If there was ever a species that probably doesn’t need a day… I mean, rabbits… I feel like they are everywhere. The foxes in my yard catch them all the time. Owls are worse… the rabbits howl bloody murder waking the entire family up. It’s sad.

I try to warn the rabbits when they hop near me in the woods. But they are completely indifferent to my existence – “Go hide, fools!” I urge, “Don’t be out in the open like this… there is a hawk right over there.” They continue to munch on our garden plants, just looking at me blankly.

Sadly, I don’t speak rabbit. Perhaps AI will crack the human-rabbit interaction code, but until then… I hope they evolve to start looking up once in a while – at least the rabbit species in my yard.  But I guess the foxes and owls have to eat too. :-\

Alas, if I read correctly, World Rabbit Day is meant to celebrate rescuing rabbits and rearing them or something. So I thought for today’s map I would show just how diffuse and widespread these mammalian hoppers are.

I created an Excel dataset and GeoPackage of rabbit species and ranges using my data creator GPT. I then asked regular old ChatGPT to make a map of it. It did pretty well, but it added a horrible compass rose. (My fault! I didn’t guardrail against it in my prompt.)

I also wasn’t happy with the legend, so I annotated the image right in ChatGPT, asked it to add data sources, and called it a day.

Hoppy World Rabbit Day, everyone!

Click Here to See Full Size Version and Download Datasets

ChatGPT Conversation

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab6ea03-4b18-83ea-ae52-9bffbba87fb9

There is no denying it: koalas are damn cute. My daughter loves koalas. She used to draw them all the time.

So I was excited when I saw this day on the calendar. But koala ranges themselves are kind of boring to map. So I thought: why not expand the day a bit, cartographically at least, to map endangered or potentially struggling Australian and Oceanic marsupials.

Then, I had my data creator agent figure out where it could find all of these ranges – mostly scientific journal articles, I believe – and scrape the data and then compile it into a single dataset. Well, it gave me a python script that did that.

Finally, I asked Web Mapper GPT to create a map with the dataset with infographic windows that allowed for pictures across the top. Meanwhile, I created 31 unique images of marsupials in the Audubon artistic style and provided them to the site folder.

And here it is… a marsupial range map with artistic pop-ups, and species filters based on endangerment levels, etc. The map layout idea was stolen from the Visualising Conflict and Peace project (keep rocking it, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde. I absolutely adore this project and wish I had known about it sooner. I found it via Stanislav Krakowskyi’s addicting Atlas Explorer. A high recommend for those that want to get lost in digital atlases from around the world!

Admittedly, the projection and map balance may not work as well here with marsupials as it does for conflict resolution studies, but I liked it so much looking at that site the last week or so that I had to try to prompt a version into existence. I figured Australia was a good spot to do so.

For fun…

I experimented with creating an ArcGIS StoryMap via a proprietary LLM tool as well.

The result from a single prompt with the images and single dataset was quite satisfactory, honestly.

Take-away: all GIS output will be done using natural-language in the near future (I predict). (Predictions are for suckers, though; so I reserve the right to be wrong.) Natural-language interfaces are being baked into your favorite tools and soon we will probably only be using LLMs to do almost everything – which will in turn call skills and agents from other software companies.

In other words, I implore young (and old) cartographer to begin learning how to do prompt cartography.

ArcGIS StoryMap Version

And below is the Web Mapper (ChatGPT) version. Thanks for reading and enjoy exploring marsupial ranges in Australia and/or Oceania!

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt

Intent
Create a map showing endangered marsupials (in particular koalas) in Australasia as a celebratory and cautious nod to Save the Koala Day.

Purpose
Garner support and feelings for saving marsupial habitat and cute, furry Australian critters. 🙂

Audience
Online public. Mostly LinkedIn people and visitors to the #365DaysOfMaps blog found at [https://mapdesign.icaci.org](https://mapdesign.icaci.org).

Style
I would like this to be a bit different than the average maps we’ve been making in this series. I’m really inspired by something I saw online recently – the portion-Earth globe found at this website:

https://visualisingconflictpeace.de/ (screen grab attached)

If we could represent these renges in a stylized, balanced but asymmetrical manner with an orthographic projection (or 3D globe that is not easily rotatable off of Australia/Oceania, I would love it.

Continue reading →

Punctuation. The curse of many. Oxford commas, full-stops (or is it periods?), colons, semicolons, the list goes on ad nauseam.

