Inspiration
About four weeks ago, the Chinese media reported a series of new stunning archaeological discoveries in Sanxingdui, Sichuan Province. Sichuan, already a famous place that full of world natural heritages, may have another chance to apply for world cultural heritage. Then, Shannxi province, the province that owns the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, jokes that if they should open the mausoleum in order to compete with Sichuan Province. Though I know that the Shannxi province is joking about open the mausoleum to compete with Sichuan province, it makes me wonder, who is the province that owns the most world heritage in China now and what is the distribution of world heritages in China.
Design Process
Data Gathering
I get the first dataset from the UNESCO World Heritage website. The data that I acquired has all the information that I need for this project. In fact, I had too much data. The original dataset contains information such as how they rank different heritages, and they write everything in both english and French. Thus, the first step that I do is extract information that I need.
The seven columns that I choose to extract from the dataset are name, longitude&latitude, area, category, state, and region.
Later, when I input this dataset into Carto, I noticed that I’ll need a shapefile that contains the location or shape information of the provinces. I tried one dataset from the Harvard university database but the file doesn’t work on Carto. Then, I got another data that not only have the shapefile but also zip code and other useful information.
Now it is time to work on Carto.
Tools
The software used in this project is Carto, a data visualization tool that specializes in creating maps. One of the greatest features of Carto is that you can find lots of existing data within the software so that you can save time to organize data and make it applicable for Carto.
Method
Step one: Choose the layer order.
Carto uses a layer structure to design the map. It means when the first time that a data file is added on Carto, Carto will process the file and put information on the map. This dataset becomes the bottom layer. Then, when we add another file, it will be placed on top of this file. Noticed one thing: we could replicate the layer to create an overlay effect and also use this feature to present critical information seprately. I use 2 layers to designed an overlay effect on my final map to present different information. To do this, I copied the UNESCO layer 2 times. Therefore, by the end I have 4 layers, 3 of them use UNESCO data and 1 of them uses shapefile.
Here is when I make the first mistake. Since this is the first time that I used it, without a second thought I put the UNESCO data first. This became a problem when I input other datasets since the content of the upper layer will cover lower layers. Below is an example.
On the other hand, this also gives my the idea on the overlay effect. I’ll introduce it after the analysis part.
Step two: Analyze the data
After I put all the data on the software, I have a very simple image. China is stand out on the world map and has dots all over it. During lab time, I learned how to use the intersect and aggregate on analysis. According to Carto, this function helps “Find overlapping geometries from a second layer and aggregate its values in the current layer.” This is how I create the choropleth map. Below are the configuration screenshots.
The target layer is where we store the information and we want to apply it on the base layer. Therefore, I did measure by count on the left to show which province has the most heritages. On the right, I measured the area of heritage to show which province has the largest area of world heritages. I did the second analysis because I want to see if one of the heritage sites is dramatically large than smaller ones. Below are the maps.
I used two set of color here to make the overlay design possible, which I will talk more in the next section.
Step three: Adjust style (text, color, pop-up, legend )
At this stage, I already made some adjustments to style. Then, I make the upper layer, which is the area layer, convert to a “lighten” effect when overlay. Next, I add pop-ups. Now, when you click on the province, you can see information about the province. And when you hover on the heritage sites icon, you will read information about the heritages.
Step four: publish and review! Link to my map.
One final step is to publish the map and now everyone can play with it from the like above. I made several small changes, such as rename widgets. Here is a screenshot of the final map. Viewers can use the legend and widget to filter the result.
Reflection & Future Direction
I’m sure that Carto can do much more than the current design of mine, so I’d love to dig more into what can I do with the software. For example, I only used one analysis to finish my map and I saw how other people use the analysis to make beautiful lines on a map. Maybe I can calculate the shortest route to visit all the heritages in China!
References
https://data.humdata.org/dataset/china-administrative-boundaries?