The 28 students of the 13th intake of the International Master in Cartography have finished their second semester here at TU Wien!
We want to thank them warmly for all their hard work, and especially for their boundless creativity. Over the various courses during the semester, they produced maps of a particularly professional quality.
We wish them all the best for their third semester in Dresden, Germany, and look forward to seeing them again soon!
On the 7th of March, a new intake of the International Master in Cartography program started a new semester at the Research Unit Cartography of the TU Wien.
Twenty-eight students from 17 countries will study with us in Vienna for four months. We are very excited to exchange our different perspectives on cartography and to experience Vienna together!
We recently concluded a workshop at TU Wien as part of the Shape2Gether project with all eight project partners. Shape2Gether aims to advance education by integrating geosciences, technology, and serious gaming to address climate change and its effects on Europe. During the workshop, we focused on laying the groundwork for three upcoming summer schools in Norway, Malta, and Germany, preparing to welcome students. Each university partner will send four students to accompany us to each summer school.
We’re looking forward to the first summer school scheduled for May 2024 in Tautra and Trondheim, Norway. The summer school will provide students with an immersive educational experience, including hands-on activities like VR, on-site exploration, and group work as an interdisciplinary, international team.
For more information and updates on the project, visit our project webpage.
Three students from the 11th intake of the Cartography Master’s program have recently successfully defended their master’s theses at our research unit.
Moreover, celebrating the defence of our programme’s 200th graduate, Julia Schiller, was a special occasion. She defended the thesis on the topic “Typology of Map Functions” under the supervision of Prof. Georg Gartner.
Oskar Baumann introduced his thesis “The Nuances of Mapping Street Art – Developing a Web Map for Interactive Graffity Exploration”. His supervisors were Benjamin Wild and Prof. Norbert Pfeiffer from the Research Unit Photogrammetry.
Sacha Schlumpf presented his thesis “Space as a Metaphor”, supervised jointly by Prof. Georg Gartner and Jethro Lennox from HarperCollins Publishers in the UK. Thus, he concluded successful defences of his intake at TU Wien.
Congratulations to them, and all the best in their future explorations!
In the summer semester of 2023, students designed and developed digital cartographic projects within the LBS course. We are happy to share with you the gallery of the best projects.
An interactive 3D view of the Earth by Cartography M.Sc. students Janek Łyczakowski, Lennart Kerl and Nicolás Martínez Heredia, which shows all active satellites and presents how humans have colonized and increasingly populated space with devices, combining it with storytelling to educate science for a broad audience.
An animated web map with live information about the underground trains’ position in Vienna by Cartography M.Sc. students Luka Laval and Ander Palacios Fraile.
An application by Cartography M.Sc. students Isaac Newton Kissiedu, Ching-Ting Chia, and Yanning Wang to request emergency services in English in Austria. The team developed the dashboard with a map for emergency service and a mobile application for users to send emergency requests.
“Location-Based Odyssey”
A combination of an interactive map and a story map by Stefan Blochberger, Sophie Haselsteiner and Philipp Zehetgruber introduces the journey described in the Odyssey for younger audiences aged 10-14 years old.
“Austrian Castles”
An interactive web map with information about castles in Austria by Cartography M.Sc. students Samuel Darkwah Manu, Yi Zhen Chew, and Ulrike Holfeld.
“Follow your favorite artist around the world!”
An interactive map dashboard by Stefan Christl, Lorana Myslimi, and Helena Anna Hettegger lets you easily explore your favourite artists’ concert locations worldwide.
The project by Cartography M.Sc. students Phoebe Ly, Dilara Bozkurt, and Zhenjiang Li utilizes the Global Fungi fungi NGS dataset to help scientists better analyze and visualize this data through a web map.
Cartography M.Sc. graduates Valerian Lange and Josè Pablo Ceballos received 1st and 2nd place in the AGEO Awards 2023 for the best master theses in the Geographic information field in Austria.
The award took place on July 4, at the GI Salzburg Conference at the University of Salzburg. This prize, awarded for the 14th time by the Austrian umbrella organization for geographical information AGEO, pursues the goal of promoting excellent graduates from Austrian universities in the field of spatial information science.
The winner of the Award – Valerian Lange, a photo from his LinkedIn page.
You can find master theses on the Cartography M.Sc. website:
Valerian Lange’s: MapColPal – a color palette generation and testing tool for thematic maps
Josè Pablo Ceballos’: Understanding Relevance in Maps through the use of Knowledge Graphs
Twenty students of the Cartography Master Programme have completed their semester in Vienna. In a farewell session on June 28, we looked back at the semester and the results of the students’ work. As a tradition, we had a students’ map exhibition during that session. We wish our students to enjoy their summer holidays and to return rested and ready for the third semester at TU Dresden!
A group of students from Penn State visited our research group in the second week of May to give a workshop on working with big geospatial data of the pandemic. The workshop started on May 8 with a speech from Prof. Dr. Gartner about the current research in our group and a lecture from Dr. Kessler about his research on map projections. Dr. Kessler and Beth King, from the Geography Department of Penn State, introduced the assignment to students for the workshop: to develop a geographic visualisation of data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were divided into 4 groups: Penn State students were working together with Cartography MSc students.
Besides working on a workshop project, our guests from the Penn State and Cartography MSc students participated in other educational and social activities. On Tuesday, they visited the Globe Museum in Vienna and had dinner together in a traditional Viennese restaurant. On Wednesday PennState students visited the AR lab in the Geoinformation group of our department, where Dr. Marcelo de Lima Galvao presented his research on Geo AI with the Microsoft HoloLens.
The final presentation of the projects was on Thursday at TU Wien. Students produced four exciting projects. The first group, Team Globetrotter, presented an algorithm that ranked EU countries that were most vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The prototype dashboard showed three investment areas: hospitals, vaccinations, and information.
The second group, GeoRelief, sought to provide COVID-19 vaccinations for young Ukrainians in response to the ongoing Russian occupation that responds to a clearly defined humanitarian need. They introduced a dashboard that would help determine populations with the most need of COVID-19 vaccines, representing data and tools gleaned from these organisations.
The third group, SeelenGarten, presented a clear mission and vision statement, linking the variables of green spaces with COVID-19 mental health impacts. They presented visuals such as sample geovisualization tools, NDVI details, and data related to the tree canopy and green spaces in their prototype.
The fourth group, Spatial Help, addressed the public health challenge of dealing with the aftermath of COVID-19. This team presented a fact-based characterization of COVID-19’s impact on mental health. Their dashboard’s representation of mental health facilities, showed the location of nearby service providers with the use of a quantitative modelling approach to measure vulnerable populations.
Cartography Research Group thanks the workshop organisers Dr. Kessler, Beth King and Brookelynn Constant as well as the Penn State students for visiting our research group and Cartography MSc students for their fruitful collaboration!
From May 2nd to May 5th, the Erasmus Mundus Master Cartography students received training from Philippe De Maeyer, a professor at Ghent University and an author of school atlases. The training focused on the creation and production of atlases.
In groups, the students examined methods for collecting data for atlas maps and how to make informed decisions about content and visualization. They also critically analyzed multiple atlases available on the market. During the final half-day, the groups presented their conclusions and discussed them with the entire group.
We are pleased to invite you to the concluding conference of our Erasmus+ project, DigiGeo, which will take place on May 24th 2023, in Olomouc. We aim to bring together students and scholars who share an interest in the field of Geosciences within higher education. Specifically, we`d like to explore the impact of the virtual/online/digital transformation era we experienced due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
For more details, visit DigiGeo Conference.
