Mapping The Scenarios: Geo Resources For The Election

by Brady Forrest

If you're like me you'll be looking at maps and polls and news sites all day long on November 4th. As the polls close and some states go red vs. blue you'll be updating your mental map of the country. Below are some tools and data sources for simulating scenarios online.

New York Times – The Grey Lady has invested in a lot of great visualization tools. The map above shows the electoral importance of each state and their leanings. Their maps also let you create your own scenarios. So if you believe that Missouri will go Red change it and see how that effects the totals. If you want to reminisce check out their debate visualizations.

GeoCommons – An online geo-database and mapping tool has many pertinent data sets available including Early Voting Data and Active Registered Virginia Voters.

FiveThirtyEight – Nate Silver and his fellow bloggers have been doing a great job of reading the polls. They've called it for Obama, but this is based on their math not their affiliation. As states are tallied I am sure they'll be updating their simulations.

Electoral-Vote – Very similar to FiveThirtyEight, this site also aggregates polls, but applies a different algorithm. They even have a Data Galore section with CSV's of all data used on the site.

Twitter Vote Report – As mentioned yesterday this site will be collecting vote reports from people on the ground.

Google – If you want to see recent voting patterns, Google has made the US election since 1980 available. They've also released a number of other maps and an election portal. And of course don't forget Google Hot Trends.

Video Galore – If you want to watch the election news online Silicon Alley Insider and LifeHacker have collected the available streams.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/mapping-the-scenarios-geo-reso.html

 Mark Newman's 2008 presidential election cartogram page is available.

   http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008

Martin Dodge writes….
Hello,
A bit of a shameless plug but to let people know that the full content of
the Atlas of Cyberspace, a book I co-wrote in 2001, is now available for
free. You can download it as a pdf from,
http://www.atlasofcyberspace.com/
While some of the content is out of date, I hope that it will provide an
interesting and informative historical record of how the Internet was
mapped and visualised in the mid to late 1990s.
Feedback and comments are most welcome.
cheers
martin

We suspect that The New York Times is the only newspaper in North America that has a research-and-development department. Clearly, that's a concept to far-out for America's newspaper industry leaders. How, Nick Bilton, who knows that department, writes in O'Reilly's Radar today:

eInk…

Posted: 07 Oct 2008 09:05 PM CDT

Guest blogger Nick Bilton is with the New York Times R&D Lab during the day and NYC Resistor at night.

Working in the R&D Labs at The New York Times, I'm constantly asked, “How long will paper be around?” or more to the point, “When will paper really die?” It's a valid concern, and a question no one can answer with a timetable. But there will be a point–and I believe in our lifetime–when we'll see the demise of the traditional print newspaper. After all, paper is just a device. It provides a way to communicate information, just as a TV, radio, cell phone, and billboard do. This isn't to say that newspapers will go away. The way they are delivered will just change, and in turn, the narrative as we know it will have to adapt–more on this in a later post. But paper can easily be replaced–and the factor that will drive this is simple economics.

Let's put books and magazines aside for a moment, and focus on newsprint. The cost of printing a national newspaper like the Wall Street Journal is close to $150k a day. That's just for the newsprint. When you factor in printing plant rental or ownership fees, machine maintenance, shipping, and wages for plant employees, drivers, and packers, the final cost is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now if you have an average of 1,000,000 subscribers to the newspaper on a daily basis (this is a rounded-down average of a few top papers) and you stopped printing the paper, but instead gave your readers an eReader at $200 apiece, it would take fewer than six months for you to recoup your costs. If you factor back in books and magazines, people who read more than one newspaper a day, and throw in the odd journal or two, you've got a multi-billion dollar industry that could collectively save billions of dollars a year by moving away from ink on paper.

But there are problems associated with this model. There's the environmental effect–devices may not be as benign as they seem, after the impact of manufacturing, materials, and shipping is considered. There's a human cost–people who print and deliver the paper would lose their jobs. There are the immense difficulties of advertising on small, different-sized devices–do advertisers create one ad at one size, or many different ones, do they animate, etc. And then there's the issue that you have to treat the device with care, something you don't need to do with paper.

But for every argument against digital paper, eInk or whatever you want to call it, there is a rebuttal, or at least there will be over time. The simple fact that an eInk device today can carry a thousand books and that it only needs recharging once a month speaks paramount. The ability to download content over the air instantly–something that the “digital native” generation fully expects–is compelling. And as far as cost goes, this will be a non-issue in the coming years. Look at the cost of a 15 Megabyte hard drive 20-plus years ago, it was $2495! Today, you couldn't buy or find that size hard drive anywhere, and if you could it would cost mere pennies to create. I'm willing to bet that the cost of an eInk device will be negligible in 20 years.

A common response to the prospect of an eReader is, “But I love the feel of paper, I love a good book in my hands.” I can empathize with that sentiment, but I don't think the digital generation can. If it's not a touch screen, or hyperlinked, or instantly available at the press of a button, then it's not worth their time. And as soon as a reasonable iPod-like replacement comes along, paper won't be worth the publishing industry's time either.

