Map of the Week: Renovating the Afghan casualty map

REUTERS

We've been maintaining an interactive map of the home towns of Canadians killed in Afghanistan for several years now. It's needed a rethink for some time.

I'm inviting comments on an alternate version, which can be seen here. The points tend to cluster, so there are also regional maps showing Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Southern Quebec, Southern Ontario, Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Alberta and Southwest B.C.

The main advantage is that the new map is about three times as big as the old one; the disadvantage is that we lose the chronological list on the old map. (This information is available elsewhere, for example on the DND site.)

The remaining issue is that our handling of communities who have lost multiple people in Afghanistan has become increasingly awkward as the numbers have increased. Our approach until now has been to create a new icon at a visible distance from the old one in the same city. However, we reached the limits of this approach a while ago - the extreme case is Edmonton, where seven different icons co-exist.

The solution is going to have to involve mapping communities, not individuals, with numbered icons on communities where more than one person has died. I tried a version of this approach about a year ago on the old map, but the larger popup windows were large enough to blot out the (smaller) map.

Maps elsewhere (2)

A reader points out a large number of very detailed public health-related maps published in the last few days by Statistics Canada. These follow 'health region' boundaries, which in southern Ontario mostly means county/regional/megacity boundaries (Toronto, Peel, Middlesex, Brant and so forth).

All are worth a look. Here is a regional map of where it is more (or less) accepted to smoke in a house.

There is a sharp regional difference between south-central Ontario and Quebec, with the upper Ottawa Valley more tolerant. In the West, an area of the prairies in southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba west of Brandon stands out, while in the Maritimes Cape Breton and an area in northern New Brunswick more people smoke in their houses.

Maps elsewhere (1)

David Topping at Torontoist points to a series of maps produced from geotagged photos in Flickr.

Toronto's map is below. Maps for another couple of dozen cities are here.

Maps elsewhere

The map project I've been working on this week isn't finished - it will appear early next week.

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A reader passes on a link to a wonderfully detailed map project at the Modern Languages Association site showing distribution of languages in the United States down to the county level.

Here is French:

and Spanish:

Renovating our traffic death map

We've been regularly updating a map of fatal collisions in the GTA since January, 2008. The data has sadly outgrown the small map it was originally given (we now display 290 accidents with somewhat over 300 victims) and I've been meaning to relaunch it for a while now. The main visible change is that the new map is about three times as big as the old one.

The new map can be found here. A screenshot showing southern Durham is at left.

What patterns do you see in the data? Let us know in the comments.

Catching up

I've been short on original maps lately (there are several interesting ones in the pipeline). The available time has been spent on other interactive map projects. Here are two:

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	Graphics editor Catherine Farley obtained very detailed spreadsheets of average assessed property values in Toronto broken down to the census tract level. This creates a very fine-grained map, with the city represented in over 500 areas. I produced five maps for the Web based on this data: all properties, detached houses, semi-detached houses, townhouses and condos.
	Another project used Google Maps to look at the pattern of burglaries Col. Russell Williams is accused of committing. At left is a suburban Ottawa neighbourhood, with the house icon on Williams' own house, and the numbers showing the number of burglaries at each address. The addresses came from the documents in which Williams was charged with 82 separate counts of breaking and entering.
Maps elsewhere:
	The Guardian has some maps up from the British election, much like the ones we have done for elections here breaking out each party individually. What this sort of thing really needs is a simple animation for each party showing change over several elections. All the maps but the last one could be set up well beforehand.
	Hat tip to the Google Lat Long blog: a widget that will show an overlay of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in its real size anywhere on the earth. Toronto is shown at left. You may need the Google Earth browser plugin.

Maps elsewhere: Real-time air traffic in 3D

Hat tip to Google Earth Blog: a .kmz file, updated every 10 seconds, showing air traffic more or less over Switzerland in real time in 3D. You'll need Google Earth to see the file -

April's real estate volume

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR

Map: Home sales volume: Percentage change, April 2009-April 2010

The Toronto real estate board released April's numbers today.

Tony Wong explains:

The spring market for resale homes in the Toronto area continued to show strength, with new records set for both sales and listings as the market moves toward balanced conditions.

According to figures released by the Toronto Real Estate Board today, there were 10,898 sales in April, representing a 34 per cent increase over last year and a record for the month.