How to tutorials with CartoDB
Making a USA Airports (using pre-existing data) Map
- Create an account—use your Haver gmail to sign in
- Click ‘New Map’
- Go to “Search” type in “airports”
- click on the “USA airports” dataset
- Click on ‘create map’ and Wait!
- Check data view to make sure everything looks like it imported correctly (at top of page)
- Go back to map view and focus on the map
- Play with features on right side make your map how you want it.
- Go to ‘wizard’, play with ‘map layer wizard’ (fyi certain options are available with certain styles of Map layers, i.e. not all options are available with every style).
- You can also label your data points with any label present in your data for example for USA airports could be labeled with their name or with another data point such as their use number.
- what data do you want your user to know about? For example, for the ‘USA Airports’ say I want the user to be able to tell just by looking at the map the airports that have the highest use (by selecting map layer style choropleth a color ramp indicates use (i.e. lightest color is least amount of use and darkest color is most amount of use).
- Make sure you label your map and give a description that will let others know what your map is about
- Go to publish—here are different ways you can incorporate your maps in different ways to different media
- Just remember this is someone else’s data—so if you publish it anywhere you need to cite your source
Creating Your Own Data Map
- Click ‘New Map’, Click on link to ‘Create empty map’
- You will get a pop-up window to click to add a point, line or polygon
- Click to add a point (geo-coordinates) for where you traveled or anything else that interests you (hint: you can increase the size of the map with the zoom on the left-hand side to pick more accurate points and you can also hold and drag the map around with your mouse).
- You can also use the search bar (on the right) to look up geo-coordinates for specific data points
- Once you find your data point a red pin will appear click on ‘add point’ (be sure to refresh your map after adding a data point as sometimes the points will not immediately appear in your data view)
- Name your map
- Go to “Data view”
- There will already be rows and columns (because you already picked data points)
- But name and describes those data points (adding meaning!) and possibly add columns as well
- Go back to Map view, click on ‘infoWindow’ (looks like a chat bubble) and add click or hover (information that will pop up when you click or hover on your data points)
- You can also click on your data point and click edit data if a data point is not a text string and needs to be changed to a number or date
- You can also edit data type and columns by going into Data view and clicking on the drop-down arrows above all the data columns
- You can use your Facebook data, or instagram —and place data pins in locations where you have lived, or taken pictures (In this way you will be merging CMS data with their own, new data)
- You can also import data and edit that data to create a map which we are going to do in the second part of this session
