Torontoist's David Topping discovers Google's first try at superimposing 3D building outlines on Toronto's downtown, and the very strange results. Here's the CN Tower:
A mid-town clergyman's blog points to a series of maps purporting to show distribution of the the Seven Deadly Sins across the United States, using counties as a base geography. At left is Wrath (number of violent crimes per capita).
 |
| RENÉ JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR |
However, the patterns they show shed light on how religion intersects with Toronto neighbourhoods.
Roman Catholics show a strong pattern roughly along Dufferin, then more northwest north of the 401.
Anglicans cluster along Yonge Street and shoreline Scarborough, while Presbyterians and United Church affiliations have roughly similar maps, clustering in mid-Etobicoke, the Yonge St. corridor, and shoreline Scarborough.
The city’s Jewish population clusters strongly along Bathurst north of St. Clair. Muslims concentrate roughly along Taylor’s Creek and the area to the north from Thorncliffe Park east into Scarborough.
People with no religious affiliation cluster in the downtown lake shore generally, and also south of Steeles from eastern North York into Scarborough.
It is a pity we have to wait until after the 2011 census to see how, or if, these patterns change.
Click here to see all the maps.
The full list can be found here.
The grand prize was won by six major online projects produced by the New York Times, including this very compelling one (note the tabs):
Google Maps is fine for the big picture, but sometimes not reliable on the level of urban detail. Here are three examples, two of which resulted in errors in the Star in print, on line or both:
1) Misspelled street name in the Christie/Dupont area:
This spelling was on the site for a while, in a story about a power outage, until a Web editor who used to live in the area corrected it. (Correct spelling is Wychcrest.)
2) East York is labelled outside the historic East York boundary (grey polygon):
3) Mislabelled park in Ajax. This wrong name was used a graphic, which ended up as a formal published correction and the fussy but in this case necessary process for correcting a graphic online.
Here's what Google shows:
and here's the corrected graphic:
There have to be more errors out there – these are just a few that we stumbled on by accident.
So: has Google led you astray? Are there roads on the map that don’t exist on the ground, or vice versa? Spelling mistakes? Leave your answers in the comment section. We’ll gather the responses and send them off to Palo Alto.
Google isn't the worst offender. MapArt’s recent atlas of the Golden Horseshoe depicts two villages outside Ancaster, Summit and Trinity (complete with a tiny pink area where the mapmaker imagines people might live), which stopped being plausible hamlets a hundred or so years ago.
Anybody trying to find these places is in for a confusing surprise.
For how many generations have mapmakers been copying each others’ work without ground-truthing it? It’s an interesting question.
 |
| WIKIMEDIA COMMONS |
The modern understanding of infectious disease began what we would now call a mashup.
The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain into a country which was richer, but filthy, dangerous and miserable for the millions who poured into its growing cities. London became the largest city in the world, and the largest city any human society up to that point had produced.
Sanitary arrangements, however, had not caught up the metropolis's vast complexity. Water came from public wells drawing from the city's mysterious innards, while what was euphemistically called 'nightsoil' was allowed to accumulate under houses.
Nightsoil men had to be paid to remove the nightsoil, and property owners who were broke or just indifferent often didn't bother to hire them. Author Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, quotes an engineer writing in the 1840s:
"I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools ... Upon passing though the passage of the first house I found the yard covered with nightsoil from the overflowing of the privy to a depth of six inches and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dryshod."
From a modern point of view, the results seem inevitable. In the summer of 1854, a devastating outbreak of cholera struck the Soho area of the city.
The outbreak attracted the interest of maverick physician Dr. John Snow, who had an eccentric theory, not widely accepted, that disease could be transmitted through water. The medical establishment of the day had reached a consensus around the miasma theory of disease, in which illness was spread through bad smells.
Snow and his collaborator, local clergyman Henry Whitehead, painstakingly investigated every case of cholera, concentrating on what the victims’ source of drinking water was. All were mapped, with the hardest-hit houses accumulating a sad row of black marks.
