At first I was worried that this day was sponsored by a plastic bag lobby group to hand out disposable plastic bags. Why did I think that?
The grammar seemed incorrect.
“Plastic Bag Free Day” doesn’t accurately suggest to me what the copywriters think it does. I believe they actually mean “Plastic Bag-Free Day,” or even more strictly… “Plastic-Bag-Free Day.”
Alas, I’ve had to adapt. Hyphens are the car signal/turn indicators of the English language, and just like the #@%* that don’t use blinkers when driving, a lot of people fail to use hyphens. I don’t have to join them, but I have to adapt to them.
Adding to the disappearance of hyphen use in the English language is the fact that many marketers and copywriting editors require they be avoided or removed. (The only place I still see them accurately used on a regular basis, honestly, is in The New Yorker, but I have to wonder how long they can hold out.)
Content written for consumption on the web (i.e., almost everything except, perhaps, The New Yorker) generally caters to lower common denominator of literacy to appeal to the broadest audience possible, generally to persuade people to buy something they don’t really need – in today’s case, not plastic bags; although, you’d be excused to think it was. What?!
Thus, inaccurate grammar is repeated and normalized, which is all fine and dandy when humans are only communicating amongst themselves but has the potential to lead to massive problems when interacting with computers. So prompt carefully, my friends! 🙂
What I’ve found is that prompting requires revisiting your natural language’s grammar rules, because even though you don’t have to always use accurate grammar, if you want to be specific (which good prompt cartographers do) and you want to make sure an LLM will understand what you are asking it to do without a lot of back and forth and iterations (which is always ideal) then grammar is fundamental to your entire workflow. Mark Monmonier was right when he said (I think he said this) that every person should have Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style handy. (Though now you can just have an LLM read a Cliff Notes version to you, I suppose. Blasphemy! :-))
So acting as today’s grammar police isn’t necessarilly a plug for the Prompt Cartography book, which goes into a lot of detail about prompting clearly for mapmaking, naturally.
Rather, I highly recommend everyone who is into prompt cartography buy this affordable guide, which I’ve bought for my daughters and quiz them on every night at dinner… okay, the bit after the last conjunction is a joke. These guides are available in many languages (but all manufactured in China, I noticed… shout out to yesterday’s map!). It may be the most useful $6 you’ll spend on prompting, particularly if you slept through grammar class, didn’t learn grammar in school (as my girls didn’t), or didn’t have a parent like my mum that almost washed my mouth out with soap if I said “I’m doing good.” (Okay, again, she didn’t do that. But she could almost glare the taste of soap into my mouth, I swear.)
However, the main point of today’s map has nothing to do with the anti-plastic-bag movement’s lack of a hyphen. Rather it is to shame Americans into doing something about how massively wasteful we are are when it comes to plastic bag consumption and waste. (Californians, Oregonians, Washingtonians(?), and Coloradans can hold their heads high, however.)
More importantly (from a news perspective), however:
This map presents the latest garage prompt cartography project I’ve been working on. (For one night… but it was still work.)
I realize some people that read this blog or use WebMapGPT, including those perhaps where I work, are under the impression that all of this stuff is part of my and Ken’s “day jobs” or our careers.
But no, this is a passion project. I’m so excited about prompt cartography that this is all done during weeknights, weekends, and vacation time. I spend my free time, outside of playing Euro games with local friends and badminton with my family, writing textbooks, blog posts (that respectfully, but also irrevocably, piss off many of my friends and the people I respect most who have alternative views from my own), and experimenting with LLMs constantly. This obsession includes making these daily maps, which again thanks to our Vice-Chair, Ken Field, I only have to do every day for half the year, not the entire one, as it is stressful squeezing this stuff in many days.
But as usual, I digress…
I forget the people may on occasion actually read what I write. It’s a problem.
Let’s talk about the main purpose of today’s map. It’s to highlight:
Stylesheet Templates!
