With thence many neat mapping visualization tools on the marketplace it is tempting to precisely select handgrip of some geo-located information as well as throw it onto a map. You tin thence release it online as well as weep 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 rattling good equally an promotion for Twitter (I've seen the map referenced inward a number of the most pop websites this calendar week as well as it has also continuously popped upward inward my Twitter stream). However I'm struggling to operate out what this map tells us, except that the events inward Ferguson convey been mentioned a lot on social media.1
Not all of the pop word websites are guilty of this scatter-gun approach to information mapping. H5N1 number of word outlets, similar The New York Times, The Guardian as well as The Global Mail, convey actually upped their game over the final few years as well as are creating some neat mapped visualizations that assistance to explicate the stories hidden behind the data.
With the availability of slow to purpose narrative mapping tools, similar Esri Story Maps, CartoDB's Odyssey.js as well as Knight Lab's Story Map, nosotros are also seeing many to a greater extent than independent map developers creating actually interesting maps which examine to expect at the narratives as well as 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 motorcar crashes, pedestrian accidents, bike crashes etc. H5N1 lot of cities instantly convey this information available equally open-data as well as it is a fairly slow chore to precisely throw that information on a map as well as release it to the world.
What I specially similar well-nigh this map is how the Boston Globe has gone to the problem to explore some of the hot-spots inward the data. If you lot select the 'see hot-spots' link the map zooms to a hot-spot, creates a boundary or thence the location as well as a map inset attempts to explicate some of the issues or thence 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 come across this Floating Sheep article.
