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Category: Mapping

• Make Thematic Maps With Cartographer.js

  Posted Nov 5, 2009 to Mapping, Software / 3 comments

  

  Like it or not, Google Maps mashups continue to be a Web favorite. It's just so easy to use. Stick a few lines of javascript in your web page, and voila, you've got an interactive map. That's for point-wise data though. It gets a little trickier beyond "you are here" pointers. Cartographic.js, in its first release, aims to make thematic mapping with the Google Maps API easier.

  The above is a bubble map for Twitter user locations, and below is a simple choropleth demo.

  

  There's nothing earth-shattering here, but the above only required a couple lines of code, which I think is something every developer likes to hear.

• Unemployment, 2004 to Present – The Country is Bleeding

  Posted Nov 4, 2009 to Data Sources, Featured, Mapping / 47 comments

  

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the most recent unemployment numbers last week. Things aren't looking good for the unemployed, I'm afraid.

  I showed my younger sister the maps. Her response: "It looks like the country is bleeding."

  While the recession is "over" the unemployment rate rose to 9.8% in September from 9.7% in August. That's 214,000 more people who are jobless in the United States. The last time unemployment was this high was back in June 1983 when it was 10.1%.

  Check out the more detailed view here:

  

  From 2004 to 2007, unemployment was actually decreasing, but things went sour in 2008, and we've been trying to bounce back ever since.

  Update: See the step-by-step tutorial on how you can make a map like this with your data.

• Using Flickr as a Paintbrush

  Posted Oct 28, 2009 to Mapping / 1 comment

  

  Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It's because there's so many brick buildings.

  So in the end is a map that provides a different geographic view of what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing the aerials or the designer-defined color coding of roads and land. This however, while portrayed as a view from above, is what people are seeing on the ground.

• This Would Be Perfect for a Roomba Commercial

  Posted Oct 27, 2009 to Mapping / 5 comments

  

  You know the Roomba from iRobot? It's the robot vacuum cleaner that is supposed to do the work on its own so that you don't have to. I've seen video of the thing picking up dirt and junk but I've always been skeptical that it would cover all areas.

  Well the above, from Signal Theorist, is the Roomba coverage over a half an hour. A camera was setup, the lights were turned off, and the above is a long exposure shot of the Roomba's path. Not bad huh?

  [via Simple Complexity]

• You Are Not Allowed to Read this Book

  Posted Oct 12, 2009 to Mapping / 11 comments

  

  What would a freshman English class be without Of MIce and Men? No George or Lenny? People in Appomattox, Virginia seem to think it'd be just fine.

  The National Coalition Against Censorship, however, has different ideas on the matter. For the past couple of years the NCAC has confronted such bans and challenges from libraries and curricula. Above is a map of bans and challenges over from December 2006 to May 2009. Other notable works include The Golden Compass, Girl, Interrupted, and yes, brace yourself, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  [via DataViz]

• The Geography of Job Loss

  Posted Oct 9, 2009 to Mapping / 5 comments

  

  While on the topic of job loss and unemployment, here's an animated map from Tip Strategies that shows job gains and losses over time.

  Red means loss and green means gain, and as you can see above, there isn't much green (read that zero) on the map. The larger the circle is, the greater the number of net loss or gain compared to that of the numbers of the year before in the respective metropolitan statistical area.

  Here's what the map looked like in 2004:

  

  [via The Big Picture | Thanks, Barry]

• Trendsmap Shows Twitter Trends Geographically

  Posted Oct 7, 2009 to Mapping / Add your comment

  

  Twitter shows trending topics, but it's for the entire user base. You can only see what everyone on Twitter is talking about at any given time. Trendsmap, on the other hand, shows trending topics by location. See what's trending in any part of the world in real-time.

  The more popular a topic is, the larger it appears on the map. Click on a topic, and read the tweets that are coming in. For example, I'm looking at 'protest' right now in Pittsburgh. It looks like there's a protest happening at the University of Pittsburgh. There are also thumbnails for YouTube videos and Flickr photos.

  Zoom into your region, and it gets much more interesting:

  

  That is, if you live somewhere where something is going on. Otherwise, maybe not so much:

  

• Earth Through the Eyes of Astronauts

  Posted Sep 14, 2009 to Mapping / 3 comments

  

  Bella Gaia, or Beautiful Earth, is a unique view of earth through the eye's of astronauts in an effort to provide some sentiment to our home planet.

  BELLA GAIA is a new immersive theater experience, a portal for an audience to develop a deeper connection and empathy with our planet Earth. Created by award winning director and classically trained violinist Kenji Williams, BELLA GAIA features a 45 minute live performance by Kenji with a fulldome planetarium immersion of orbiting visualizations of Earth from space.

