallenge, edition 2021. Hopefully next year I will get into the cool 3D stuff everyone seems to know how to do. The challenge is over for 2021, and I think I did great, or at least I did what I planned for "5-7 maps, ... all based on the same dataset". Let me know what was your favorite map!