This week's map is a MyMaps application because of temporary production constraints.
From the archives of the Star and the Hamilton Spectator, dog poisoning incidents in southern Ontario over the last several years.
This week's map is a MyMaps application because of temporary production constraints.
From the archives of the Star and the Hamilton Spectator, dog poisoning incidents in southern Ontario over the last several years.
Thanks to colleagues for passing these links along:
At cbc.ca: a Google Map of locations where severed feet (real ones) have been found along the B.C. coast.
The CBC's uses of the API include their Afghan casualty map, which shows where in Afghanistan the actual deaths occurred (as distinct from ours, which shows where the soldiers came from).
My only comment is that I'm not sure what the placemarks mean to someone who isn't already familiar with the Kandahar area, but it's an interesting approach. They use numbered icons for incidents with multiple casualties, which is one solution to a problem we have with displaying multiple points on the same place. Our homicide map is due for a rethink, and that's probably a feature we should adopt.
Election violence in Zimbabwe, by category of apparent perpetrator. This map has some design features in common with the crime map at The Tennessean, which is very thorough (there's a lot of mapping potential in U.S. jurisdictions which are open about crime data) but the choice of colours is strangely festive - the week's holdups in Nashville appear as cheerful pink balloons.
This week's maps are quite different from the previous ones: two detailed 1878 atlas sheets of the east and west ends of Toronto, presented as a translucent overlay over the modern city. Adjust the transparency with the buttons at the top of the map.
The most striking change is to the city’s shoreline, especially downtown and in the east end – the 1878 maps were drawn before the growing city found ways to expand southward into the shallow water just south of Front St.
Rural Ontario begins just above Bloor – St. Clair is also listed as the Third Concession, and still mostly is a rural concession road. The city is surrounded by market gardens and orchards, run by small farmers selling produce for sale at city markets.
In the countryside are now-forgotten villages like Carlton, at the crossroads of St. Clair Ave. W. and Old Weston Rd., Norway, at Kingston Rd. and Woodbine, and Coleman, at Dawes Rd. and the Danforth. Yorkville is a distinct community in its own right, though the city is about to absorb it.
Toll gates block many major roads. Wagons headed into the city from Leslieville would have had to pass one at Queen and Broadview.
The Union Station on the map is the second Union Station, built in 1873. (The one we know today is the third station, built in 1927.)
Just north of the Don Jail (the ‘New Gaol,’ finished 13 years before) we see the House of Industry, or workhouse. The walls must have cast a long shadow over the workhouse inmates, as was perhaps intended.
Nerd box
The overlay maps were prepared by rotating them counter-clockwise and changing the vertical and horizontal dimensions until the major streets matched. The process at one point involved holding a ruler up to the screen, which looks ridiculous but actually works pretty well as a way of calculating the corrections.
Just as an old house has no right angles and no parallel lines, the 1878 maps (produced decades before aerial photography could be used in mapping) don't align perfectly to the modern one. In the west-end map, for example, Yonge lines up with Keele and Ossington but not Dufferin. On the north-south axis, Bloor lines up with St. Clair but not Queen as precisely as I’d like. On the east-end map, Queen and the Danforth aren’t exactly parallel on the overlay.
The fit here is the best possible one, as far as I can tell. Readers will have to use their imagination to a certain extent.
The maps themselves came from the McGill library’s online collection.
The red state/blue state map produced after the 2000 American presidential election - with the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, the Pacific coast and a few other states blue and everything else red - was a cultural meme for a while, becoming the starting point for a great deal of discussion of the intersections between culture, politics and geography in the United States. It inspired partisans on both sides and even a movie (now out on DVD) in which a disgruntled Democrat finds love on the road to Winnipeg in the aftermath of John Kerry's defeat.
It also inspired people with really good MapPublisher skills to mess around with the original concept, showing an alternative version designed to show the U.S. in all its real complexity as mostly shades of grey or perhaps purple. Or pink. There's even this population-weighted version which looks sort of like a chemical spill seen from the air.
Now a Flash app at the LA Times’s election site offers you the chance to simulate the presidential election yourself, putting states into the red or blue camp, depending on your fears or preferences, and seeing the changes in the Electoral College. It’s very educational – it’s one thing to know in principle that the election will hinge on a few high-population states that are realistically in play, and quite another to be able to play with the concept interactively.
This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.
Durham Region is strongly represented.
Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.
The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.
The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.
Nerd box
This week, we’re displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we’re pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn’t the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.)
It may take 10-15 seconds to load.
Toronto is facing its worst outbreak of measles in 12 years, with 21 cases since the middle of March. We’re kicking off the Map of the Week project (introduction here) with four maps dealing with vaccination of students in Toronto schools. An important part of the package is parentcentral.ca editor Brandie Weikle's explanation of why many Toronto students don't have the shots otherwise required by law, and what that could mean.
All images are clickable links.
Map: Percentage of the school-aged population (5-18) with vaccination exemptions
As we can see, vaccination exemption is highest in M5J, the FSA that covers the Islands and an area of waterfront condos. It is also high in Bloor West Village/Swansea, High Park, the area south of the Annex to the lakeshore, Seaton Village/Hillcrest, Riverdale and the Beaches, Weston, and the Finch/Bathurst area.
Schools with the highest percentage of pupils with vaccination exemptions: Top 25
Schools with the highest number of unvaccinated pupils: Top 25
Schools with the lowest vaccination rates
Nerd box
The two starting points for this project were two spreadsheets released by Toronto Public Health under access-to-information laws. One showed vaccination statistics for 861 Toronto schools, and the other gave enough address information of students whose parents have gone through the process of exempting them from vaccination that we could map exemption by neighbourhood, more or less.
The polygons on the first map are postal forward sortation areas (FSAs), the first three digits of a postal code. The amalgamated city of Toronto has just over a hundred, though not all are residential. FSAs are a useful unit for building this kind of map – they’re small enough to yield a lot of local information, while at the same time officials handling the FOI request can’t reasonably argue that anyone’s privacy is being compromised.
I’ve been working at the Star as a Web editor since 2001. I also write for the paper occasionally, though not as often as I’d like.
In 2005, colleagues Brett Smith, Chris Carter and I started to explore the possibilities of the Google Maps API as a news tool for thestar.com:
We had one of the first homicide maps on a North American news Web site, in early 2005. Later, we started mapping home towns of Canadians killed in Afghanistan and marijuana grow houses busted in the city. We were the first in the city to link to live traffic camera images on an interactive map.
Our splash page for the last provincial election was built around a Google Map, which for the first time displayed polygons, or two-dimensional shapes.
Many other online media outlets have taken advantage of the API:
As you can see, we’ve barely scratched the possibilities of the medium, which brings us to Map of the Week.
Like the maps that the magazine Harper’s used to run, the concept is that the weekly maps will work as stand-alone features, not necessarily connected to a story or to content in the paper, though opportunities to link them would be exploited as they arise, as I expect they will.
Some will be complex, others simple. The research required varies considerably – some can be prepared quickly from open-source data, while others will require FOI requests. One in particular took months of negotiating, off and on, before the data was eventually released.
The blog’s central feature will be the weekly map. I will also link to maps outside the project, especially as map projects designed for the print edition become more Web-friendly, which is something else we’re working on.
I’d like to thank Brett and senior editors Marissa Nelson and Neil Sanderson, all of whom showed the patience of Buddha while the various details were being pulled together.
Feel free to use the comment section. Hopefully readers will want to discuss the ‘why’ behind the facts presented – ideally, I’ll present the information and we can discuss together what it means.
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