Mapathon: All About Maps

Join tcplot for a morning devoted entirely to maps, in two acts.

Act one: bring a map. Your ticket in is one map, any map, and two minutes on why it's great (or gloriously terrible) — a classic like Minard or Snow's cholera map, an interactive you keep going back to, a paper map with a history, something you made yourself, or a bad map you love to hate. By the end of the round you'll have seen thirty maps and stolen ideas from most of them.

Act two: build together. After a short primer on the modern mapping stack, work solo or in small groups to make a map — of your neighborhood, your commute, the Twin Cities, anywhere — then present what you made. A half-built map with a good idea beats a finished default.
Pick your lane:

Fast and no-code — Datawrapper, Felt, kepler.gl
Web code — Leaflet, MapLibre GL, deck.gl, D3
Analysis-first — QGIS, GeoPandas + Folium
Analog — hand-drawn cartography is a real and honorable lane

We'll have a starter list of local open geodata ready to map: the Minneapolis tree inventory, bike lanes and scooter trips, the Minnesota Geospatial Commons, Metro Transit's GTFS feed, OpenStreetMap, or your own GPS traces.

No GIS experience needed — the primer starts from zero, and AI assistants are welcome (they're good at GeoJSON plumbing). Bring one map you love (on a phone, a laptop, or paper) and, if you want to build digitally, a laptop.