mapping
Geographic Profiling. “The Los Angeles Police Department announced a mapping program used by its anti-terrorism bureau to identity likely terrorist breeding grounds in Muslim areas.” What next, checkpoints?
12 November 2007 | Manure, U.S.A.. “Once upon a time... livestock manure was an essential source of fertilizer for nearby farms. Now, immense factory farms are so concentrated in some counties... that there is not enough cropland to dispose of all the waste that is created. Below is a map... of counties where the amount of phosphorous in manure that must be disposed exceeds the entire assimilative capacity of the county’s farmland.”
“Cartographers don’t lie, but they take a position”... “‘The problems of cartography are the same that exist in diplomatic relations’... For mapmakers like Nova Rico, disputes over geography are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is shown split in two, a division that Greek Cypriots do not recognize. In one globe, Chile gets parts of Antarctica that on another globe go to Argentina. And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.”
Mapping the Regional Express Rail. 
“In its 1996 Third Regional Plan, the Regional Plan Association describes a rapid transit line in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that could be built almost entirely on pre-existing rail rights of way and would connect with at least twenty existing subway lines. The so-called “Triboro RX” (“TRX” for short) presents a unique opportunity to provide mobility and accessibility to New Yorkers living or working within these three boroughs, at a fraction of the cost of most transit projects of similar size. In my part-time internship at the RPA, which ends today, the lion’s share of the work I have done has focused on fleshing out the idea of this line.” And he did it with mostly open source tools: GPL mapping and GIS software, GPS to digital camera sync, Google Map maship, population and commuter demand modeling... Mike’s data sources and results are up on his TRX wiki.
“In its 1996 Third Regional Plan, the Regional Plan Association describes a rapid transit line in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that could be built almost entirely on pre-existing rail rights of way and would connect with at least twenty existing subway lines. The so-called “Triboro RX” (“TRX” for short) presents a unique opportunity to provide mobility and accessibility to New Yorkers living or working within these three boroughs, at a fraction of the cost of most transit projects of similar size. In my part-time internship at the RPA, which ends today, the lion’s share of the work I have done has focused on fleshing out the idea of this line.” And he did it with mostly open source tools: GPL mapping and GIS software, GPS to digital camera sync, Google Map maship, population and commuter demand modeling... Mike’s data sources and results are up on his TRX wiki.Are Belong to U.S.. A good collection of links to maps, essays, and statistics on the number, scope, and significance of U.S. military bases around the world.
Map Junk
On Vertederos Localizados Por Los Internautas, the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia invites readers to send in photos and descriptions of illegal garbage dumps. Photos and descriptions are plotted on an interactive map of the country. The intent seems to be embarrassing officials into cleaning it up.
Built by coder Jim Nachlin and friends, the Garbage Scout plots some of the things New Yorkers are throwing out, so that others may claim them. (Many of the shelves in my apartment were inherited from the street.) Sadly, the experiment only lasted a year, though I hear the code may be GPL’d soon.
It’s interesting to me that two maps with the same interaction and functionality and with similar focus can have such different approaches — one top down, the other bottom up.
Baghdad: Mapping the Violence. A geographic interface to four years of BBC stories on violence in central Baghdad. A nice integration of time and place, though the hard boundaries of the “ethnic areas” seem a little misleading. On that see this. And note, each dot represents 10 or more people.
Health Care That Works. “A Google Map mash-up designed to visually illustrate the economic and racial disparities that exist in New York City's health care system. The website overlays data on NYC hospital closures between 1985 and 2007 onto an interactive city-wide map that can display either the racial or economic demographics of the Five Boroughs during three distinct time periods: 1985, 1995, and 2005. Using this tool, visitors can visually see how hospital closures disproportionately impact poor neighborhoods and communities of color (this is particularly vivid in Central Brooklyn). Text on the sidebars guides the user through each decade and demographic overlay, explaining the changing conditions of the city and the impact that closures have on underserved communities.”
A Radical Apple Map. 14 points of radical New York City history around the East Village, plotted using the More Accessible Map CSS technique.
