Spatial Data Visualisation with QGIS

This repository contains the material connected to a workshop developed for CDCS by Tom Armitage on spatial data visualisation. Attendees will be guided step by step on how to produce effective map visualisations with QGIS. In this repo you will find

• the Workbooks of the three sessions (Session 1.pdf,Session 2.pdf, and Session 3.pdf)
• The Dataset folder containing the data for the two sessions (SDV_QGIS_1.zip and SDV_QGIS_2.zip). In order to use the dataset you will need to download and unzip the files to an easy to access location on your machine.

Topics and Content

Session 1 -

Getting Started:

1. Brief familiarization with QGIS, installing plugins and web base maps.
2. A review of cartographic and visualisation principles to be reinforced with each exercise.

Visualising Point Data:

Bringing in a point data file from excel and exploring more advanced cartographic styles.

1. Proportional Symbols

2. Heat Maps (turning points to raster surfaces) a. Basic for visualisation b. Advanced for analysis

3. Turning points into choropleths a. Counting points within boundaries and grids b. Normalising and Visualising the results

Session 2 - Monday 29th March, 14:00 - 15:30

Visualising Area Data:

Using election results to explore advanced representations. “Land doesn’t vote”, so how can we represent the density or volume of a phenomena rather than the extent that it occurs over:

1. Hexmaps / Cartograms a. Warping or redrawing boundaries to better show votes rather than area

2. Dot Density Maps a. Representing votes as points on a map

3. Prism Maps (3D) a. Creating 3D visualisations for export to the web

Temporal Mapping:

Using QGIS’ temporal controller to show change in data.

1. Animating Points
2. Animating Heat maps

Author

Tom Armitage

Topics

Data Visualisation, GIS

License

All material here collected is free to use but it is covered by a License: CC BY-NC 4.0 license