Punctuation is essential for writing natural languages. But too often we forget or take punctuation marks for granted.

No more! At least, not in the United States. Here we have a special day to celebrate the left- and right-parentheses, as well as the em- and en-dashes and well… All Latin-language based punctuations apparently. Or maybe just English punctuation? The language isn’t specified, which is interesting. Perhaps an oversight of the organizers or a holdover from the assumption that English is an official language in the Constitution perhaps… Alas, it is not.

But I’m not here to debate which punctuation marks from which languages are meant to be included. I’m for all of them. But this map is in English, because I had to draw the line somewhere and I don’t speak Spanish — unfortunately.

I love old typewriters. So I went with a carbon-copy typographic style map. It’s nothing special but I’m happy with it considering I wrote the prompt and this short blog post at a swim meet on my phone. Prompt has two meanings… No one said you couldn’t use both meanings at the same time. 😉

Click above map for larger version.

ChatGPT 5.6 Prompt

Intention
Create a map of the US that is constructed entirely of punctuation marks.

Purpose
To celebrate national punctuation mark day on Thursday September 24

Style
I would love the look of a 1960s manual typewriter used to construct the maps with punctuation marks and perhaps state abbreviations with letters. A couple of x-ed out or /-ed out words and double types and fading ribbons spots would be great. Slight imperfections would lend it credence. Carbon paper sticking out underneath would make a great frame line.

Title
Should be typed in the same font across the top somewhere: “United Punctuation Marks of America.”

Output Style
PNG with slightly yellowed/aged correspondence paper background. Imperfect.

Credits
Lower right or somewhere on the bottom:
“Ian Muehlenhaus / prompt cartography.com”

Guardrails

• should resemble albers equal area projection shape or comic projection using manual typewriter alignment possibilities.
• Alaska and Hawaii should be minimal and in the lower left or gulf of Mexico. If in Gulf of Mexico, move credits to the lower left side.

Thanks! Have fun with this! Be creative. Typographic map creativity!

International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer

Well, if ever there was a day we could all probably agree on, I thin it’s may be this one. I mean, we would be fried pretty quickly without the ozone layer. So let’s rejoice it’s still there, and that it seems to be stable right now – unlike when I was a kid and the hole was growing massively according to media reports of the time.

I’ll keep this blog simple; like the map.

My goal with this map was to map a contemporary ecological disaster – currently prevented – using an antinquarian visualization style. I thought the juxtaposition would be kind of fun. So I…

• chose the 1800s newspaper map style from promptcartography.com:
• found a half-decent dataset of ozone hole-based data from NASA and then generalized it to represent area of the hole broadly, not accurately using Spatial Data Maker GPT;
• asked Web Mapper GPT to map the dataset using a very simple animation, and
• here we have it.

I’m quite happy with the output. No, I don’t think it’s a scientifically robust – it’s not!

No, I don’t think it’s going to help prevent us from doing more environmental harm.

I do think, however, this map’s unique appearance may garner more passive attention than another data-heavy visualization of environmental data – which personally, I almost always ignore.

And to quote the academic proceeding that (kind of, mostly) launched us into this large-language model mess, “attention is all you need.” The rest is just proverbial icing.

Happy International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer!

https://webmapgpt.com/maps/365/sep/16/

Web Mapper GPT Prompt

Intention

Create a map for the public to show the shrinking Ozone Hole over time. Do so in a manner that is not another NOAA, NASA, or contemporary newsroom look. Instead, do so with an antiquarian map style to pique curiosity.

Audience
General public, social media, Linked In type crowd mostly. Journalists. People who thumbs up anything a little different. You know the type: the uncritical masses. 😉

Guardrails

• Don’t place subtitles or titles above the map saying celebrating prevent ozone depletion day or anything.
• Don’t use a tileset that has an API requirement.
• Don’t add too much complexity to the visual hierarchy. Country borders and ozone hole is fine.
• Keep the map simple and like a digital, interactive artifact of a map that was created in the 1800s. Black and white, but a 3D globe would be kind of cool.
• Animate the map but offer intuitive, uncomplicated controls to step through year-by-year, play, pause, refresh. That’s it.
• Design for mobile first. Portrait. Create a desktop version that loos good, though.
• Add Cartographer: [Ian Muehlenhaus](https://www.muehlenhaus.com) to the soruces. Also provenance file link and data information provenance if available in the attached zip.
• Give it a journalistic name: 1800s style.
• Avoid expository text on the limitations of the dataset, etc., anywhere on the map or in any pop-ups if any. You may mention this a little in the sources if relevant, but if there is a data provenance or readme file, don’t bother.
• Provide a year of production. Also, put in a little blurb at the end in the sources modal saying something like: Interested in prompt cartography yourself? Learn more [here](https://www.promptcartography.com).