  Below is a five-minute preview of the visualizations in the "Live Atlas":

  I had to mute it, because the music wasn't my cup of tea, but the visualizations themselves are interesting, much like some of the other space views we've been seeing lately.

  [Thanks, Kristy]

• Stimulus Funding Map is ‘Slick as Hell’

  Posted Sep 9, 2009 to Mapping / 12 comments

  

  As you know, states have received billions of dollars of federal stimulus funding. But do you know where all the money goes?

  Stamen Design, in its most recent project with the State of California, lets you explore the money breakdown. Like most of Stamen's work, at the base is an interactive map, but it is of course much more than that.

  Roll over for breakdowns, search for your city or county, select sectors of interest, and take a look at project-specific information. The color-coded bars change depend on what's geographically in view, and the map zooms in on points of interest on the fly.

  In Eric's words, "It's just slick as hell."

• Mapping the Growth of the Internet – What Do You Think?

  Posted Aug 20, 2009 to Mapping / 12 comments

  

  I, uh, well. Hmm. Yeah. New Scientist recently compiled a list of visualizations exploring the growth of the Internet. Here they are in no particular order (plus the one above).

  

  

  

  What do you think of this series? Which ones are good? Which ones are bad? How can they be improved? Do they need improvement? Discuss in the comments below.

  [Thanks, Brian]

• What DC Metro Routes are Most Common?

  Posted Aug 18, 2009 to Mapping / 9 comments

  

  Greater Greater Washington maps rider flow for the DC Metro. As you might guess, the thicker the path, the greater the estimated number of riders in that given area.

  As the author notes, the data collection process was an unscientific one, so it should be taken with a few grains of salt, but this makes me wonder. These types of subway maps seem to be getting fairly common, in both the static and interactive/animated variety - but the visualization always seems to come from estimates.

  Have any metro systems released their full data? I am sure there are tons of data logs sitting somewhere, growing every time someone swipes their metro card or drops in a subway coin. And more importantly, are metro systems using these types of visualizations to figure out how to distribute trains at different times per day? Do they use something better?

  [Thanks, Jamie]

• Religious Geography of the United States

  Posted Aug 17, 2009 to Mapping / 13 comments

  

  The U.S. Census Bureau doesn't ask questions about religion because of political issues involving separation of church and state, so we don't always get a very detailed view of religion. The Glenmary Research Center does collect this data, however.

  The Valparaiso geography department maps this detailed data, and the extensive collection of choropleth maps can be found here.

  Here are just a few of them:

  

  

  

  

  [via Madville Times | Thanks, Travis]

• Mapping Crime in Oxford Over Time

  Posted Aug 12, 2009 to Mapping / 6 comments

  

  Mentorn Media and Cimex Media, on behalf of BBC, explore crime patterns in Oxford over time. In a map, that I am happy to see is not a Google mashup, select different kinds of crime (e.g. violent crime, burglary & theft), or if you live in the area, compare different neighborhoods by postcode. The interactive also provides three animations for a week in crime - street violence, street robbery, and rowdy behavior - complemented by narration and explanation.

  One thing I'm not so sure about is the color scale. I think I would have gone with a yellow to red progression and left out the green since green usually means something positive. I'm also not sure what 'high' and 'low' levels of crime actually means in numbers. What do you think?

  [Thanks, Jack]

• Watch the Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains

  Posted Aug 3, 2009 to Mapping / 3 comments

  

  Similar to other visualizations showing location (e.g. Cabspotting, Britain From Above), this one from Australia-based data visualization group, Flink Labs, shows the ebb and flow of Melbourne trains over the course of a single weekday using the Melbourne train schedule as the data.

  Inspired by the foraging of ants and their pheromone trails, this visualisation provides the viewer with a satellite-like view of the entire train network over an accelerated timeframe. The visualisation exposes the ebbs and flows of the system along with a surprising level of complexity, not obvious to the the viewer at a single point in time or at the scale of a individual train.

  As you might expect, things start out slow in the morning and then peak during commuting times. Watch the animation below:

  [via @JeffClark]

• Health Care Costs Vary Widely By Region

  Posted Jul 9, 2009 to Mapping / 10 comments

  

  No, this isn't a bad fungus spreading northwest towards Washington. This map from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (via MSNBC) shows health care costs across the country, and yes, you are included Hawaii and Alaska.

  As you can see health care costs are from uniform country-wide.

  However, the color scale is kind of funky. I'm guessing it was automatically chosen by the mapping software to even split the number of regions amongst the five color bins, which I think kind of throws off the color distribution. I don't know. I think as a whole, the map is missing some special sauce.

  [Thanks, Christopher]