Lesson 5 Overview

This week we will focus on learning how to create beautiful maps in Python and how to share them on GitHub using GitHub Pages. As you might remember from our earlier plotting lesson during the Period I, there are many different Python modules that can be used for making visualizations.

Quite many of them allows you to create also different kinds of maps. During this lesson we will focus on few of them, namely:

• Matplotlib (static maps, integrated into Geopandas)
• Bokeh (interactive plots)
• Folium (interactive Web maps on Leaflet)

In addition to these modules, there are also at least a few good and interesting modules for making maps that we cannot cover today:

• mplleaflet (converts Matplotlib plots easily to interactive Leaflet maps)
• Basemap (Matplotlib’s own mapping module)
• GeoViews

Learning objectives

After this weeks lesson you should be able to (at least):

• Create a static map using Geopandas
• Create a simple interactive map using either Bokeh or Folium (or both).
• Share your maps (static / interactive) on GitHub using GitHub pages.

Let’s start by recalling how those static maps could be done in Geopandas.