Let’s iterate together. If you can find a black and white or minimalist globe/3D view for this map that works with the animation, that would be great. Make sure the animation, if the user hits play, doesn’t go incredibly fast, but fast enough to get through the years fairly quickly.

I was once the Director of several online programs at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

However, for this day, I decided it would interesting to look at online higher education in Europe – since I’m in Europe right now – and how it compared before the pandemic to after the pandemic. Also, I get tired of Albers Equal Area US tehmatic maps. I want to see Svalbard and Crete once in a while. 🙂

Also, I admit, since I spent most of the day searching for the ultimate Tisza River Fish Soup, I didn’t have much time to spend on this map. Europe has some great datasets regarding online education, so that made my decision easy. To add a little flavor, while the data was beging collected by one agent, I has Map Styler create what I can only call a Student-Moleskin-Dot-Notebook-with-Staedtler-Pen-and-Pencil-Inspired schema – or SMDNSPPI schema for short.

It looks close to as I imagine my daughter’s rendering of the map might look if she were into maps – which she is not. So overall, I was happy with it and that’s a wrap on day and map number 258 of the year.

View map here

Original Prompt

## Intent

Create a thematic map of Europe only, showing online education rates across the continent and variation by country.

## Audience

Varied, but likely European educators, those interested in online education or stakeholders in education, and passive participants seeing this map and the datasets online via social media and (hopefully) viral sharing.

## Data description

The data is comprised of European countries and their percent or number of students attending university or higher education online. I have shared both the Excel dataset (with more metadata and information about what the data presents) and the CSV (for easier joining to geometries and use with mapping APIs) for you to explore before visualizing.

## Preferred stylistic choices

I am attaching a style sheet based on a college student’s moleskin notebook style with Staedtler pens and pencils. Please follow this broadly, but ignore where it doesn’t work or make sense stylisitcally in particular contexts, please.

## Guardrails

– Do not assume online is better than in-person courses. This just shows where it is more or less prevalent. Let the user ask questions from the data.
– Do not include areas of land very far outside of Europe.
– Use an Equal Area projection suitable for Europe.
– Do not allow someone to pan far outside of Europe or zoom out into space or zoom in too far so that the map doesn’t make any sense.
– Do not include subtitles and things saying we are celebrating a day, etc. Make it look like a just-the-facts map. We can include information about why we made it in an about/info/sources modal.
– Try to avoid subtitles.
– Focus on usability and interactivity. Perhaps include some tools to change the number of classifications, the types of classifications, and if suitable (ignore if not), perhaps a bivariate representation can be set up by the user.
– Ensure this is a mobile first application. But the desktop version can be more spread out and beautiful. Bottom-up info windows in mobile, please.
– Make sure the title isn’t too dominant on mobile.
– Try to make the title look organic, part of the map, fluid, not compartmentalized in desktop (no background box, for example), as though it was written at the top of the notebook page.

## Other comments

Have fun with this. It’s interesting data. Make it look like a college student sketched the map in her notebook during a lecture and you are simply allowed to interact with it.

Sorry, I don’t have much time to write. I’m visiting friends and family in the Carpathian Basin and the internet is a bit spotty – on the ICA side.

However, today’s map is kind of neat. I think it’s the first map of ancient times I’ve done this year: the rise and fall of Gedaliah, essentially.

I knew little about what today’s fast represents, honestly, so I thought I might as well educate myself. It’s an interesting story and, as with most stories involving humans, there is some geography to it.

Originally I wanted to go with an ancient, biblical, Old Testament and/or Torah sort of vibe. However, the results seemed a bit contrived.

So in a later prompt I decided it would be interesting to reimagine how this religiously significant sequence from ancient times might be preserved via map interface in the year 2800. The look is kind of cool – an amalgamation of biblical archaeology and ShadowRunner.

Anyway, for those who are practicing, have a great Fast of Gedaliah today. For those that do not, it’s a story well worth reading. Particularly for those that think assassination solves problems.

View Map Here

Original Prompt

I would like to make an only moderately interactive (e.g., pop ups with expository text) and a step-by-step timeline map representing the history and geography of the events leading up to the assassination of Gedaliah in BC to celebrate The Fast of Gedaliah.

