Institute for Analytic Journalism

Suicides by Location on the Golden Gate Bridge

analyticjournalism — 2009-07-28T10:42:21-06:00

For those of us familiar with San Franciso, its bay and its famous bridge, The Golden Gate, this is a compelling infographic. Fundamental in its data and a fine mix of data and representation of geography. Once again, thanks to Nathan at Flowing Data.

Suicides by Location on the Golden Gate Bridge

Posted by Nathan / Jul 28, 2009 to Infographics / 3 comments

This graphic from SF Gate is a good four years old, well before I knew what an infographic was, but just because it's old doesn't mean it's not interesting. Here we see San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the "sad tally" of 1,218 known suicides by location. Each black square represents a person who has taken his or her life and 128 light poles are used as reference points.

The east side of the bridge, where most of the suicides occurred, has a pedestrian walkway. The first suicide was just 10 weeks after the bridge opened in 1937.

A nice piece of coding here -- Google Maps to Heat Maps

analyticjournalism — 2009-07-27T15:29:53-06:00

gheat is, as its promo line says, a nifty tool to turn a Google pin map into a heat map. (Or should we be calling that a "Heat" map?)

Here's what the page looks like, but drill down into the examples. I especially like the map of Davis, Calif. bike accidents.

gheat

heatmaps for Google Maps

Project Home		Downloads		Wiki		Issues		Source

Summary | Updates | People

Star this project

Code license:	MIT License
Labels:	gmaps, heatmap, python, wsgi, aspen, geo

Show all Featured downloads:
gheat-0.2.tbz gheat-0.2.zip

Links:	DOCUMENTATION Screencast Ruby starting-point (thanks David :^) other software from Zeta
Blogs:	http://blag.whit537.org/.../gheat
Feeds:	Project feeds
Groups:	gheat@googlegroups.com

People details

Project owners:
	whit537
Project committers:
	endtwist, dav...@brconsulting.com.au

Google Maps gives you API for adding additional map layers. This software implements a map tile server for a heatmap layer.

Examples

Please tell me (chad@zetaweb.com) if you'd like a link here.

The Anglican Church in North America is using gheat on their homepage to show their parishes.

VisTrac is using gheat to visualize clicks on web pages.

Russell Neches is using gheat to visualize auto and bike accidents in Davis, CA. The data is parsed from about 10,000 raw police reports.

The Australian Honeynet Project is using gheat to visualize the origin of spam that gets caught in their SensorNET honeypots.

The Conficker Working Group is using gheat to track the spread of the Conficker worm.

This is an animated heatmap of the conficker botnet as found in Australia (one frame a day, unique IPs per frame, with data from the end of January through June, 2009). This was produced using a heavily modified gheat. Here's a Flash example.

Cool site for finding geodata

analyticjournalism — 2009-07-24T15:53:57-06:00

Thanks to Michael Corey over on NICAR-L

Random find today for the geographically inclined:
http://finder.geocommons.com/
Library of spatial data, and the ability to convert it all to and from Shapefile, KML and CSV.

They also produce http://maker.geocommons.com/, a quick way to build visually appealing maps with all that data. Haven't experimented with it much yet to know the limitations/features

Sidenote: Anyone using QGIS? How intimidating is installing all the necessary frameworks if you don't already have them?

Thanks,

Michael Corey
Digital Projects Editor
DesMoinesRegister.com
515.284.8076 mcorey@dmreg.com

Teaching Spatial Thinking

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-22T16:40:16-06:00

Discovered a new, online resource for teaching spatial thinking today while attending the UCGIS Summer Assembly here in Santa Fe. Take a lookat teachspatial.org:

About TeachSpatial

TeachSpatial.org implements suggestions from a multi-disciplinary Symposium on a Curriculum for Spatial Thinking. The symposium, organized by Diana Sinton, Mike Goodchild, and Don Janelle, was hosted by the University of Redlands in June 2008. Its purpose was to discuss the merits and content of a general curriculum course on spatial thinking. One of its recommendations was to establish a wiki site to promote the discussion and sharing of resources among instructors.

Participants in the Redlands meeting were Kate Beard-Tisdale (Spatial Information Science Engineering, Maine), Marcia Castro (Global Health and Population, Harvard), Jeremy Crampton (Geosciences, Georgia State), Phil Gersmehl, Geography, CUNY Hunter), Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle (spatial@ucsb), John Kantner (School of Advanced Field Studies, Santa Fe), Steve Marshak (Geology, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jo-Beth Mertens (Economics, Hobart and William Smith), and Diana Sinton (Spatial Curriculum, Redlands).