During the Mexico-Ecuador World Cup Match last two nights ago, I had a crazy idea. Well, it’s something I’d thought about doing for a long time, but I get tired and don’t always get around to doing what I think about doing. But the football match was a blowout, and I didn’t want to go to bed yet, so I set forth to create stylesheets to guide Web Map GPT, or any map design assistant you have, including human ones, to produce maps that mimic generic tropes or creative/technical styles.
First and foremost: this idea was not mine originally. (As anyone who reads these blogs knows, I don’t believe humans have ideas. I follow the selfish-gene and information physics maxim that everything is data and humans and what we perceive as the physical environment are merely the medium across which thoughts, ideas, knowledge (you name it, hell, why not consciousness too?) flow. So this idea I first heard from Ken Field back in the mid-2010s when I was the Director of the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s GIS Professional Programs. He was wondering if Daniel Huffman and I would be interested in creating design schemas with him for different map styles and types throughout history.
It was a brilliant idea. But I was addicted to Playstation 4 at the time – Star Wars Battlefront I had just come out, as I recall, and it was all I cared about at the time, as it was the first time in my life I didn’t have to worry about tenure service and securing academic promotion – and it sounded like a lot of work. (Yes, like many others, even though I play with AI stuff for fun, I’m inherently lazy and can develop Pavlovian-like fixations on things that really are a waste of time.) Apparently, I was not the only one without the bandwidth – though, admittedly, others probably had more sane reasons – because I never heard about the idea again.
Yes, indeed, the “idea” from an evolutionary theory standpoint appeared to have died out. But it wasn’t extinct… like chickenpox in the spinal cord, it was waiting until…
Two nights ago, when Mexico was up two-nil on Ecuador, it popped into my head! And as though in a feverish dream, I grabbed my laptop on the table next to me in the garage and created a new project in my favorite LLM tool (which is not Claude, honestly). I started creating random design schemas that popped into my head. Today’s map shows several of the early prototypes.
The good news: schemas work!
If you have a design concept based on an era, design-type, or even particular cartographers, you can create a schema that will get you at least halfway there in your first draft.
For today’s map, I asked WebMapGPT to create the map using a 1980s US news magazine style schema. Then in a follow-up prompt, I asked it to recreate the map in three other schemas and add a drop-down in the upper right.
Now, a caveat: you’ll notice all the maps have the same layout. This was done to save tokens. If I were to make each map individually, each would look massively different in arrangement, layout, thematic representation, etc.
As I had already created the map in one style, I decided to allow it to just change some cosmetic things with each style and keep the layout largely the same. (Yes, I too am disappointed that it didn’t add the archaic ArcView 3.x default legend styling. Next time!)
I figured I was saving a little water and some coal burning by not proving the concept beyond a reasonable doubt. I realize it’s hot in Europe right now and it’s been well over 30-degrees C here in Minnesota and muggy too recently, so I was trying to do my part.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a glimpse of some of the schemas coming to the WebMapGPT site and/or perhaps the promptcartography.com site. I’m also working on labs for the promptcartography.com site, as well as the Canvas-ready importable assignments and rubrics. Lots going on… good thing there is football on.
Happy mapping!
P.S. Thank you, Ken, for diffusing the idea to me years ago. Now, I hope it diffuses further to more people who may sit on the idea for some time and come up with far more brilliant solutions!
Plastic Bag(-)Free Day
View Map HereWeb Map GPT Prompt (with schemas, coming soon to www.webmapgpt.com)
Please design this map to have an Albers equal area projection (unless a specific style schema says it shouldn’t) and to show Alaska and Hawaii above the fold so that the contiguous United States, Alaska, and Hawaii all appear in a single browser window. Require mobile devices be rotated to landscape mode to view the map too, please.
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# Disposable Environments
We are going to make a map of estimated US disposable bag use by state. The goal of this map is to promote “Plastic Bag Free Day” [sic] on Friday.