Professional Geographer » thematic mapping

Slate’s Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

drjill — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:08:05 +0000

In their Dec. 30, 2009 post, Slate poises the question “When Did Your County’s Jobs Disappear?” with a nicely done interactive map and timeline. Besides painting a dismal picture of the ongoing state of U.S. unemployment, this map does an equally fine job of integrating space, time, and demographic data.

Visualizing the Grid: Interactive Web Map

drjill — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:16:05 +0000

NPR has produced a new interactive map of the U.S. energy grid and power sources. Included are several roll-over maps to see percent energy production by different states and by fuel type. It also includes an informative display of anticipated renewable (solar and wind) fuel sources incorporated into the grid over the next few decades. The maps are intuitive, well designed, and data sources are cited in the map’s footnotes. This is a good example of interactive map design for public education. It should serve as a terrific resource for educators to help students understand power production, renewable power supply, and power distribution in the U.S.

The interactive map is produced for NPR’s series, “Power Hungry: Re-Envisioning Electricity In The U.S.,” including over a dozen articles. One could easily imagine this series and maps being worked into the curriculum in middle through higher education, inviting students to explore questions about location, energy, and the future. From the site: “The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation’s electrical systems.”

ScapeToad Cartogram Software

drjill — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:50:15 +0000

ScapeToad is an interesting, free, stand-alone cartogram software for Mac, Windows (and available platform independent). ScapeToad 1.1 is available for download under a GPL license.

Classical thematic mapping displays spatial patterns of theme or series data depicted on familiar reference maps of standard land-area polygons, which are typically distorted only by the selected projection. A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area. The geometry or space of the map is distorted in order to convey the information of this alternate variable. There are two main types of cartograms: area and distance cartograms. To see examples, WorldMapper.org provides a nice collection of cartograms.

(from the ScapeToad website) “The visualization of social phenomena through classical thematic mapping often leads to unsatisfying representations… Cartograms are a well-known technique used to compensate for this inconvenience by breaking the link between statistical regions and their topographical areas. Consequently, this liberates one visual variable (that of polygon size) for a more relevant use, such as the representation of the relative social importance of these regions (usually measured by the size of their populations), while leaving intact their topological relations.”

Thematic Mapping Engine

drjill — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:45:12 +0000

Thematic Mapping Engine (TME) enables you to visualise global statistics on Google Earth. The primary data source is UNdata.

The engine returns a KMZ file that you can open in Google Earth or download to your computer.