Geography 353 Cartography and Visualization

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Geog 353 Lab 9: Cartographic Animation
Update: 11/4/19
50 points
ASSIGNED: Monday November 11
DUE: Wednesday November 20

Lab 9 Goal: In Lab 8 you exported three sets of maps and associated legends from ArcGIS in .png format. The next step is to animate your maps and include them in your HTML for the world to behold.

Details:

First, a bit of background on map animation...

"In the motion picture lies a highly essential but much neglected field for pictorial statistics. Newsreels, war films and such features as "The March of Time," McCrary's "Ringside Seat" or "Kaltenborn Edits the News" occasionally incorporate maps, but usually they are either globes or maps clipped from newspapers and similar sources. But the screen offers the best imaginable opportunities for "dynamic" visual information. On the screen arrows can really move as opposing armies advance or retreat, statistical columns can grow or shrink, frontiers can be violated and empires can literally "crumble." The effect created by such "living" maps and graphs can be further heightened by an effective accompaniment of words or music. One could both see and hear a "frontier" "break down," the tramping "men" in the statistical column "join the army," "the whistling ships" slide down the ways and the like. Why not include such a map feature, dynamically illustrating current war events, in the newsreels? Why not visualize the growth of line-lease aid, the progress of the war-bonds campaign, in pictorial statistics that move? Why not portray Germany's exploitation of the occupied countries by maps on which the confiscated goods actually march into the Reich? Or depict the effect of air raids, swarms of planes (in symbols) dropping bombs across a map of strategic and key industrial points? Why not dramatize the unrest in Nazi-occupied Europe by flashing on a map those places where hostages have been executed, troop trains have been derailed, underground papers have been secretly edited and printed. These few suggestions indicate how great can be the improvement in the techniques and therefore the effectiveness of visual means for conveying information about the war. (Heinz Soffner. "War on the Visual Front." The American Scholar 11:4, 1942. pp. 465-476. Quote from page 476-77)

This multimedia extravaganza envisioned by Soffner in 1942 was suggested by the need for war-time propaganda. What is interesting is that there is a clear sense that adding a dynamic component to maps will "enliven" them and make them more effective.

Animation can be defined as "...a dynamic visual statement that evolves through movement or change in the display. The most important aspect of animation is that it depicts something that would not be evident if the frames were viewed individually. In a sense, what happens between each frame is more important than what exists on each frame."

Animation works because the eye-brain mechanism retains, for a fleeting instant, images of objects it has seen after the objects have been removed. If the eye is shown a series of static views of objects at a rapid rate (30 per second) with the objects changing positions only slightly from frame to frame, the illusion of life like motion - animation - is created in the mind.


A Short History of Animation

1. GIF Animations: Animation for the People or Scourge of the Internet?


GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a common graphic file format, one of the primary graphic file formats used on the WWW (along with JPG). It was developed by Steve Wilhite for CompuServe, in an office building in north Columbus. It was first used in 1987. One interesting characteristic of GIF files is that they can have layers and thus you can put multiple GIF files into a single GIF file (one file on each layer).

When a GIF file with layers is viewed on the WWW it flips through the layers one by one: thus you can use GIF files to easily create animated graphics for the WWW. Just like above.

Stare at the animations (above) for a moment, then ponder the annoyance factor when experimenting with GIF animation for your project.

The hug advantage (huge too!) of GIF animation is that no special browser plug-ins are needed to view the animations (even the oldest computers with out of date browsers can show them quickly) and they are easy to create with free or low-cost software.

Sadly, GIF files have really crappy resolution. While that might cast some olde-time charm upon the medium, it causes problems when we are using GIFs for map animations. Colors are often different from the originals, and resolution is coarse.

Along comes the PNG file to the rescue. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) are lossless (they maintain quality from the original - in our case, ArcGIS) and, over the last few years, more web sites are appearing which help you generate animations from PNG files. Importantly, most browsers now support animated PNGs.

Each of you will create at least four PNG animations:


Creating Animated PNGs - APNG

Three sites are listed below. There are others. Start with the first, and move on to the others if you are having problems.

Think a bit about some options that would be nice to have: see if the sites above can provide these options:

Once you have saved your APNGs, go back to your HTML files, open and add the animated PNG file names (just like you would add any image)

You will finish this lab with four animated PNG maps (choropleth - two class and original classification; graduated symbol map, dot map).

Embed them in your HTML pages, spiff up the pages, and upload to the web.

You will present your web pages with animations the last week of classes.

For your lab log note any prob lems you encountered and define the following:

Next: Presentation of final project + Final Evaluation (Lab 10).



E-mail: jbkrygier@owu.edu

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