What you can do here

Create an account and contribute. Account setup is automated and fast and your email address is kept private.
Once logged in, you can subscribe to content types (blogs, links, discussions, etc.) to get emails announcing new postings -- do this from your My Account page
From the "Create Content" page you can post:
- schemas (e.g., models and representations) to help link concepts into broader frameworks of spatial reasoning
- teaching resources (syllabi, lesson plans, exercises, examples of student work, etc.)
- links of interest to this community

New levels of data aggregation

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-02T11:37:35-06:00

We've been noticing since the first of the year the results of some very creative and sometime brilliant aggregation sites. (Do we need a new phrase for this format?) These sites are richer than Google mash-ups in that they allow far more control by the user. Some, like Mint.com or TripIt.com, also require various degrees of data entry by the user, sometimes with with a surprising degree of detail, both personal and specific. Mapumental, below, pushes the limits of this evolution.

mySociety blog » Say hello to Mapumental

By Tom Steinberg on Monday, June 1st, 2009

We’ve been hinting for a while about a secret project that we’re working on, and today I’m pleased to be able to take the wraps off Mapumental. It’s currently in Private Beta but invites are starting to flow out.

Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time - to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.

In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.

Francis Irving, the genius who made it all work, will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely UI, and to Matthew, for being brilliant as always.

Words don’t really do Mapumental justice, so please just watch the video :) Update: Now available here in HD too

Also new: We’ve just set up a TheyWorkForYou Patrons pledge to help support the growth and improvement of that site. I can neither confirm nor deny that pledgees might get invites more quickly than otherwise ;)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:20am and is filed under Launches, News, Travel Time Maps. Follow responses to this entry (RSS2 feed).

Amazon Hosts TIGER Mapping Data

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-30T11:06:38-06:00

From O'Reilly Radar....

Amazon Hosts TIGER Mapping Data

Posted: 29 May 2009 09:18 AM PDT

Last week at Ignite Where Eric Gundersen of Development Seed made a significant announcement for geohackers looking for easy access to open geodata. Amazon will be hosting a copy of TIGER data on EC2 as an EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Eric stated that this happened during the Apps For America contest in 2008 when they need open geo data for their entry Stumble Safely (which maps crime against bars).

Amazon is now hosting allUnited States TIGER Census data in its cloud. We just finished moving 140 gigs of shapefiles of U.S. states, counties, districts, parcels, military areas, and more over to Amazon. This means that you can now load all of this data directly onto one of Amazon’s virtual machines, use the power of the cloud to work with these large data sets, generate output that you can then save on Amazon’s storage, and even use Amazon’s cloud to distribute what you make.

Let me explain how this works. The TIGER data is available as an EBS storeEBS, or Elastic Block Storage, which is essentially a virtual hard drive. Unlike S3, there isn’t a separate API for EBS stores and there are no special limitations. Instead an EBS store appears just like an external hard drive when it’s mounted to an EC2 instance, which is a virtual machine at Amazon. You can hook up this public virtual disk to your virtual machine and work with the data as if it’s local to your virtual machine – it’s that fast.

The TIGER Data is one of the first Public Data Sets to be moved off of S3 and switched to an EBS. By running as an EBS users can mount the EC2 instance as a drive and easily run their processes (like rendering tiles with Mapnik) with the data remotely. If you're a geo-hacker this makes a rich set of Geo data readily available to you without consuming your own storage resources or dealing with the normally slow download process.

I love the idea of Amazon's Public Data Sets. It's an obvious win-win scenario. The public is able to get access to rich data stores at a relatively cheap price and Amazon is able to lure said public onto their service. Smart.

Where '09: Jack Dangermond, "Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb"

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-26T20:26:13-06:00

"Where 09" is a fine conference put on by O'Reilly Publishing. At this year's conference, Jack Dangermond, honcho at ESRI, talked about "Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb." Take note of how he and a colleague use a command in Google Maps - “Greeley: mapservers” -- to call up a bunch of map servers and their files for, in this case, Greeley, Colo.

That's a neat search tool that may give you quite mixed results depending on how GIS hip your local governments are. It seems to work for many non-U.S. cities, too. For example, "Amsterdam: mapserver" returned good results, but nothing for Mexico City or Berlin. Still, we think the search tool. while young, has a lot of promise, especially if you can find the time to drill down into the metadata for individual maps.

For the Dangermond presentation (15 min) go to: http://where.blip.tv/file/2151502/

Crime mapping conference in New Orleans

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-26T10:25:03-06:00

Great opportunity for learning if one is in the New Orleans area.

The Tenth Crime Mapping Research Conference

http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Summary.aspx?e=c9e87fa2-759d-4bb3-a42d-91841ca7dfa2

Solving Problems with Geography and Technology

Solutions to crime and public safety problems are necessarily about “where.” Those solutions are a combination of research, practice, technology and policy that provides a full perspective of the breadth and depth of a problem and the results of its solution. The application of geographic principles to these problems has come into the mainstream as the reemergence of geography has become a primary component in solving problems.

Advancements in geographic-based technologies have brought a better understanding of crime, more efficient deployment of public safety resources and more critical examination of criminal justice policies. This is due to the reciprocation that occurs between research and practice, often resulting in better technology. Research provides a foundation of theories. Practice operationalizes the theories through technology. Policy decisions are then enacted with a more precise focus based on research and practical demonstration. Geography has been the constant in the expansion of each of these areas, and technology has been the facilitator.

The Crime Mapping Research Conference is not just about presenting where crime is. The conference is about understanding crime and public safety and their effect on community. It represents a range of research findings, practical applications, technology demonstrations and policy results.

Indieprojector Makes it Easy to Map Your Geographical Data

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-21T15:55:07-06:00

Clipped from FlowingData....

Indieprojector Makes it Easy to Map Your Geographical Data

Posted: 21 May 2009 12:37 AM PDT

Axis Maps recently released indieprojector, a new component to indiemapper, their in-development mapping project to "bring traditional cartography into the 21st century." Indieprojector lets you import KML and shapefiles and easily reproject your data into a selection of popular map projections. No longer do you have to live within the bounds of a map that makes Greenland look the same size as Africa.

Indieprojector was built by Axis Maps as the smarter, easier, more elegant way to reproject geographical data. It's platform independent, location independent and huge-software-budget independent. Indiemapper closes the gap between data and map by taking a visual approach to projections. See your data. Make your map. For the first time ever, it's just that simple.

Not only can you map your data; more importantly, you can also export your map in SVG format, which you can in turn edit in Adobe Illustrator or some other tool.

For those who frequently deal with geographical data and want something simpler than the big GIS packages, Axis Maps' indiemapper is a project to keep an eye on.

Google Launches Maps Data API

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-21T14:38:55-06:00

Google Launches Maps Data API

Posted by O'Reilly Radar : 20 May 2009 11:27 AM PDT

The crowd at Where 2.0 was expecting an API announcement and Google delivered one. Lior Ron and Steve Lee announced their Maps Data API, a service for hosting geodata. As they describe it on the site:

What is it?

The Google Maps Data API allows client applications to view, store and update map data in the form of Google Data API feeds using a data model of features (placemarks, lines and shapes) and maps (collections of features).

Why Use the Google Maps Data API?

Storage scales simply with usage. You shouldn't have to worry about maintaining a data store to build a cool Google Maps mashup. Focus on building the client, and we'll provide hosting and bandwidth for free.
Geodata is accessible across platforms and devices. With many client libraries and clients, accessing stored geodata is possible from anywhere, whether it's on the web, a mobile phone, a 3D application, or even a command line.
Realtime geodata requires realtime indexing. For a lot of geographic content, freshness is important. Geodata from the Google Maps Data API can be instantly indexed and made searchable in Google Maps.
Rendering geodata is better and faster with the right tools. Through JavaScript, Flash, 3D, static images and more, we'll continue to provide better ways to render your content to meet platform and latency demands.

Google is launching with some sample apps:

My Maps Editor for Android allows users to create and edit personalized maps from an Android mobile phone. Integration with the phone's location and camera makes it easy to document a trip with photos and text on a map.
ConnectorLocal is a service that informs users about the places where they live, work and visit by gathering trusted hyperlocal information from many sources. Using the Google Maps Data API, ConnectorLocal makes it easy for users to import and export geodata in and out of Google Maps, and also improves their ability to have data indexed in Google Maps for searching.
My Tracksenables Android mobile phone users to record GPS tracks and view live statistics while jogging, biking, or participating in other outdoor activities. Stored with Google Maps Data API, these tracks can be accessed, edited and shared using the My Maps feature in Google Maps.
Platial, a social mapping service for people and places, uses the Google Maps API to host geodata for community maps on both Platial and Frappr.

Geo data can get very large very quickly. Serving it can get expensive. This Data API will help NGOs, non-profits and developers make their data available without breaking the bank. Google's goals for doing this are obvious. If the data is on their servers they can index it easier and make it readily available to their users. There will be concern that Google will have too much of their data, but as long as Google does not block other search engines and allows developers to remove their data I think that this will be a non-issue.

The crowd was hoping for a formal Latitude API to be announced (knowing that they launched the hint of one at the beginning of May). When I asked Lior and Steve about it we got some smiles. I think we'll see some more movement in this area, but not *just* yet.