This storm appears headed straight for Iceland! Egads! High winds and rain in the North Atlantic! Unprecedented! I wonder if Icelandic TV has an endless feed of a meteorologist standing on the Reykavik waterfront with excessive rain gear on.
Read more ...
Republican Fundraising 2012 - the Early Days
Thursday, August 25, 2011
They're coming! Holy crap, they're coming!
It's always instructive to see the spatial dimensions of politics. Development Seed in D.C. just set up this snappy way of viewing individual donations to candidates so far this election cycle [it's already a cycle? Jeez, slow down, Hoss.]:
The regional clustering of some candidates - Romney owns the coasts, the midwest is split - is a fairly good representation of how our society fractures and gathers, even on the conservative side of things alone.
Mostly surprising is the number of times Ron Paul's name shows up. Dude just won't quit. Or make a coherent argument for a tight monetary policy.
Read more ...
It's always instructive to see the spatial dimensions of politics. Development Seed in D.C. just set up this snappy way of viewing individual donations to candidates so far this election cycle [it's already a cycle? Jeez, slow down, Hoss.]:
The regional clustering of some candidates - Romney owns the coasts, the midwest is split - is a fairly good representation of how our society fractures and gathers, even on the conservative side of things alone.
Mostly surprising is the number of times Ron Paul's name shows up. Dude just won't quit. Or make a coherent argument for a tight monetary policy.
Oh for the love of . . .
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Finally took a look at ArcGIS Online, released in May this year. I now feel a wee bit like Mike Doonesbury circa 2000:
So I've been working for a few months on an open-source workflow that runs between a web map and an editable database with embedding capability, actually pretty psyched that ESRI wasn't in that space yet. I wish I'd tried this out months ago:
View Larger Map
It looks like you still need some ArcSDE and ArcGIS for server chops to pull off a completely-editable interface - to actually practice vector editing in a webpage window - but this was frightening. I threw the above map together in 30 minutes using ArcGIS Online, while coding something similar from scratch took closer to 40 hours (though I'm no programmer).
ESRI strikes again.
Read more ...
So I've been working for a few months on an open-source workflow that runs between a web map and an editable database with embedding capability, actually pretty psyched that ESRI wasn't in that space yet. I wish I'd tried this out months ago:
View Larger Map
It looks like you still need some ArcSDE and ArcGIS for server chops to pull off a completely-editable interface - to actually practice vector editing in a webpage window - but this was frightening. I threw the above map together in 30 minutes using ArcGIS Online, while coding something similar from scratch took closer to 40 hours (though I'm no programmer).
ESRI strikes again.
Shapefiles to Fusion Table Maps
Thursday, August 4, 2011
So you need a web map on the fly?
Google's fusion tables toolkit is something of a killer app for cartographers. As many have already discovered, it's sort of a miniature, compacted version of the process by which a relational database gets viewed as a web map. By tossing it all into the same browser-based, code-free blender, Google has removed a whole slew of otherwise-tedious steps from the process. Fusion tables can do the following:
Read more ...
Google's fusion tables toolkit is something of a killer app for cartographers. As many have already discovered, it's sort of a miniature, compacted version of the process by which a relational database gets viewed as a web map. By tossing it all into the same browser-based, code-free blender, Google has removed a whole slew of otherwise-tedious steps from the process. Fusion tables can do the following:
- Clean data
- Serve data
- Centralize authentication and access
- Merge/Relate Datasets
- Map and style geographic data
- Serve maps on the web.
That's anywhere from three to six different types of software using traditional methods. Hot damn.
The one downside to fusion tables has been the use of KML as the standard accepted geometry type for complex features like lines and polygons. For those of us who work with the shapefile format, that's an extra step. Fortunately, Josh Livni at Google hacked together a way to send shapefiles directly to fusion tables with geometry intact for mapping:
It's a sweet add-on that lets you send - say - a shapefile showing Vermont towns directly to a styled web map, with queryable information via Google charts.
I love how this stuff just keeps getting easier . . .
I love how this stuff just keeps getting easier . . .
Cartodynamism
Monday, July 25, 2011
Herodotus laid down his world on parchment with ink. Samuel de Champlain traveled with paper and pencil. They - and every mapmaker in between and since - created map objects that were imbued with authority.
Maps have always been trusted for complex reasons; social, cultural, political. But for millennia map-making and even map-reading were the province of an elite few, mirroring the dynamic of priests who owned the word of god when the world was 5% literate. Only in our great-grandparents' lifetimes have maps been democratized, their use become common for road navigation and capital-memorizing.
Broken Survey - Incomplete topography in Wyoming
The same way it shook everything else in our lives, the internet has brought maps a step further. Common map interfaces are available in every browser and show only the most basic of facades - these maps contain the world within, and the whole of geography in a 4"x3" container on a glowing screen. Cartographers are only just starting to grasp the possibilities here - this technology isn't yet a decade old - but now that maps of everything are available to everyone, the size of the world has changed.
