Friday GeoCommons Fun, Become Your Own Maptoonist, or Cartoonagrapher.

Earlier this week at FortiusOne we were discussing cool uses of our new temporal timeline.  Earlier Sean Gorman showed how it can be used to animate one’s social stream in his post “GeoCommons and Wonderchook’s Fourth Dimension (a.k.a.) Temporal Fun.”  Bill Greer took this one step further with the creation of “Polygon Man Goes for a Swim.”

Polygon Man Goes for a Swim

Impressed with Bill’s “Cartoongraphy,” I asked him how he did it. Turns out it was relatively simple. The first step is to draw all your animation frames using Google My Maps. To do this you just go to Google Maps and click “My Maps” and “Create New Map.” In My Maps draw all the frames for your animation. Select the drawing tools in the upper right hand corner of the map.

Next select “Draw a Shape” and draw the first frame of your animation. When you complete the polygon a info window will pop-up make the title of that polygon the numeric order of your animation. So the first polygon should be titled “1″ and the second “2″ and so on. If you have more than one polygon you want to appear in the same frame give them the same numeric value. Once your animation is complete select “View in Google Earth” and save the KML file. Upload this file into GeoCommons. Now you need to add time to your animation. Make a new spreadsheet in Excel or OpenOffice, give it to columns “name” and “timestamp.” In the name column put a numeric value for the total number of frames you want in your animation. For example my animation has 16 frames so I’m going to make 16 rows numbered 1-16. For the timestamp I use simple dates i.e. (1/1/10) and then format them. Highlight the timestamp row and right click and select format, choose a format that contains date and time (MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS for example). Now save your spreadsheet as a CSV and upload it.

The key step in the upload process is the “geolocate” step. Select “Join with a boundary dataset,” normally on this step you then join against country, county, state or other boundary information to make a thematic map. In our case we are going to join the time values to the frames of our animation. The next screen will say “Now, help us geolocate your data,” in the text box search for the animation data you want to join to the time information and select your layer. Next select the column in each dataset that has the numeric frame numbers. If everything has gone right you should get a message that says “Success!” and that all of your features match. Click continue and finish the upload process. Once this is complete click ‘Make a Map.”

Select “Reference Map” in the first step of the Map Brewer.

On Step 2 select “Animate this data using the attribute below:” and choose “timestamp.” The temporal animation interface should come up, select finish, choose a color for your animation and a title for your map, then save your map.

So that’s how you become a cartoonagrapher. If you make one, tag it “wooo” and let us know about it.

Man/Fish Frolick