These two maps depict amenities and pathways in Santa Cruz and common birds in the Santa Cruz area. The bird map uses data from the app and website iNaturalist.org to plot some of the most common research-grade bird observations throughout 2021, while the map of Santa Cruz uses data from OpenStreetMap and Santa Cruz County to show the bicycle paths, bus stops, drinking water locations, parking spots, footways, and hiking paths of Santa Cruz. I wanted to find a way to represent complex, overlapping information in a concise physical fashion. The layers are individually labeled and removable so that users can reorder and recombine the transparencies to focus on and compare layers more closely.

I used ultra-fine Sharpies in different colors, a 3D-printed Cricut pen adapter sized for ultra-fine Sharpies, paper, and transparency paper. These met my needs very well.

I used a Cricut Maker with a fine-point blade, mats, and tools. These met my needs very well.

I used QGIS, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Cricut Design Space; these all worked quite well for my project.

I'd like to do this with other data, perhaps in collaboration or in a peer-support role with other people, as I figure people would have other really interesting ideas for what data to depict. For instance, if someone has an ongoing project involving geographic data, this could be an useful supplementary display project or resource to use.

This project might be interesting to humanities and STEM students looking to represent data in a tactile and material way. For instance, these layers could be combined with historical, thematic, or otherwise informational maps. This project is as much a proof of concept as a final product in itself.

I first printed some of the bird map layers; since the bird observations were represented as points, these were merely tiny circles, squares, and plus signs, so they were quite uniform in the way they printed. When I started printing the "Streams" layer of the Santa Cruz map, I realized that it was printing too slowly and disjointedly. During the preparation of the print in Cricut Design Space, I had noticed that each segment was a separate layer in the layers panel -- like normal -- but when the Cricut drew with the Sharpie on the transparency paper, the tiny separate segments caused the pen to stop and start too often, leaving blots of ink. These blots of ink are inevitable to some extent, but the print was far too slow, and it wasn't turning out quite right visually. So I went back into Illustrator and figured out that it helped immensely to use the Simplify Path function. I tested different levels of the simplification scale to reach the strongest simplification that still maintained accuracy to the original paths. I ended up considering this step to be an essential part of the process when I wrote instructions for this activity, so I'm glad that I decided to fine-tune it. A positive side effect was that a minimal, conservative amount of simplification could cut the amount of points in half without damaging accuracy; thus, Cricut Design Space gave me fewer issues around importing large files.

I like how the layers printed with the Cricut, especially the more complex line and polygon layers that I needed to simplify and clean up a bit more. I also like the legend, with each item on a different layer but arranged so that they all line up vertically when viewed together; I think that this effect is appealing.

I would probably think more critically about my color choices; during this process, I decided on colors by testing pens against a scrap of transparency paper and seeing how they showed up on the transparency against light backgrounds. I was less considerate of how they would look layered on top of each other and in particular orders. Now I have a good idea of how the colors interact with each other because I have these maps as examples, so I can use them to be more cognizant of my color decisions.

I hope that these projects make you think about ideas, information, or places that you might like to map in multiple layers.