Washington D.C. live - dark dynamic cartography
Read more ...
Maps have always been trusted for complex reasons; social, cultural, political. But for millennia map-making and even map-reading were the province of an elite few, mirroring the dynamic of priests who owned the word of god when the world was 5% literate. Only in our great-grandparents' lifetimes have maps been democratized, their use become common for road navigation and capital-memorizing.
The same way it shook everything else in our lives, the internet has brought maps a step further. Common map interfaces are available in every browser and show only the most basic of facades - these maps contain the world within, and the whole of geography in a 4"x3" container on a glowing screen. Cartographers are only just starting to grasp the possibilities here - this technology isn't yet a decade old - but now that maps of everything are available to everyone, the size of the world has changed.
Washington D.C. live - dark dynamic cartography
Multi-Attribute Labels in QGIS
Sunday, May 29, 2011
We frequently have to render feature labels on maps that have more than one type of information in them, for instance both parcel ID and parcel area. This quick run-through shows the process for multi-attribute labelling in QGIS, eveyone's favorite open-source alternative to ArcMap.
Read more ...
Agriculture, Food and Poverty
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
A recent post from the world of crowdsourced mapping has me thinking about food availability and the nature of poverty in the United States. The Brooklyn Food Coalition has begun a community food survey, collecting location and stocking information for food stores throughout the borough. The aim is partly to identify zones where - for reasons of distance, transportation or pricing - it is difficult to locate healthy food.
The general term used to describe zones like these throughout the country is "Food Deserts." This also refers to the economic state of people; a household is said to live in a food desert if it doesn't have access to a car or public transportation, and lives more than a mile from a grocery store. According to the USDA, there were 2.3 million such households in 2009. Here's what that looks like spatially, broken down by county:
While there's lots of local variation, the emerging theme is one where relative poverty and food deserts coincide spatially, particularly in the South and in Appalachia. Huge chunks of rural America lack access to fresh foods, relying instead on smaller stores with a greater abundance of processed foods. The Brooklyn Food Coalition is also noting this trend on the community scale, and with greater detail about the specific character of food availability.
There is a dichotomy here, and it will require further investigation: How do food deserts line up spatially with agricultural production? Here is a tiny look in that direction, using a geographically-weighted regression:
And what I'll call the "Map of Socio-Agricultural Irony", or where existing food deserts coincide with high levels of total crop cultivation:
Amber waves of grain everywhere, and not a kernel to gnaw on . . .
Read more ...
The general term used to describe zones like these throughout the country is "Food Deserts." This also refers to the economic state of people; a household is said to live in a food desert if it doesn't have access to a car or public transportation, and lives more than a mile from a grocery store. According to the USDA, there were 2.3 million such households in 2009. Here's what that looks like spatially, broken down by county:
 |
| Percent of households a.) without access to a car, and b.) living more than one mile from a grocery store (Data: USDA) |
While there's lots of local variation, the emerging theme is one where relative poverty and food deserts coincide spatially, particularly in the South and in Appalachia. Huge chunks of rural America lack access to fresh foods, relying instead on smaller stores with a greater abundance of processed foods. The Brooklyn Food Coalition is also noting this trend on the community scale, and with greater detail about the specific character of food availability.
There is a dichotomy here, and it will require further investigation: How do food deserts line up spatially with agricultural production? Here is a tiny look in that direction, using a geographically-weighted regression:
 |
| Percent of county land area in crop cultivation (Data: NASA) |
 |
| Geographically-weighted local R-squared: percent area in cultivation vs. percent of population in a food desert per county |
Amber waves of grain everywhere, and not a kernel to gnaw on . . .
Political Space
Friday, November 26, 2010
As the dust settles following the 2010 midterm elections, we're back to agonizing over the political nature of spatial relationships. Both sides are gearing up for the state-level redistricting fights that will occur with the arrival of data from the most recent nationwide census. Gerrymandering is the oldest geostatistical art, but it doesn't have a long history in the public eye. This could be intentional; dividing a republic into fair, representative districts is both a philosophical and a practical exercise, mind-boggling in its complexity. Small wonder that it becomes a game of party advantage, played by a select few.
Two recent projects have sought to shed some light on the process of redistricting:
- The Redistricting Game, produced by Annenberg Center for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It raises all sorts of insights about how the current process is tailor-made to reinforce partisanship, including this excellent point by David Winston, a former RNC mapping strategist:
" . . . When I, as a mapmaker, have more of an impact than the voters, the system is out of whack."
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From The Redistricting Game (USC, 2010)
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| Demo "Contiguous" Districts in North Carolina (D. Sparks, 2010) |
Geospatial technologies have proven to be essential tools for partisan demographic division in politics. In a representative democracy, how can spatial analysis be used to promote real representation?
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