Intention

Show the Babylonian destruction of the temple, the rise of the leader Gedaliah, hist assassination due to jealousy, and the exile to Egypt. It should have a brief takeway on the map about how the murder of a righteous leader can be just as bad as an invasion or something – whatever the moral is. Historical geography and intention.

Please make the map look biblical in style and tone, without looking Christian. Just ancient. Try to refrain from overly religious decor and cliches. More a history map of where the Fast of Gedaliah comes from, narratively and historically. Pop-ups should act as text-based history callouts.

View Map Here

Programming and coding have been fundamental to economic development and the well-being of the planet. Why? Because it is due to programmers that we can interact with computers and technology in a non-binary manner. And this is huge! Humans don’t think in binary – at least not well, though I can do okay in cribbage, which is somewhat complex to me. 🙂

In the grand scheme of things, though, which admittedly may be short-lived if we get killed off by AI in the next 10 years, programming and coding – though important – will have been merely a blip on the radar in the history of human-computer interaction.

Turing somewhat represents the beginning of modern programming from a lay-historian’s perspective. (I know this isn’t accurate, but roughly.) Humans don’t code because it’s fun. They don’t code because coding itself is good for human thinking. We code to get  super complex machines (i.e., computers) to do what we want them to do.

And today, with LLMs, we no longer need to code manually. Humans can now interact with machines using our own natural languages. Coding was a means to an end, and it was the best means… Python perhaps the easiest means, some would say. But there are more efficient, faster, intuitive, and natural ways to interact with computers now. Even easier than GUIs in many cases. And because of LLMs, coding is no longer a human endeavor. We communicate with machines to code what we would like into existence – likely in programming and binary-based languages humans will not understand or participate in developing in the near future.

So programmers have been important and remain important in the short-while, but they are endangered as a human form of labour.

I have a weird relationship with video games. I’ll never forget when my older brother received our first family computer around 1983 or so – the TI-99 or something. It was revolutionary. I could play Parsec, Pac-Man, Centipede, and some obscure video games that no one has probably heard of. (Many of the games were loaded via cassette tape, as I recall).

Since then I’ve become hooked on video games again many times.

There was the Commodore 64 addiction era (1987-1991).

Then a pause before the Sega Genesis era (1992-1993).

Then Dune 2000 on my brother’s MS-Dos PC in Hungary in 1993.

Then the Civilization on my dad’s PC 1994-1996.

Then Madden NFL and FIFA football era (in grad school at Penn State, 2000-2003). Then the Nintendo Wii era. Then the Playstation 4 era…

Inevitably I become distracted by more interesting things… I’m sure I’ll get hooked on games again – typically in winter – and now that I’m older, more likely the New York Times puzzle app or King’s Cribbage than first-person shooters.

Instead, now I get to observe my daughters fight over the Playstation. One is hooked on D&D Baulder’s Gate or something like that… and the other is one of those 14 year-olds that slays Gen X-ers online in Star Wars Battlefront.

And that’s my story. I have no idea where this post is going. But it’s Saturday, so probably no more than 10 people will read this anyway.

I guess my point is this: video games are fun. They can be addicting. But they also don’t make people dumb but have been shown to make people smarter – partivularly visually. (Check out Colin Ware’s work on this.)

So I say enjoy video games. Try not to get too hooked – though, personally, I find gaming benders from time-to-time are quite enjoyable. And please, if you are one of those people espousing that video games make people dumb… take a moment to read up on this and reconsider. It’s not true. People learn through play, including spatial cognition.

It’s a belief that isn’t based on science. Which is fine if you want to believe it, but from a factual perspective, it’s not true. 🙂

Happy Video Game Day! I made a geographically themed video game based on a world atlas and early 1980s games. Have fun!

View map here

ChatGPT Prompt

Intent

I would like to create a map for international video game day. I think it would be really cool to create a 1980s arcade style game that is similar in style and nature to Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Number Munchers, etc., that incorporates different continent maps (generalized and symbolically) as level boundaries, etc.

I’m visiting family in Hungary so…

Can you come up with some interactive videogame idea that would facilitate this, as well as a UX and UI that works on mobile and looks and feels 1980s 8bit-ish? Then produce it in a manner that can be simply uploaded as a web page to my website, ideally without npm, etc. We will iterate from there. Thanks!

