Thursday, February 18, 2016

Urban Dictionary Map of San Francisco


Reddit user atrubetskoy has been making some popular Urban Dictionary maps lately. I particular liked his map of the Bay Area According to Urban Dictionary. In fact I liked it so much that I stole the idea.

Urban Dictionary is is a crowd-sourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases. It also seems to be a place where a lot of white middle-class kids go to describe their white, middle-class neighborhood as a 'gangsta ghetto'.

The methodology for atrubetskoy' maps is very simple. He just types in a city or a neighborhood name into Urban Dictionary and then adds the definition he finds to his Urban Dictionary map.

I decided to create my own version of atrubetskoy's map with Mapbox Studio Classic. Mapbox Studio Classic's CartoCSS allows you to change place-names, so it is a great way to re-label a map.

To change place-name labels in Mapbox Studio Classic you just need to find the CartoCSS for the administrative level that you wish to change (in my case this was level type 'city', 'town' and 'village'). Then all you need to do is type in the place-name you wish to change and its replacement. So to change 'San Francisco' to 'Tha City' I add,

[name_en='San Francisco'] { 
    text-name: '"Tha City"'; 
}

to the CartoCSS for city labels.

So - here is my Urban Dictionary Map of San Francisco.

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