In a follow up to his McDonald's map, Stephen Von Worley of Weather Sealed maps the dominating burger chains across the United States. McDonald's obviously has a stronghold in a lot of areas but not all of them. Most noticeable is Sonic Drive-in with over 900 restaurants in Texas alone. Personally, I'm rooting for Carl's Jr. and In-n-Out.
[via We Love Datavis]
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In an effort to put transit data from the Toronto Transit Committee to better use, MyTTC provides a trip planner to help you find the best route from point A to point B. This video, compete with smart arses sitting on a couch, provides a peek into how the underlying algorithm works.
[Thanks, Canna]
FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.
Of course there are plenty of possible explanations for the distribution. Maybe people get all their food from superstores like Walmart in the red dot areas, so there are fewer gigantic stores than there are small local bars.
Then again, the FloatingSheep guys did their homework and found, according to Census, that the number of drinking places in those red dots are really skewed compare to the average. So it's also possible that area of the country just likes to drink a lot.
Anyone who lives in the area care to confirm? I expect your comment to be filled with typos and make very little sense. And maybe smell like garbage.
[Thanks, Michael]
Open data is great, but it's useless if you don't know what to do with it. Sunlight Labs, a group focused on using technology to support open government, recently released ClearMaps. It's an Actionscript framework for interactive cartographic visualization.
In addition to giving designers and developers more control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
It's still in the early stages, but developers will want to check this out I am sure.
[Thanks, Kevin]
ITO world, who you might remember from a year of OpenStreetMap edits, come back to the map visualization to show the efforts of an impromptu community and Crisis Mappers to produce the most complete and accurate map of Haiti following the earthquake.
From the ITO blog:
Each flash represents a new edit into OpenStreetMap, and this visualisation is a vivid picture of how much work was contributed by volunteers, following the quake. First the primary and secondary roads (green and red) are added and then smaller residential streets and many other features such as the blue glowing camps of displaced people that emerge.
Watch the mapping frenzy unfold below.
[Thanks, Christopher]
Update: I had scheduled this post for next week, but apparently, Data.gov.uk launched today. The site isn't loading for me right now though. I guess they weren't prepared for traffic.
Data.gov, a catalog of US data, launched last year. Now it's the UK's turn. Well, not yet. But soon. Data.gov.uk is still under lock and key, but it has granted access to some developers. Ito Labs, the group behind mapping a year of OpenStreetMap edits posted screenshots of their maps that show vehicle counts (above).
Here are some comparison maps between 2001 and 2008, by vehicle type.
Once Data.gov.uk is up, it'll be interesting to see how it compares to its US counterpart. Even more interesting will be the projects that come out of it.
Despite all the broohaha over Data.gov, not many useful projects (or datasets) come to mind. Can you think of any? There's still a long way to go from both sides of government and developer.
[Thanks, Oliver]
I'm admittedly not very good with historical precedent, but I think we can all agree it's important to know about the work those have done before us. It makes your own work better and lets you appreciate what others do more (or less).
To that end, Zach of indiemaps has a fine roundup of the very first thematic maps. The first known choropleth map? That would be Charles Dupin’s from 1826 (above).
How about the first dot density map from Frère de Montizon in 1830?
Check out indiemaps for more. Also find a complete history of data visualization here.
[via TomC]
Unless you live under a rock inside a cave in the remotest area in the world, you know a huge quake struck Haiti on Tuesday, and much lies in ruins. The New York Times just posted some before and after satellite images, and it's a horrible thing to see. Buildings gone. People gone.
It pains me to think about what if that were to happen to me or my family.
To this end, I'm donating all proceeds from World Progress Report orders, along with this month's FlowingData revenues, to UNICEF's relief efforts. The Report, after all, is an effort to relate to the rest of the world. It only seems fitting. It's not much in the grand scheme of things, I guess, but at least it's something. As they say, every little bit counts.
Again, I'm taking orders for one week - through January 21. Do some good and get something good too. I'm including How America Learns with all orders now. Buy a print now.
Or if the World Progress Report just isn't your thing, you can donate directly to UNICEF.
I mean, seriously, there are 27,000 of you + me. We can make a big difference together.
Some movies are popular everywhere. Others are popular only in certain regions. The New York Times, in a nice team effort, maps rental popularity by zip code for large regions in the US.
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The Known Universe from the American Museum of Natural History shows a view of the universe, starting from the Himalayas and quickly moving out to the edge where all is black and scary - made possible by the records in the Digital Universe Atlas.
Naturally, the above video draws comparisons to the well-known Powers of 10 video (below), but both serve different purposes. One teaches a mathematical concept while the other is meant to draw in visitors to a museum exhibit. Both are awesome.
[Thanks, Rich]
It was World AIDS Day last week and UNAIDS published the latest estimates on the number of people around the world who are living with HIV. Xaquin G.V. provides four cartograms (i.e. value-aread maps) to show the numbers. In the final result (above) each square represents 10,000 people with HIV, and regions are color-coded by percentage of people with the virus.
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I'm no doubt still under massive food coma at this time, but in case you've regained consciousness or don't live in the US, check out this collection of maps from The Morning News. Can you guess what each is supposed to show? If you can guess even one of them correctly, I'll be impressed.
[Thanks, William]
Food-wise, Thanksgiving is different across the country. In some places you're going to get a lot of chitterlings and collard greens, while in others, turkey and mashed potatoes. Personally, I'm a big fan of the 10-course Chinese feast, but to each his own.
The New York Times (Matthew Ericson and Amanda Cox), map what's cooking in your neck of the woods based on searches on Allrecipes. The top search, concentrated in the southeast, was sweet potato casserole. I have no idea what that is, but it must be delicious.
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Verizon has been running these ads lately that compare their 3G coverage to that of AT&T's. In the ads a Verizon customer walks along on a speedy phone, and a US map pops up that's covered in red. Later, an AT&T customer looks frustrated with a sparsely-covered AT&T coverage map. You've probably seen them by now, but if not, here are the Verizon ones.
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There are about a million ways to make a choropleth map. You know, the maps that color regions by some metric. The problem is that a lot of solutions require expensive software or have a high learning curve...or both. What if you just want a simple map without all the GIS stuff? In this post, I'll show you how to make a county-specific choropleth map using only free tools.
Here's what we're after. It's the most recent unemployment map from last week.
