Yesterday, Digital Humanities Answers helped me find an answer to a problem I’ve been wondering about for a long time: how to map some data easily, without having to know a lot about GIS.
DHAnswers, a project of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and ProfHacker, is a much-better-than-average implementation of the message-board concept, with really smart people who answer questions there. When I saw Bethany Nowviskie’s reference to GeoCommons, I decided to play with it. (I’d just listened to an older podcast from the Scholars’ Lab, Andrew Turner’s November 2011 “Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall.” Andrew is the CTO of GeoCommons, and that talk’s a good introduction to mapping for non-experts, even if the sound quality’s not great.)
In any case: if you’ve ever wondered how to map some data, and especially if you already have a spreadsheet of it with state names, other place names, or latitude/longitude columns, go play with GeoCommons. Once I clean up my maps a little, maybe I’ll post them here.
I’m finding some annoyances with GeoCommons, largely around how it handles date-formatted data, but overall it’s more useful than frustrating.
Kate Chapman
on Mar 16th, 2011
@ 2:48 pm:
Hey Shane,
Glad you like GeoCommons. What is the issue with date formatting? I know it isn’t perfect, but maybe I have some tips that can help!
-Kate
Shane Landrum
on Mar 17th, 2011
@ 4:53 pm:
I’m trying to do choropleth-esque maps that replicate, more or less, this historical item:
There are actually 3 kinds of data mapped on there: states in the federal birth registration area (red), states with good laws but not yet in the birth registration area (pink), states with unsatisfactory laws (yellow).
I know that I’d need to have 3 separate columns of data to map that appropriately; for now, I’ve just been trying to map one (the birth registration area), and I’m trying to map it year-by-year to explore a question about state-by-state policy diffusion.
The map I’ve got so far is here, (dataset here).
Here’s what I’d like to do and what problems I’ve found:
Anything you can suggest to work around these problems would be great. Thanks for your comment.
Shane Landrum
on Mar 18th, 2011
@ 4:10 pm:
Note here, mostly for my own reference later: The choropleth example provided by protovis behaves a lot more like I want my map to behave. The data being mapped is straightforwardly numerical, unlike mine, but the conditional coloring code seems easy enough to edit. Unfortunately, the data’s in JSON format, which will require some research and hacking around to export from Google Docs.