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.