Collective Mapping and Knowing Which Way to Run the Bases

I've taken a recent liking to OpenStreetMap.  OpenStreetMap, known often simply as OSM, is the wikipedia of mapping -- essentially, an exercise in collective mapping.  OSM is a worldwide, user-created map that can be edited by anyone.  It is then rendered by various different mapping engines, such as Mapnik, which is my current favorite.  The results can be viewed from openstreetmap.org or imported easily into various GIS software such as ArcMap, and used for many types of personal products.  The information is public domain, so there's no concerns about having to worry about map copyrights of a background Google or Bing or Yahoo map when making you're creating your own maps.

Since the information is user-driven, the level of information varies from place to place.  Many areas have decent levels of input, but some parts of the developing world need serious additions.    This is a Mapnik rendering of the area around the Cathédrale Notre Dame in Paris.

[Click on any map for larger, full-sized image.]
 

Central Paris

 Many roads, natural boundaries, and other features are imported from government data, including much of the US Census Tiger shapefiles.  However, much of the additional editing is done by users. 

If you have a large scale color plotter -- or even if you can print out several 8 1/2 x 11 sheets -- I find that OpenStreetMap is especially good as a physically-in-your-hands highway map.  Not only are the highways clearly labeled, but they're color coded by type of highway using standardized Tiger Census Feature Class Codes (CFCCs) so that you can tell whether that US-shielded highway is a divided, limited-access highway, an expressway with access to local roads at-grade, or a backwoods two-lane barely-paved road where you'll decelerate to 25 mph for every small town.   (Since this is a wiki project there's always a chance that something may be vandalized, but it's not like you can add an interstate highway without someone noticing.)

Highways around Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

 As you can see from the above maps, there are extensive tags that have been approved, far beyond the highways, streets, and natural and political boundaries.  There are amenities such as scenic viewpoints, museums, public restrooms, walking paths, ferries, military facilities, conservation areas...  the list goes on and on.

Natural areas around Jenny Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Most importantly, collective mapping can provide valuable pieces of information.  One of my favorite user edits is Fenway Park.  Now there's no excuse if you've just hit a line drive up the middle and you have no idea which way you should go.

Fenway Park.  Note the one-way arrows on the footpath marking the bases. 

I highly recommend playing around with OSM.  Drawing buildings is soothing in its own special way.  The tools are easy to use, and there are beginners guides for those just starting out and helpful hints on best pratices.   Before you know it, you'll have added detail to half your hometown. 

Personal Maps

There are a lot of personal maps out there on the web devoted to where people have been, what people have done, where family lived in the past...  if you can map it and it's about you, that's a personal map.

Some of the most prolific personal maps are non-electronic and found on the backs of motor homes and RVs.These are typically maps of the United States and/or Canada and consist of a set of state or province-shaped stickers. 

The rules go like this: if you visit, drive through, or camp in a state, you get to put the decal on.  There is quite a debate among RV enthusiasts about whether you actually have to camp there (in your RV) to get the sticker or if you just have to drive through it. The debate is, from what I hear, a bit of a big deal.

The high-tech version of the RV decal collection was made popular by Facebook.

A "Where I've Been" app map.  Red = "lived there." Blue = "been there."

Facebook was one of the first to make personal maps both easily accessible and popular with the online "Where I've Been" app. Their initial app allowed you to create a map by checking a list of the states, provinces, and/or countries you've been to or lived in.

You can go crazy will the virtual pushpins with this version of "Where I've Been."

Later iterations allowed you to go into further detail about the cities you've been to, the places you've actually lived in, and the places you've merely wanted to visit.

Flightmemory.com is one of my favorites.  It's especially nice for people who fly quite a bit, since it won't stay static for years at a time.  It not only allows you to keep track of where you've been, but also what flight you were on, when it took off and landed, your satisfaction with the airline, if you flew for business or for personal reasons, which class you flew in, and whether you had a window, aisle, or center seat. The information you choose to enter is up to you.

The site logs all of the geographic information and creates a handy map.

There are single-country maps if you've flown domestically, and a world map if you've flown internationally. If you have intra-European flights, those are also given on a separate, zoomable map. 

You can also enter your flight ahead of when you book it.  Flightmemory keeps a real-time map of the users who are in the air at the time you check it.

Flightmemory users in the air at 0330GMT on 5-12-2011.

In addition, depending on how much information you choose to enter, you'll get information on your Top Ten Airports, Top Ten Airlines, Top Ten Routes, and Top Ten Aircraft.  I found out through this process that my personally most popular airport to fly through away from home is not Detroit, like I thought, but Milwaukee's Mitchell Field.

