{"id":35,"date":"2011-03-19T08:34:23","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T12:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/?p=35"},"modified":"2011-03-19T08:52:08","modified_gmt":"2011-03-19T12:52:08","slug":"mapping-birth-registration-with-protovis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/2011\/03\/19\/mapping-birth-registration-with-protovis\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the spread of birth registration with Protovis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I was reading Lauren Klein&#8217;s recently-posted <a href=\"http:\/\/macaulay.cuny.edu\/eportfolios\/lklein\/2011\/03\/17\/how-we-know-what-we-know\/\">talk on her work about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved cook, James Hemings,<\/a> when I found a tool I wish I&#8217;d known about sooner. Lauren made her images with <a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/protovis\/\">Protovis,<\/a> a Javascript visualization toolkit produced by the <a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/\">Stanford Visualization Group.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Protovis can do <a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/protovis\/ex\/\">all kinds of things<\/a>, but I was particularly taken with the <a href=\"http:\/\/vis.stanford.edu\/protovis\/ex\/choropleth.html\">choropleth map<\/a> example, which bears a <a href=\"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/2011\/03\/16\/a-brief-note-on-geocommons\/?preview=true&preview_id=32&preview_nonce=0fdc50d0ed#comment-245\">striking resemblance<\/a> to a problem I&#8217;ve been wanting to work up a visualization for. It took a while to figure out how to adapt their example to the data I&#8217;ve got, but here&#8217;s what I ended up with. <\/p>\n<p>This image is for 1921. Gray states didn&#8217;t meet the federal standards for birth registration or death registration; yellow states registered deaths well; purple states registered births and deaths well. You can click on the image for an interactive version that&#8217;ll let you set what year to examine. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/sandbox\/regarea_maps\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Screen-shot-2011-03-19-at-8.18.07-AM.png\" alt=\"US death & birth registration areas, 1921\" title=\"registration areas screenshot.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"500\" height=\"349\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The ability to play with this has helped me think about the periodization of my story in new ways that the source data (rendered in a table on page 59 of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/misc\/usvss.pdf\">this PDF<\/a>) just wasn&#8217;t. (Note the lack of good coverage in heavily rural states, especially the southeast and southwest. These states developed better birth registration by the late 1920s as a result of federal funding from the <a href=\"http:\/\/womenshistory.about.com\/od\/laws\/a\/sheppard-towner.htm\">Sheppard-Towner Act.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<h2>Want to do this yourself?<\/h2>\n<p>For those of you who have a similar research problem that might be able to use some visualization, I&#8217;ve posted the code on <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/cliotropic\/sandbox\">GitHub<\/a>.  You don&#8217;t need a web server to run it; all you&#8217;ll need is to modify the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/cliotropic\/sandbox\/raw\/master\/regarea_maps\/birthreg_grid_simple.js\">data file<\/a> with your own state-level data. If you change the names of any variables in that file, you&#8217;ll need to search-and-replace them in the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/cliotropic\/sandbox\/raw\/master\/regarea_maps\/index.html\">main page&#8217;s scripts<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I was reading Lauren Klein&#8217;s recently-posted talk on her work about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved cook, James Hemings, when I found a tool I wish I&#8217;d known about sooner. Lauren made her images with Protovis, a Javascript visualization toolkit produced by the Stanford Visualization Group. Protovis can do all kinds of things, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[50,46,48,51,49],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools-hacking","tag-javascript","tag-mapping","tag-protovis","tag-timelines","tag-visualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cliotropic.org\/wip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}