User Friendly Free/Open Source GIS Products?

July 11, 2024 10:47 AM

Have GIS applications progressed to the point where a relative newcomer could use a widely available non-ESRI product and make a serviceable chloropleth map?

Someone I know is trying to make a "heat map"--picture something like this--of data at the local level (think ZIP, census tract, precinct, that type of thing). They aren't familiar with GIS applications, and while I know ArcGIS, I have neither the software nor the time to help with this.

So let's say they just wanted to map, hypothetically, who prefers Drake, Kendrick, or J Cole at the census tract level. They have a spreadsheet with all the needed data. But they don't have shapefiles or any software at the moment. Is there something free or not-terribly expensive they could learn with a couple days of fooling around and have a serviceable map sometime a week from now?

I see there are tons of answers for this online but wanted to get the AskMeFi view as well.

posted by kensington314 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

This is not impossible but it's not easy. I taught myself QGIS for a job without any previous experience (design job and there was no one on staff to help me with this stuff) and was making maps of this type after a couple weeks, but I found it extremely non-intuitive. There are good learning tools out there for it, I did eventually gain the level of proficiency I needed without any help. QGIS and OpenStreetMap were the tools I used for this. I don't know about 'a couple days of fooling around' but maybe 1-2 weeks depending on what they need to do, how tech-savvy they are in general, and how much time they have to spend on it.
posted by matcha action at 11:05 AM on July 11

Oh, forgot one more resource that I used: Natural Earth https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/

I used mostly youtube to learn, I don't have any records of what I watched (this was about 8 years ago) but most of this stuff seems pretty unchanged since then at the free/consumer level.
posted by matcha action at 11:08 AM on July 11

What is their level of comfort with programming in general?

If they are comfortable with Python, or tech-savvy enough that they could learn in a few days, there's many open-source software packages that can do this. One is Plotly (link to an example that's similar to the one mentioned).

They may need to find their own GeoJSON file with the relevant boundaries, but there are many freely available on the internet that can be found by searching "geojson ".
posted by mekily at 11:10 AM on July 11

Best answer: You might get them to check out Tableau. It's been a few years but I built more than a few spreadsheet to map things for a previous job.
posted by gregr at 12:25 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Easy stuff might not happen at the census tract level but datawrapper handles a lot use cases. I like observablehq. There you could upload some files and paste some code and get there with their Plot project, but it wont be all UI driven.

Isnt ESRI online free for some use? If it is and the census tracts arent jailed that should still be doable.
posted by drowsy at 12:39 PM on July 11

Best answer: I'm a long time ArcGIS user, so I am not sure what someone who isn't would be comfortable with, but I've found the QGIS User Guide to be very easy to look through, find an example similar to what I'm trying to do, and modify. Here's a heat map example
posted by hydropsyche at 2:08 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

I think Tableau may be the simplest path to this for a non technical person. But I do want to mention the tidycensus package for R, which makes downloading and visualizing census data (including shapefiles) super easy once you have some comfort level with R. This chapter of the (free online) tidycensus book walks through various approaches to making static and interactive maps.
posted by yarrow at 3:41 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

I'm an intermediate-level Esri ArcGIS user and have some familiarity with QGIS. As others have said it has a steeper learning curve than some other products, but there are lots of good tutorials online and I think it's doable for someone reasonably wiling to muddle through and RTFM.

When I've tried to do similar things with Tableau, I haven't liked them as much.

ArcGIS Online does have some free public licenses but the functionality is pretty limited. If your friend has any way to glom onto an academic institution with an Esri educational license, that might be worth checking out.

Dataset size is something to consider too with these kinds of projects. Census tracts are small and there are SO MANY of them! If they are looking at the whole USA of census tracts, they might want to start with a smaller region to get a feel for how the software works. It can be very frustrating to try and figure out a new platform while it's hanging up trying to render hundreds of thousands of census tracts on an under-resourced PC.
posted by pantarei70 at 5:03 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Felt should work great for this.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:19 PM on July 12