You can go a step further and create all sorts of fun, detailed work on your own if you have access to a full-fledged GIS program.  The people over at radicalcartography.net -- who rate high enough for me to write an entire column someday devoted solely to some of the incredible mapmaking they do -- have created personal maps that show the highways they been on across the United States and Canada. 

The interesting thing about radicalcartography's personal highway maps is that they have consciously chosen to not put any markers on the maps -- nothing except for the highways themselves: no highway labels, no state boundaries, no oceans, no rivers or lakes -- just the highways.  It makes for an interesting perspective, especially if a person, say, flies into a city and never leaves the metropolitan area.  


Mark's North America, mid-2010.
Can you tell the destinations?  Was one the Pacific Ocean?


My version of this map was drawn with ArcGIS. It uses only state, provincial, and national highways, except for in instances where a county road was needed to make a particularly long road trip look like we didn't hop in a helicopter for 20 miles. It, like most of my personal maps, is a work in progress.

Redistricting Extravanganza

Last Monday, The Minnesota House released its proposal for the 2012 redistricting for the Minnesota State Legislature. Rep. Sarah Anderson (R-Plymouth) submitted the proposal, which passed the House Redistricting Committee on a 7-5 vote along party lines. 

Twin Cities Metro Area House Redistricting Plan

Anderson stated that the plan intended to keep cities, counties, and areas of common interest confined to one district. Democrats have attacked the plan as partisan, pairing up several incumbants as lines are redrawn. None of this is surprising.  And here in Minnesota, with a Republican-controlled State Legislature and a Democratic Governor, redistricting will likely end up being drawn by the court system anyway.

It's pretty darned easy these days, especially with the redistricting software out there, to draw areas that are small, compact, and accomplish political ends at the same time. And some of the biggest names in mapping make redistricting software.

Some places, such as Sacramento, have put redistricting software online for the public to use for free. It's pretty self-explanatory for someone who is familiar with the way mapping software works, but for a novice, it could be pretty daunting. Anyone can try it out and submit a plan. (Note: Their deadline for input of publicly drawn plans is May 16, 2011.)

The Redistricting Game

There's a great online educational program about the redistricting process called The Redistricting Game [warning: there's automatic audio on the intro page] that walks you step by step through some of the hurdles that redistricting process faces: politicians who gerrymander to give their party an edge over the other, politicians who gerrymander in a bipartisan manner to preserve incumbency, and the complexities of creating minority majority districts allowed under the Voting Rights Act.  The game is a simpler attempt at doing redistricting, and there's basic and advanced levels of the game.

A hypothetical 2012 redistricting I did for Nebraska's three CDs using Dave's Redistricting Online

A hypothetical 2012 redistricting I did for Nebraska's
three CDs using Dave's Redistricting Online

Want to do it all yourself with real state-level data?  "Dave's Redistricting Online" has a free online application to do just that. It's fun to play around with, even if you just want to hypothetically gerrymander your favorite state senator into an open Congressional seat.  You basically just color the map with your cursor. There are options to base your plans on the 2000 apportionment, or just start from scratch.  Dave's tool lets you change the number of seats you're drawing for, which is good if your state was on the bubble of gaining or losing a Congressional seat.

The tool also keeps track of race and ethnicity data -- both for voting age persons and the general population -- by each individual voting district and by your newly drawn Congressional district.  Plus, it will let you know how each geography voted in the 2008 Presidential election.  That's handy if you want to lean a district to one party or another. It will export the data by precinct into a csv file, which could be easily joined to if you had a corresponding shapefile.

If Congressional reapportionmant is not up your alley, you can also draw up state level legislative districts with the tool, because Dave lets you crank that number of seats for which you're drawing boundaries up to 499.  Want to draw lines for the 99 Wisconsin State Assembly seats?  Not a problem.  Want to draw lines for the 203 seats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives?  Still not a problem.  The 400 seats in the New Hampshire House?  Yes, Dave's program will let you do draw those 400 districts, but New Hampshire draws their districts by county and often has multiple representatives per district, so his tool isn't going to help you.

The program does have some minor flaws.  It could use a bigger paintbrush or a way to select multiple voting districts at a time, perhaps an entire county. (Coloring every voting district in Clark County, Nevada?  A bit of a pain.) But for a free educational mapping tool that churns out some decent maps and a ton of demographic data?  I'm impressed.