Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Friend Matt Waite, of the St. Petersburg Times, has an interesting post on his personal blog wherein he lists the 19 different software programs he used to prepare the latest installment of his ongoing work on the disappearance of wetlands in Florida. (Who could ever imagine such a thing?)We wonder how many journalism educators could identify these programs and what they are used for?The online version of “Vanishing Wetlands” (Craig Pittman is the lead byline on this episode.) is rich with details and interactive features, including a fine mash-up of Google Maps to show the location of some land in so-called “mitigation banks.” Best of all, for the analytic journalism crowd, is the explication of the story's methodology. It's in some sort of embedded code that delivers the text in a pop-up. Look to the upper right of the homepage for a hot button.By the way, these guys have been working this story for three years. Now THAT's the kind of dedication that produces insight and context.
And there's another good angle on this effort at “Working backward on the last wetlands story.”
A few days back we reported on a verbal dust-up betweeen ASU (and IAJ's) Prof. Steve Doig and the PIO for the Maricopa County's district attorney's office. Seems the spokesman didn't think much of mere “student journalists” wanting to attend the DA's press conferences. (Of course, journalists are little more than just citizens doing a special task, but that's a sub-set discussion for another day.) In the end, changes have been made; the DA's public non-information officer has been redeployed.
The Rrove blog — no, no, not THAT Rove (different spelling) — delivers a round-up review of nine sites related to community mapping tools. See http://www.rrove.com/blog/2006/12/04/9-awesome-community-mapping-websites/
Disclosure: Rrove.com plays in the community mapping space. This post aims to highlight the innovations and the usefulness that others have made in this game. We haven’t added ourselves to this list – if you want to know more about Rrove, click here.
A community mapping website, in our definition, is a service that gets its members to map and define places. Through crowd-sourcing, these sites are building a database/directory of local and nearby locations that their users can discover and visit. Why is this important? We all know that search advertising is the fastest growing industry in the Internet. Within that market, local search is the up-and-comer. In the next few years, it will be the largest segment within search!
It’s refreshing to see how others have approached community mapping. Some have focused on map creation while others do it through mobile apps. More than that, some players have mapped the community of users to map the physical community (i.e. neighborhoods). Here’s how nine websites (all free) are doing it, what makes them awesome and how you can use their services in your Internet life.
It was the second year of the national crime mapping conference when we realized that, hey, there's a lot of not-just-good-but-great analytic work going in the then-young profession of crime analysis. Seven years later, it's just getting more impressive.
If you can only get to one national conference a year (we assume you're already going to the NICAR meetings), do this one every other year and the Special Libraries Association convention on the off year. NOTE: NO NO NO registration fee!
Registration for the Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference has opened. This year, there will be no conference registration fees but registration is still required. Preliminary conference details available on the MAPS website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/pittsburgh2007/index.html
The Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference will take place March 28-31, 2007 at the Omni William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Agenda:
The conference will include a full compliment of workshops, panels and plenary sessions. The main plenary session is entitled GPS in a Crime Analysis Context- Practitioner Consideration, Research Needs.” Panel session topics will include uses of spatial data analysis and GIS in corrections, parole, and probation, geography and crime, geographic profiling, offender travel behavior, NIBRS/incident-based data and mapping, international programs, impact of Hurricane Katrina on crime, crime analysis, spatial data analysis, policing issues, managing sex offenders, travel demand modeling, and more. The conference also includes a map competition, and provides an excellent opportunity for researches and practitioners to network with each other.
Sigh. Another skirmish in the on-going battle to convince public officials that they work for the people, in the broadest of terms.
For more see http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1201dispute1201.html
The folks at Faneuil Media, a company that “helps site owners publish maps and data, just announced a promising tool, “Atlas.” Check it out because they say….
When I first switched from the newsroom to the web newsroom, I was surprised by all the technical constraints.
As a reporter and editor I had all the tools I needed – it was up to me to create something fit for the front page. As a web editor, content management systems and development priorities became constraints on my ability to publish the news.
With the hope of helping publishers chip away at these constraint, we’re releasing a new mapping tool today. Meet Atlas: www.fmatlas.com.
Atlas is a simple web application that allows you to put Google Maps into your stories in a few seconds.
Certainly there are already mapping tools out there. Atlas distinguishes itself in two ways:
First, it is simple: Point. Click. Map. No messy code, no unnecessary hoops to jump through.
Second, Atlas is designed for news sites. We’re building it so that reporters, editors, producers and local bloggers have an easy way to add maps to their stories.
This first release of Atlas has a very basic list of features. You can:
There’s lots more we want to add, but before going any further, we want to get your feedback. So, try it out, let us know what works, what doesn’t and what we should add.
Thanks to Gary Price at ResourceShelf Newsletter <http://www.resourceshelf.com> for this:
Fifteen cities already are searchable online. Microsoft will drop ads into the maps on computer-generated billboards. You'll be able to type “Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX – news – people )” on your mobile while standing in San Francisco's Union Square and get a 3-D map guiding you to the nearest one. Microsoft acquired some of this technology in May when it bought videogame ad-broker Massive Entertainment.
While we keep looking at the mapping, we need to remember that the money comes from the advertising, not the mapping per se.
Friend and mega-librarian Marylain Block's “Neat New Stuff” column (http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html) points us to another example of a great community-building tool. She writes:
Paul Parker, of the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, is the Quick and an impressive list of folks on the state's voter registration rolls are the Dead this week. Below is a note Parker posted to the NICAR-L listserv. The great thing about this is the recipe Parker provides for an analytic journalists' cookbook. Said he:
Here's the link:http://www.projo.com/extra/election/content/deadvoters9_11-09-06_DN2P2GR.33b46ef.html
I know it's CAR101, but I'll outline how we did it (which is alsoexplained in the story):
1. Get your state's central voter registration database.2. Get your state slice of the Social Security Administration's DeathMaster File from IRE/NICAR.3. Run a match on First Name, Last Name and Date of Birth.4. Exclude matches where middle initials conflict. (Allow P=PETER orP=NULL, but not P=G.)5. Calculate a per capita rate for each city/town by dividing the numberof dead people by the total registered.6. Interview the biggest offenders about why they're the biggest offenders.
This was so easy, and now everyone at the paper thinks I'm some sort ofjournalism deity. (And the voter registration people called to ask,“Where do I get a copy of that Social Security list.”)
As for the possibility of false positives, we pointed this out in thestory, which I think sufficed because the odds are low enough. I alsohand checked a few against our obituary archives.
—Paul ParkerReporterThe Providence Journal75 Fountain StreetProvidence, RI 02902401-277-7360pparker@projo.com
Then David Heath, at the Seattle Times layered in his experience. Said he:
