Developer Spotlight: Notable People Map with Topi Tjukanov
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a few weeks ago the mapping world was consumed by an amazing global map of notable people with each person's name centered over their place of birth the map went viral as just about everyone can find something interesting as they explore the notable people in their corner of the earth i caught up with the developer fellow map boxer to learn more about how this map came into existence what inspired him to build it and how it's been received join me now for a chat with topi from our map design team hey everyone so i'm here with topi who is a senior map designer based out of helsinki who works for mapbox but today we're going to talk with him about his notable people map so topi you can introduce yourself a little bit and then jump right in and share screen and then we'll talk about that we'll show the app and then we'll talk about a little bit yeah cool uh thanks chris um yeah you heard it i'm i'm a map designer um based in helsinki i've been doing map design i think for maybe seven-ish years my background background is in geography realized that twitter is a nice channel map designs and an odd data explorations and visualizations and and whatnot and maybe this uh is a part of that i i made it a a few weeks ago uh i did it during work hours it wasn't initially like related to anything like we recently launched the globe and and internally we thought that yeah maybe it's nice to get some nice um like show to people how you could use the globe i got this idea a bit later late but then i think i when i when i saw the data set that i used for this map i i but eventually i was pretty happy how how it was received so i don't feel bad anymore about spending a few few hours here and there there on it yeah so maybe i should tell something about like how i ended up doing the actual map and many people have asked um how i found the data or like what there's this nice uh newsletter called like into database or or data analysis or data exploration i highly recommend um i've found inspiration for many of my visualizations from from this newsletter so it's like weekly newsletter that which i used was featured here uh so the data set is this uh it's a cross verified database of notable and it's made by real scientists unlike referenced as a as a science researcher in some of the news articles where where there's a there's a whole article on on the actual data set and they data set openly openly too and then i article mentions two things birth locations shouldn't be used as such and secondly people shouldn't be the rank of people shouldn't be used like to compare different people i'm using both in my map because this is for for fun this is not science uh what is what is rank if it's not for comparison to other people with rank um it's just a kind of like a guideline or it's it's it's a bit vague i would say but maybe it's uh it's a bit it becomes a bit too serious to see like who's number one and who's number two but yeah i i used both of the those those things in my map those both of them are essential in in the map there's a link to this and on on the site and then there's also a link to this one this is a map by the pudding from i would say maybe four years back uh it's a people map of the us i got very inspired actually made with my very inspired by this when i saw this initially and and and i thought that like i really want to do something either with in finland or then globally and then when i saw this data set just what about the globe features we have i thought that it's a great match data analysis a bit of data crunching and and this is the result condensed the data set down in in the chose one person uh with with with the highest rank for each location so born in helsinki uh it only only shows the person with with the highest rank so does that mean you had to you had to choose i guess like central places or notable places to actually filter the data set by like did you just pick cities or towns or some other proxy for i i used each er each unique location so uh that's that was my idea was that i the map to be full of names i wanted to have like a good geographical spread and actually did the data analysis in in uh so that's where i did some basic sql uh with the data and grouped it grouped it by by location so are you saying that there's a lot of people who are named in the original data set that just wouldn't show up at all because they're not the exactly exactly so there's like some people were asking like uh i think it was from from new york some people were asking like why why we have not surprising that that came up but people were asking like why is this or that person not visible in this city actually vladimir putin was one yeah vladimir putin was one that a few people asked like what where is he uh but he was like he's not as notable and you can look out you have when i click on one you can link out and go read more about this person from the pop-up you can you can access access the wikidata page of that that if if this would be super fancy and would have all the features it would use the weekly data api to get like a nice small picture there and maybe a description but there's actually the this just a single html file so there's like i don't have my own back end server running anywhere or anything like that i so did you actually like load the data into mapbox tiling service or where is the data actually stored yeah great question so um i first crunched the data in post gis then from postgas i exported geojsons and then the geojsons i with macbook styling service into vector and i actually used some of the uh tiling service documentation there were like nice instructions on how to uh vector files for place names and i used exactly the example that uh that that was available there because basically exactly the same way as as place names i uh and then i'm um deciding i'm ordering the names based on that and that decides then from uh from those vector tiles i actually did the initial design in map box studio so i created this base map uh i basically created created this out of one of the studio templates so i and then in studio i added the the tile layers there because i wanted to play names look like and how how like how how bold some names are how big some names are how they appear on the map like zoom expressions and everything so i i did that in studio uh and then from studio i actually took like the uh the styling and and then use awesome and what i really love about this is that it it's it's just using the same technique that is in place on pretty much every web map that most people use which is for doing labeling um but most of the time that's behind the scenes and we don't really think about you know the all the work that has deciding what what to show when and when you zoom out you see a different set of labels and when you zoom all the way into street level um so it's just kind of taking that exact same the exact same you know calculations and algorithms and and applying them to something different besides place names i love it yeah yeah thanks i i i kind of like the uh as a geographer i really like the of if you're like in iceland you don't have to be as significant scale to be visible whereas in whereas if you zoom into london you see that pretty significant pretty notable uh person to to pop up because uh data density and the accuracy is just insane in places like like london or or awesome yeah amazing and i've seen um so i've been watching this you know watching the the twitter traffic on this you know everyone's immediate response is to go to a place that they're very familiar with and then tell you what's wrong with the data uh and i find that i find that fascinating just because this is you know essentially giving a whole what otherwise would have been an obscure you know obscure data set that some you know maybe some database people might have poked around with or tinkered with it's it's it's extremely valuable of course but it's like not something that is for general consumption as a data set this makes it for general consumption uh but it also comes with the caveat that now a lot of people are going to be correcting it um any anything notable like anything interesting people have pointed out that you didn't know about or any other thoughts on like how we can you know take all these corrections and and turn them into something more useful uh i'm actually i've been exchanging with with some one of the researchers who is behind the daytime and we will we next week which is uh a lot of fun i've heard from them the researchers they've received a lot of traffic to their uh article which is which is really awesome yeah and and they they said that they've been following also will probably release like a 2.0 uh version of with with the most obvious that's really really fun uh there is something like i i think i've been told about a thousand times the sartre wasn't uh where's where's maradona well mario donna is uh is in the wrong place or yeah there are a few which i've heard and many people were like some people found my like personal email i don't know how but i got several emails there why is this and this not person this uh hey my uncle is pretty significant yeah but it's been fun and i uh it's been fun to interact with people like you said people zoom into their hometowns and see it hey why is this yeah and i think that's it just with more eyeballs we can trend over time we can trend towards you know better data i the the same you know ethos behind wikipedia and openstreetmap and everything else where we work together uh on making you know some source of do you have any other plans for this do you want to continue you know after after the dataset gets updated you want to update you know want to fix it or you know anything else you want to you want to see happen with this or you just kind of want to let it let it sit easy to update because i have i have all the all the tiling service recipes and my sqls i have all of all of it ready so easy to to update it with with those but otherwise i don't have any any specific plans it was this was a thing that was on in the back of my head for a long long time so i'm really happy and i'm also really happy because that when i was doing this i was super excited about this i i shared it with and with the people in the office like hey i'm doing this thing and and i'm that also others felt the same that it wasn't me just geeking around it many people found it interesting so i'm i'm really happy about that still about the globe view i have to mention one thing yeah please like if this weren't wasn't on a globe like there are some people who are actually like born close to the arctic this would look so weird on a web mercado map so pretty pretty happy about like how this works out and this was actually a finnish name like up way up here and i had to look it up like does like is this accurate and it says that this person was born like in the arctis arctic ocean ship so i was pretty pretty surprised when i when i zoomed up here amazing and another thing uh i have to give a shout out to so uh william in our team who helped me out with this and step on in the gljs team who helped me out so so they were they were a big awesome and the code is open source it's on github so anyone who wants to see how you you did the you know interactions um the web the website of things can take a look right yeah sure uh of course like it's not the cleanest code ever or and and if you have any any comments i'm it is on my on my uh on github page so feel free to take a look and okay thanks for uh thanks for showing us your map and uh look forward to seeing what you do with it in the future thanks a lot chris okay take care thanks so much for watching this developer spotlight we'd love to hear what people are building with mapbox tools and technology so please give us a yell on twitter and use the hashtag builtwithmapbox see you next time
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