The map combined four data sets: the underlying geography, the victims, the pumps, and lines showing the closest pump from any given point – in the area’s winding streets, this was not always the closest as the crow flew. Once the information had been mapped visually, one thing was clear: at the centre of the outbreak was the pump on Broad Street, seen above.
Ironically, the Broad Street pump had been popular because its water tasted and looked cleaner than the water from many other sources.
After the information in Snow’s map forced local authorities to look closely at the well, a decaying brick sewer was found next to it, fouled by what Whitehead described as ‘abominations, unmolested by water, which I forbear to recite.’
Johnson explains:
The “ … investigation had unearthed the gruesome truth. The contents of a cesspool were seeping into the Broad Street well. Anything living in the intestines of the residents of 40 Broad had direct access to the intestines of about a thousand other human beings. That was all the V. cholerae had needed.
Snow’s map had a longer-term influence as well:
As the waterborne theory of cholera became increasingly accepted, the map was regularly invoked as a shorthand explanation of the science behind the theory. It was easier to point to those black bars emanating ominously from the pump than it was to explain the whole idea of microorganisms invisible to the human eye.
The understanding which Snow's map had helped to emerge then led to the enormous project of giving London a recognizably modern water and sewage system. Snow's mashup is the direct ancestor of the applications for interactive mapping we use today - it's just that our tools are faster and more sophisticated.
Some on the list object. The Times explains:
... Supporters have filed suit in Federal District Court in Sacramento seeking a preliminary injunction of a state election law that requires donors of $100 or more to disclose their names, addresses, occupations and other personal information. In particular, the suit seeks to stop the final filing for the 2008 election, which is due Jan. 31. That filing includes donations made in the closing days of the campaign, when the proposition surged to victory.James Bopp Jr., a lawyer from Indiana who filed the lawsuit on the behalf of Protect Marriage, said the harassment of Proposition 8 supporters violated their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly.
“The cost of transparency cannot be discouragement of people’s participation in the process,” said Mr. Bopp, who has argued several prominent cases challenging campaign-finance laws in California and other states. “The highest value in the First Amendment is speech, and some amorphous idea about transparency cannot be used to subvert those rights.”
My own view is that public records are public records and that information wants to be free, but it's interesting to see modern tools make facts that once would have been buried in obscure files (I remember long afternoons spent in the Commission on Election Finances reading room, poring over heavy tomes) instantly made public in sophisticated, interactive ways.
Eightmaps.com itself is registered through this outfit, which does create the appearance of wanting to have it both ways.
A couple of days ago, this blog had its 200,000th hit.
I’m glad it’s attracted so many readers. Back in June, I wasn’t sure how many people would be interested in an interactive map blog. The answer is: about a thousand a day, more or less. Original maps will resume in January.
If you are looking for the eviction maps, they're linked from the post below this one.
A map of U.S. oil imports since 1973, using a more sophisticated use of polylines than I’m used to seeing. An animation shows change in source and volume over time. I’d be curious to know how the animation was done – I think it’s a series of screenshots.
From Google Maps Mania (which recently had nice things to say about this blog):
A solar roof calculator tool driven by Google Maps. Find your house in the satellite view, draw the area that could be covered by solar panels, and get some information about the possible power generation potential. I’d like it better if it allowed for the differences in sunlight between regions, but still much better than nothing.
From the Map Room:
… For all the attention garnered by catastrophic hurricanes such as Katrina and Andrew, simple heatwaves kill far more people than all natural disasters combined, according to a newly published county-by-county map of natural hazard deaths.
Other extreme summer hazards, such as floods, and cold winter weather also outranked hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires, according to geographers Kevin Borden and Susan Cutter, of the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
More here.
We should be doing much more with mapping mortality in general. As well as this U.S. data, there have been some outstanding British mortality maps.
