Reading List for NeoGeographers - Suggestions?
Posted by Aaron VanWieren on 14 Aug 2007 at 12:27 pm | Tagged as: Book shelf, Cartography And GIS
Neogeographers are the wave of the future… Or are they the bane and destruction of all that is spatial and cartographic? From a geography/GIS background, what books or resources do you think would give neogeographers an understanding to create meaningful cartographic output?
The idea of this post is to illicit suggestions from the geography/GIS community and to generate a running list of must read books and resources for neogeographers and the just plain curious.
In light of the recent blog article with Steve Chilton, Chairman of the Society of Cartographers, neogeography and neogeographers pose a difficult problems regarding quality and accuracy of cartographic output. It has been suggested that we, as a geographic community, should be responsible to assist and educate neogeographers on good solid cartographic and spatial concepts, eventually leading to better cartographic and thematic output (paraphrased with interpretation from interview).
I figured this would be as good a place as any to start a discussion on this. What I would like to hear is peoples suggestions for learning GIS, cartography(digital), spatial databases, etc., providing it is aimed at the neogeographer or untrained geographer in particular. I feel that as geographers and GIS practitioners we would have a much better suggestions as a group, rather than a single person coming up with a list. I don’t think this should be just books, but should include anything that is a great learning resource (IE: white papers, videos, websites, interviews, whatever). Also, if you want to second a suggestion just say so. I think this could be really interesting to see what can be compiled from this loose survey. So leave your recommendation in the comments and anything else you deem supports that recommendation.
Talk Hard!
I could recommend the Introduction to Neogeography shortcut (ok, I’m biased) - but it would be useful for someone first getting into Neogeography, or a Cartographer wanting to get a quick overview of the tools and aims of neogeographers.
Other books that I’ve found useful: Tyler Mitchell’s Web Mapping Illustrated is a good overview and introduction to open-source geo-tools. Scott Davis’ Pragmatic GIS (only available as beta PDF) so far is a good cross-over book that gives a lot of introduction to GIS concepts and tools.
ESRI actually has a good series of small books on GIS: The ESRI Guide to GIS Analysis gives a good high-level overview of mapping & analysis techniques and their A to Z GIS dictionary is a good reference for the various terms used in GIS.
I don’t have it yet, but Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS looks really good.
A couple of things to be aware of when recommending to Neogeographers. Many of ‘us’ do mapping on the side of our real jobs - as a hobby. This means we are learning and playing in our free time, on nights and weekends, and whatever we read probably has to be fun, engaging, lightweight, and practical. If I only have 4 hours to do some neogeo stuff, then I don’t want to spend that 4 hours pouring through a tome that is considered the “end all be all” of GIS practices.
Andrew,
Thanks for the suggestions, and good point about the light weight and fun comment. Even as a professional GIS developer I feel the very same. I prefer books that give me some sense of entertainment as well as knowledge.
Aaron W. Vanweiren
Damn you Andrew, that’s both my suggestions already taken!
I’ll add a second vote to Andrews list.
Aaron W VanWieren