New Mapping Pedestrian Accidents

With therefore many nifty mapping visualization tools on the marketplace position it is tempting to exactly pick out grip of some geo-located information together with throw it onto a map. You tin together with therefore pose out it online together with proper name out to the world, 'Hey expect at this cool map'.

Twitter did that this calendar week amongst their Torque powered map News of  Ferguson Spreads Across Twitter. The map has worked real good every bit an promotion for Twitter (I've seen the map referenced inwards a number of the most pop websites this calendar week together with it has also continuously popped upward inwards my Twitter stream). However I'm struggling to operate out what this map tells us, except that the events inwards Ferguson convey been mentioned a lot on social media.¹

Not all of the pop intelligence websites are guilty of this scatter-gun approach to information mapping. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 number of intelligence outlets, similar The New York Times, The Guardian together with The Global Mail, convey actually upped their game over the concluding few years together with are creating some nifty mapped visualizations that assistance to explicate the stories hidden behind the data.

With the availability of slowly to purpose narrative mapping tools, similar Esri Story Maps, CartoDB's Odyssey.js together with Knight Lab's Story Map, nosotros are also seeing many to a greater extent than independent map developers creating actually interesting maps which essay to expect at the narratives together with stories behind their mapped data.

However you lot don't convey to purpose these narrative mapping platforms to exercise interesting maps. For example, I actually similar this map from the Boston Globe exploring Massachusetts Pedestrian Crashes.

I've seen a lot of similar maps over the years of auto crashes, pedestrian accidents, bike crashes etc. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 lot of cities at in ane lawsuit convey this information available every bit open-data together with it is a fairly slowly undertaking to merely throw that information on a map together with pose out it to the world.

What I peculiarly similar well-nigh this map is how the Boston Globe has gone to the problem to explore some of the hot-spots inwards the data. If you lot select the 'see hot-spots' link the map zooms to a hot-spot, creates a boundary roughly the location together with a map inset attempts to explicate some of the issues roughly why this location powerfulness endure from an abnormally high number of pedestrian crashes.

TL;DR:  - I similar this Boston Globe map

¹ For a to a greater extent than detailed critique of Twitter's Ferguson map run into this Floating Sheep article.

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