Today is world (or maybe national?) Make Your Bed Day. I admit, today’s map is not particularly inspiring or inspired. What is inspiring, however, is meeting with all the university educators, cartographic professionals, and geoinformatics researchers here  in Brno, Czechia, interested in prompt cartography and the prompt cartography workflow. I love sharing ideas with, learning from, and chatting with so many other enthusiastic people from across Europe and the world.

The workshop the Map Design Commission ran with the Commission on Geovisualization on Tuesday was an absolute blast! I introduced the prompt cartography workflow and got to see it work in action. One participant noted that the map he made in 30 minutes would have taken a week using traditional means. Thanks to all those who came out and for those who are interested, stay tuned to this website, webmapgpt.com, and promptcartography.com for future workshops, video walkthroughs, etc.

As LLM technology becomes the primary user-interface in all GIS and everyday software, learning how to prompt well, and organize your prompts logically, will be fundamental to cartography and map design. These won’t be assistants. LLMs will be your your collaborators.

Let’s make this process ubiquitous and start evolving it – together! That is how disciplines evolve, in my mind. Collaboratively. Open-mindedly. With skepticism, sans cynicism.

Oh yeah… what about making beds. As I’m still jet-lagged (despite my best attempts to sleep through the night), and because I need to give a talk on prompt cartography in a handful of hours, here’s a simple prompt map I made representing where I plan to crash later today.

Happy Make Your Bed Day, everyone!

Click image to view at full size.

Original Prompt to ChatGPT

Can you create a “map” for national make your bed day that charts, in a faux scientific manner how to make a bed professionally with sheets and a quilt (e.g., hotel style), or if you only use a pillow and down comforter, or if you just have three blankets and a pillow. The map should be lie a poster layout (you decide whether portrait or landscape words best). Design the map to be overly serious and look like the directions were crafted by engineers and the map poster itself designed by Apple Designers (clean, crisp, white background), and it should show the three techniques for twin, double/queen, and king size beds.

The title should be in an engineering font. San-serif. Give it a title like: “The science of bedmaking” or silmiar. Somewhere inconspicuous on the map, please put Cartographer: Ian Muehlenhaus.

This should be an image. Thanks!

I’m a bit short on time to go on and on in this blog right now, as I’m in the middle of a session on the ICA Research Agenda session right now. We will be studying making maps for machines, which I agree with. However, I would argue that machines (and AI) don’t need maps. Perhaps, space-time is merely a human interface that evolved to help our genes keep going (Michael Levin, Donald Hoffman). It is likely merely a genetically evolved abstraction – i.e., gross generalization – of the dataome that comprises everything – including all biological species. It from bit.

Thus, space-time doesn’t necessarily matter to machines. They don’t need this interface bit-based dataome. They currently consume data – not visuals.

That’s what’s going through my head, right now, as I post a map on The Great Idea Exchange. The above ideas by Michael Levin, Donald Hoffman, and Caleb Scharf have reshaped my idea of what geography and maps are.

Now, please share some of your ideas on this map. And borrow another one.

Happy Share an Idea Day! You can post an anonymous idea here after you borrow one from someone else. Have fun! Pay it forward.

View Map Here

Original Web Mapper Prompt

Intent

To celebrate share an idea day with a fun, interactive, social map. To be distributed on social media.

1. The Great Idea Exchange

Users post an idea at their location and must “take” someone else’s idea in return.

• Ideas appear as map points with short titles and categories.
• Selecting one reveals the idea and marks it as “borrowed.”
• Animated arcs connect each idea to where it was adopted.
• A counter tracks ideas given, received, and carried across borders.
• Optional rule: you cannot take an idea from your own state or country.

This is probably the strongest direct interpretation of the holiday.

Audience

Anyone who likes maps and sharing ideas. The broad public – almost entirely US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and European Union.

Data description

No datasets required except for country boundaries and a perhaps a free geocoder (not sure) to show the closes “place” to the point the user created.

Preferred stylistic choices

I will upload a style guide with this prompt. Use that.

Guardrails

• The map must not allow the user to upload any injection prompts or JSON, python, etc. Please build in filters.
• Users cannot use vulgarity or disparaging comments. Please filter.
• Users may not “borrow” an idea from within the country they posted.
• Preferably there is no database, just an updating CSV that gets plotted. I would like ot keep this as minimally intensive as possible and avoid any situation where someone can hac into the database or the backend easily.

Other comments

Please make sure any connecting visualization or symbolization between new idea and checked out idea is clear and not so dominant that the map becomes unreadable after a few people do this.