Also from the Map Room: a Flash-based animated map of sources of immigration to the U.S. since 1870.
The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings,
of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World and Europe. Place names are replaced with their literal meanings. It's fascinating - and some of the names are quite surprising.
Some screen shots are at left.
A few weeks ago, a disgruntled former member of the far-right British National Party leaked the party's membership list. The Guardian explains:
Every police force in the UK was tonight scouring the leaked British National party membership list for names of serving officers, after the Merseyside force confirmed it was investigating one officer's links to the far-right party.The Prison Service pledged to oust any employee on the list and far-right supporters spoke of fear for their livelihoods as the BNP was plunged into crisis.
...Around 13,000 names and addresses appear on the list. It is thought to include a number of lapsed members and possibly the names of individuals who contacted the party and expressed interest in joining but did not do so.
However, the BNP has confirmed that it is essentially a genuine membership list. It includes the names of a number of clergymen, an actor, two solicitors, at least one doctor and a number of primary and secondary school teachers.
Both the Guardian and the BBC's Map of the Week have presented the data as a map. They took different approaches:
...There is a spine of BNP support running down the Pennines from the former Northern English mill towns of Blackburn, Burnley and Bradford to Derby, Nottingham and Leicester in the East Midlands.
Their choice of colours is more intutive than the Guardian's map, to my eye.
However, both maps use the absolute number of party members in any given area, while I think it would be more meaningful to look at membership per 1,000 of population. This is particularly important when using postal areas where (unlike electoral divisions) there is no real attempt made to make them equal in population.
Mark Easton's mapping project this week is a 17-map set showing how cause of death varies in Britain by age and geography:
... As we move on to the next age band, 15-19, the shades on the map change radically. In most places, the most common cause of death for older teenagers is transport but in many urban areas it is suicide or undetermined intent. Two neighbourhoods in Glasgow have homicide as the most common cause of death for this age group.As we move into the late twenties, we begin to see cancer creeping into the picture and by ages 30-34, the map colours change radically again, with cancer now dominant, particularly in rural areas. In other rural neighbourhoods we start to see cardiovascular causes appearing.
By the ages of 35-39 the map is dominated by cancer as the most common cause of death, but cardiovascular causes are now becoming evident in northern urban areas. There then follows a series of maps covering the five-year age bands from 40-44 through to 70-74.
On all of these maps the most common causes of death are cardiovascular or cancer and they show the changing geographical variation across these years of age. At younger ages cardiovascular causes dominate in the northern parts of the country and London, and gradually extend southwards and eastwards.
By ages 65-69, cardiovascular is the most common cause of death across almost all of the country, apart from a ring in the south east around London where cancer dominates.
This had flown under the radar until now: bbc.co.uk editor Mark Easton's blog also has a Map of the Week feature. His version is based on embedded .gifs, but the concept is similar.
Check out these maps of shifts in global wealth over the last 2,000 years. I respect a man who takes the long view.
The BBC's blog template doesn't seem to allow for tags, but there is an archive of sorts here.
I admire the TTC trip planner at myttc.ca. (a) it's the kind of thing that the TTC itself should be doing (as an aside, so is this); (b) public transit trip planners seem to be very hard to create; (c) it's being provided free as a public service.
It does mostly work. But it also sometimes shows signs of being a work in progress, as in the example below:
When I tried that route again just now, it came up with a much more sensible plan involving the King and Queen streetcars.
I find I disagree with it fairly often based on local knowledge, but this also happens with driving directions. Google will favour the Annex stretch of Bloor St. W. for motorists (as far as I can tell because it's Hwy. 5) when Dupont is a much more car-friendly street, for example. But I see why it makes sense to a computer in Palo Alto.
I’ve been working at the Star as a Web editor since 2001.
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.
For all that, we’ve barely scratched the possibilities of the medium, which brings us to Map of the Week. 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.
| Tag and save this blog to your Del.icio.us favourites.  |
Recent Comments