Tell Us About Yourself
My name is Antonia Blankenberg. Alongside being a drummer with the fantastic TBL8 Brass, I’m a Lead Consultant in Utilities with Esri Ireland and I’ve been working in GIS for 6 years now. I’ve always been interested in geography, but I only first came across GIS during my undergraduate degree. I was so intrigued and inspired that I decided to further pursue the area, undertaking a Master’s degree in GIS which led me to where I am now. My current focus is accessibility in web mapping applications and how we can provide a better user experience for anyone who interacts with maps. A tricky challenge in the area of utilities, but important nonetheless!
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)
This map is all about space and distance. I made it as part of the 30 Day Map Challenge a couple of years ago, and it ended up being an interesting challenge. Taking the theme of space, I wanted to investigate the space in between cities to see if there were any kind of patterns in the distance. Topped off with a want to use some new colour palettes and symbology, the map turned out to show a cool web across Europe that highlights the closely packed cities in north-west Europe.
Tell us about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map!
This map uses Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) data on city locations. Taking that data, I used Python to get the five closest cities to each feature, create a line feature between each set of points, and record the distance against the line feature. This took me a few goes to get right, but I really enjoyed practicing something new in Python. This left me with a large web of lines, which I then symbolised with both colour and transparency in ArcGIS Pro. All that was left to do was to apply some fun legend symbols and text to the map, which was done in Canva.