Handicapping the Horserace

•September 30, 2008 – 6:30-8 pm  •October 7, 2008 – 6:30-8 pm  •October 14, 2008 – 6:30-8 pm

It’s human nature: Elections and disinformation go hand-in-hand. We idealize the competition of ideas and the process of debate while we listen to the whisper campaigns telling us of the skeletons in the other candidate’s closet. Or, we can learn from serious journalism to tap into the growing number of digital tools at hand and see what is really going on in this fall’s campaigns. Join journalist Tom Johnson for a three-part workshop at Santa Fe Complex to learn how you can be your own investigative reporter and get ready for that special Tuesday in November.

Over the course of three Tuesdays, beginning September 30, Johnson will show workshop participants how to do the online research needed to understand what’s happening in the fall political campaign. There will be homework assignments and participants will contribute to the Three Tuesdays wiki so their discoveries will be available to the general public.

Everyone is welcome but space will be limited. A suggested donation of $45 covers all three events or $20 will help produce each session. Click here to sign up.

• The Daily Tip Sheet (September 30, 6:30 pm)
  
  Newspapers are a ‘morning line’ tip sheet. There isn’t enough room for what you need to know.
  
  Newspapers can be a good jumping-off point for political knowledge, but they rarely have enough staff, staff time and space to really drill down into a topic. Ergo, it is increasingly up to citizens to do the research to preserve democracy and help inform voters. Tonight we will be introduced to some of the city, state and national web sites to help in our reporting and to a few digital tools to help you save and retrieve what you find.
• Swimming Against the Flow (October 7, 6:30 pm):
  
  How to track data to their upstream sources.
  
  A web page and its data are not static events. (Well, usually they are not.) Web pages and digital data all carry “signs” of where they came from, who owns the site(s) and sometimes who links to the sites. We will discuss how investigators can use these attributes to our advantage, and also take a step back to consider the “architecture of sophisticated web searching.”
• The Payoff (October 14, 6:30 pm)
  
  Yup, it IS about following the money. But then what?
  
  Every election season, new web sites come along that make it easier to follow the money — election money. This final workshop looks at some of those sites and focuses on how to get their data into a spreadsheet. Then what? A short intro to slicing-and-dicing the numbers. (Even if you are a spreadsheet maven, please come and act as a coach.)

This workshop is NOT a sit-and-take-it-in event. We’re looking for folks who want to do some beginning hands-on (”On-line hands-on”, that is) investigation of New Mexico politics. And that means homework assignments and contributing to our Three Tuesdays wiki. Participants are also encouraged to bring a laptop if you can. Click here to sign up.

---

Tom Johnson’s 30-year career path in journalism is one that regularly moved from the classroom to the newsroom and back. He worked for TIME magazine in El Salvador in the mid-80s, was the founding editor of MacWEEK, and a deputy editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His areas of interest are analytic journalism, dynamic simulation models of publishing systems, complexity theory, the application of Geographic Information Systems in journalism and the impact of the digital revolution on journalism and journalism education. He is the founder and co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism and a member of the Advisory Board of Santa Fe Complex.

---

 

Foreclosures and Crime: A Geographical Perspective

Brady Forrest, at O'Reilly's Radar, tips us to an interesting mash-up of Flickr, Open Street Map and the  Burning Man festival.  Why not use this idea for local festivals — fairs, classic car rallies, an introduction to a new shopping center?

Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

Posted: 26 Aug 2008 07:38 PM CDT

Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.

Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ.
NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping
data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week
every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like
Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see
what Yahoo's map currently looks like.

This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

In other geo-Flickr news they have added
KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to
Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the
tip on this Niall)

If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008
conference after the jump.

A new Web 2.0 tool came across our desk today.  Widgenie supplies a basic, but effective way to quickly get some elementary dataviz images up on your page(s).  Note, however, if you go to the demo page there will be three or four different links for tutorials.  They are all the same content.  Lets hope these guys give us more riches soon.  In the meantime, “MrExcel” gives a slightly richer tutorial on his site here.

Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can publish data in the places you already know and love, places like iGoogle, Facebook, WordPress, and even your own website. We combine all the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget. It's simple to get started, all you need is the Internet, a browser and an understanding of your needs. Are you: A blogger who wants to make their latest poll data pop right off the page? A marketing rep who needs to share sales figures without waiting for IT? A Sales manager who wants his team to update their own client data? A soccer coach who needs an easier way to display the most recent stats? If so, then widgenie is the service for you. With just a quick rub of the lamp, all your data can easily be visualized and shared with everyone who needs it. Best of all, you can do it all by yourself! And it's free!
	Plug In. Data, data everywhere	Tutorial Overview
Widgenie makes it easy to create a widget out of any data including: Excel spreadsheets CSV files Data feeds from our data partners learn more Widgenie's one-click upload process makes it easy to upload your data to our service. Once the data is here, widgenie allows you to customize your data to only display the columns and fields you want to see. Best of all, when your data changes, it's easy to re-upload your data so all of your widgets will have the latest information in real-time.

We've been pushing to get news sites to appreciate — and employ — the value of developing timelines for a couple years now (and have the rejected grant proposals to show for it).  But thanks to Nathan at FlowingData, we now have an example of what's at hand.