Great places to start thinking about maps:
- Dave Cole, John Keefe and Matt Stiles on Mapping Best Practices (NICAR 2013)
- John Keefe, Albert Sun and Jeff Larson talk about making maps (Hacks/Hackers 2011)
- Take Care of your Chloropleth Maps
- When Maps Shouldn’t be Maps
- Amanda’s maps and mapping tags on Tumblr
KML is the markup language that Google Earth uses to convey geographic information. You might never write KML from scratch, but it is worth at least looking under the hood to see how it works.Wikipedia has some syntax examples.
Shapefile is a geospatial vector data format. Like a KML file, a shapefile lists points that connect to make up polygons.
So where can you find KML and Shapefiles?
- Columbia’s digital media tutorials include New York City KML files that are Google Map ready
- CUNY’s research center maintains an extensive collection of digital map files.
- You search Fusion Tables for data sources, though you’ll want to be sure you know what you’re getting.
- NYC political and administrative districts are available from the Department of City Planning.
- John Weir maintains a pretty comprehensive list of NYC geographic data sets, and if you learn a little git, you can contribute to it!
- GeoCommons is a great resource for national and international map files.
Get a Little Fancy
Color Brewer is an indispensible resource for finding good gradients and color palettes so you don’t have to become an expert on color theory, color blindness, hue and saturation.
You can use more than the ten map markers that Google Maps offers. ONA’s MJ Bear Fellow Lucas Timmons has instructions for you.
CartoDB is new and more powerful and flexible than Google Maps. It is also more complex. They regularly round up maps their users have made. Most of the examples there involve some substantial programming, however.
MapBox is even more powerful, flexible, and complex.
For the Programmers
Quantum GIS is free and open source software that will let you do sophisticated geographic analysis.
Git isn’t particular to map making at all, but it is a distributed version control system, and a great way to collaborate on software development. Repo.or.cz, GitHub and Gitorious are all great places to can get free git hosting.
Albert Sun’s gmap library is an excellent resource.
If you start developing your programming skills, you can do a whole lot more using tools like TileMill, which is quite powerful, but takes a bit of technical know-how. The news apps team at ProPublica built their own mapping library, published the code, and used it to power a very cool redistricting explorer.
Think Things Through
Clay Shirky wrote a great review of Homicide Watch D.C. and Washington Post’s Homicides in the District, two projects that look at murders in Washington D.C. through very different lenses. One starts with a map, one with photos. This is one great place to start thinking about what it means to map information and what story you’re telling when you do that.
In class we talked a lot about gun data, which has been in the news. The Journal News posted the addresses of every gun permit holder in Westchester
+ The New York World took that data and organized it into zip codes by density. And some very smart journalists weighed in on the Journal News’ decision, including Susan McGregor in CJR, David Carr in NY Times and Jeff Jarvis on his blog
More tools? More questions?
Lingering questions? Want to share a tool you love (or just kind of like)? Bonus points if they’re free (as in birds).
CSV Sound System NICAR 14 — a walk through that has you plot