A good piece on the googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com on how the Wall Street Journal crew created a fine set of maps illustrating various major-city marathons. Go here for complete piece.
The following guest blog post was written by Albert Sun of the Wall Street Journal. He takes us behind the scenes in the creation of a recent news graphic titled: "Going the Distance: Comparing Marathons".
The Google Maps API has been a great boon for news websites and a great help in creating all kinds of interactive graphics involving maps. Here at the WSJ we're big fans of the API and happy that Google continues to improve it and roll out new features.
We got the idea to map out the routes of Marathons from a story by Kevin Helliker about how despite the beautiful scenic route of the race, the San Francisco marathon was still very unpopular. The difficulty and the hilly terrain kept people from attempting it. To help people see this better, we decided to compare the San Francisco marathon to the big three US marathons: Boston, New York and Chicago.
The code for our marathons graphic grew out of a similar graphic we did for our coverage of the Tour De France. In this one, we managed to incorporate many improvements. Two new features of the Google Maps API played a big role in this graphic. The Elevation API let us quickly and easily get a comparison between the different routes.
Styled Maps let us give the map more of a distinctive WSJ look. We have a distinctive style for our maps in print, and there is some reluctance to run maps online that deviate from that style. Styled Maps lets us get close enough for what we're trying to show. When Styled Maps first becomes available we used the Styled Map Wizard to create a set of different looks for different types of maps, trying to recreate our own maps style.
Along with the Google Maps API, we used jQuery for its wealth of convenience functions and how much easier it makes writing programs in JavaScript. The core of the graphic is a basic Polyline drawn in Google Maps showing the route. [more]
"The Bolivian Express, an English language magazine in La Paz, Bolivia, set up by Bolivian graduates in collaboration with students from around the world. We are a subsidiary of the Grupo Express Press, which publishes another magazine in Bolivia, Revista Metro (http://www.metrobolivia.com/metro/default.asp). We would love if you could include us in your database of journalism internships and feature us on your website (http://journalism.nyu.edu/careerservices/internships/postintern.html).
"The Bolivian Express has just started an ongoing journalism internship program in Bolivia where interns take Spanish classes, journalism classes, photography classes and cinematography classes. Participants are paired with Bolivians in La Paz and are then expected to explore Bolivian culture, eventually producing four pages of content for our magazine each month. This content is then passed to our editors who offer feedback, helping to improve our intern's writing skills. Due to the large numbers of classes offered our internship is perfect for students with a strong passion for learning.
"Our magazine is distributed on the ground, in the skies and, within the next week, online.
If you've acquired a spreadsheet file with a bunch of addresses, you can quickly map them using BatchGeo. We haven't tried it yet with a huge data set, but it works nicely with a couple hundred addresses. Check out BatchGeo athttp://batchgeo.com/
"Have locations in a spreadsheet? Well try this free and unique tool to...
Map them using Google Maps
Publish a map on your Web site
Create a store locator
Get coordinates, print maps, and more!
Get started by following the steps below, or check out our video tutorials
... What could I use this for?
Create a map - Copy directly from spreadsheet program such as Excel, Numbers, or the free Google Docs or OpenOffice Calc.
Distance Calculator - Calculate the distance in miles or kilometers to several locations from a single address.
Satellite Photos - Addresses are linked to Google Maps for satellite photos and driving directions.
Make your own Google Earth KML - Quickly create KML files with your address data for 3D viewing data in Google Earth.
Get postal codes / zip codes - Retrieve postal or zip codes for a given address internationally.
Print a map - Make a printable map with your addresses on it.
Save a map - Create a map with your locations and associated data to a web page for later use.
Create a store locator - Map your store properties, and then link to them from your website.
Get center coordinates (centroids) for a listing of zip codes, cities, or states.
Graphs and charts are a great way to break down the information at hand to the user in a descriptive and visually enticing manner. These visual structures allow you to easily simplify complex data and output easier to understand content. Everyone can use a graph or chart, however, not everyone has the right tools to create an effective one. Below we’ve compiled the best JavaScript graphs and chart solutions. We chose to put a list of JavaScript graphs because of their flexibility and functionality.
Doug McCune maps San Francisco crime in 2009 as if it were elevation. Peaks and valleys emerge with the rolling terrains of crime. The above is the map for prostitution:
My favorite map is the one for prostitution (maybe “favorite” is the wrong choice of words there). Nearly all the arrests for prostitution in San Francisco occur along what I’m calling the “Mission Mountain Ridge”, which runs up Mission St between 24th and 16th. I love the way the mountain range casts a shadow over much of the city. There’s also a second peak in the Tenderloin (which I’m dubbing Mt. Loin).
I love how realistic the 3-dimensional models look. They could almost pass for clay figures. Doug notes that the series of maps are more an art piece than they are information visualization, but these would be a great complement to your standard choropleth.
IAJ Fellow Patrick Mattimore, currently living in Beijing, recently wrote in China's People's Daily Online:
Media badly misplaying Foxconn suicides
Patrick Mattimore
One newspaper has called the recent suicides at the electronics company Foxconn an epidemic. Another newspaper reports that Foxconn is experiencing a “spate of suicides.” Unfortunately, this is an instance of media hysteria and disregard for statistical facts which may have real world negative consequences.
Taiwanese-owned Foxconn has had seven suicides this year. That sounds like a lot, but the firm has an estimated 800,000 workers, more than 300,000 of them at a single plant in ... more»
White House to tie together mapping and data sites
By Aliya Sternstein 05/28/2010
The White House has contracted with a major developer of mapping software to merge a federal website that publishes geospatial information with Data.gov, the government's depot for downloadable data sets, the company's president said on Thursday.
California-based ESRI began last summer tying Data.gov to Geodata.gov, the geospatial information gateway, said company President Jack Dangermond in an interview with Nextgov. He said he expects Geodata.gov's map services, which enable Web-based applications from different sources to communicate with each other, to be available on Data.gov within ... more»
Social Media and Geo-Services – A Fabulous ArcGIS Explorer, Twitter mashup
Modeling real-time situations… This video goes back a few months to the Haiti disaster response, however, its a great example and reminder of how geo technology (ArcGIS Explorer in this case) and social media (Twitter) can be combined to result in a very useful application. Enter the video showing Real-time modeling of the disaster situation in Haiti. Viewing Twitter updates on the map in real-time really puts the situation in context and provides the responders with much needed situational awareness. No doubt these forms of Geo services and mashups will be useful in the near future with the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill response and cleanup efforts.
BP senior vice president Kent Wells explains in this new video what his group is doing towards repairing the leak. He presents the bar graph above to show the improvement in their efforts. It's increasing, so they must be improving. Nifty. The problem is that it's cumulative, and the rate at which they're collecting isn't improving.
Traffic visualizations, mostly in the form of geographic maps, have been popular lately. Governments and organizations have been releasing lots of GPS data, and as a result, we get to see some impressive animations and explore some slick interactives.
We don't often get to see how cars, trains, subways, airplanes, etc move in physical space, because, well, we're usually in them, so it's always interesting to see the big picture. The activity ... more»
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The following guest blog post was written by Albert Sun of the Wall Street Journal. He takes us behind the scenes in the creation of a recent news graphic titled: "Going the Distance: Comparing Marathons".
