Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Articles tagged: mapping
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Project Diary: How we made the Wage Theft Monitor
By Max Siegelbaum
Posted onHow Documented fought for data about businesses that have stolen from their workers, and what you need to know to do this kind of project in your state.
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How we tracked down and mapped historic street signs in New York City’s Chinatown
By Aaron Reiss
Posted on“Small data”—the kind you might have to get out and collect yourself—can uncover the deeply personal history of a place.
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How We Made “The Melting of Antarctica”
By Lauren Tierney
Posted onFor over 120 years, National Geographic magazine has mapped Antarctica, and continues to visually illustrate the complex processes that occur on this remote continent. The tradition continues with “The Melting of Antarctica,” published in the July 2017 issue, highlighting the effect that climate change is having on the continent.
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How We Made “The Water Drain”
By Lindsay Muscato and Cecilia Reyes
Posted onTo piece together the bigger picture of water usage and how much people pay, the Tribune team used a variety of data sources, including their own survey. They found wide disparities in what residents were paying for water, with the poorest communities paying the most.
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How We Made the Washington Post Eclipse-Scroller
By Bonnie Berkowitz, Armand Emamdjomeh, Laris Karklis, Denise Lu, and Tim Meko
Posted onWith the coming eclipse, we wanted to build a very detailed map of the parts of America that would experience totality. We also wanted to show what the shadow of the eclipse would look like as it traversed the country.
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How We Built a Lifetime Eclipse Predictor
By Denise Lu
Posted onThe idea for our lifetime eclipse-finder project is based around a widely used NASA database of eclipse predictions. The data is dense (5,000 years worth) and I was surprised that nobody in the media dataviz community has really taken advantage of the dataset, in recent years at least.
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Same Diff: The English-Language Press Maps the French Election
By David Yanofsky
Posted onHere’s a reminder: In normal times, US-based publications normally don’t put much effort into visualizing foreign elections. Of course, with presidency of Donald Trump, a British vote to leave the European Union, and a presidential election in France without either of the mainstream political parties qualifying, we don’t live in normal times.
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How Reveal Mapped the “Secret” U.S. Border Fence
By Michael Corey
Posted onThe Trump administration’s pursuit of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has brought back a project that I thought I had finished years ago.
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Draw Your Own Election Adventure
By Juan Elosua
Posted onAt La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.
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How We Made Losing Ground
By Brian Jacobs
Posted onHow we tracked down, processed, filtered, revisualized, mashed up, and otherwise handled a boatload of disparate imagery to map changes in the Louisiana coastline backward and forward in time.
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Introducing Wherewolf
By Noah Veltman and Jenny Ye
Posted onLast week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.
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Twitter Mapping: Foundations
By Simon Rogers
Posted onTwitter’s data editor lays out the major challenges and opportunities that arise when you set out to map tweets.
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Animating Maps with D3 and TopoJSON
By Roman Kalyakin
Posted onAn exploration of an easy way to animate paths in SVG maps.
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Finding Evidence of Climate Change in a Billion Rows of Data
By Brian Abelson
Posted onSeeking to contribute to the climate change conversation, the team at Enigma started to brainstorm ways we could produce a data-driven story on how climate change has played out in the United States. Browsing through NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, we discovered the Global Historical Climatology Network which collects, aggregates, and standardizes daily weather information from more than 90,000 weather stations, dating as far back as 1800. While we come across many incredible public datasets in our work at Enigma, this one immediately stood out for its remarkable combination of geographic granularity and temporal breadth
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Introducing Landline and Stateline
By Al Shaw
Posted onToday we’re releasing code to make it easier for newsrooms to produce maps quickly. Landline is an open source JavaScript library for turning GeoJSON data into browser-based SVG maps. It comes with Stateline, which builds on Landline to create U.S. state and county choropleth maps with very little code out-of-the-box.
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A Map That Wasn’t a Map
By Tasneem Raja
Posted onIf you want to show information with a geographical component, you should start with a map, right? Not so fast, writes Tasneem Raja. Questioning your assumptions can help you make something much more effective.
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Choosing the Right Map Projection
By Michael Corey
Posted onMichael Corey’s guide to smashing the earth for fun and profit
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How We Made “Behind the Bloodshed”
By Anthony DeBarros, Destin Frasier, Erin Kissane, and Juan Thomassie
Posted on“Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings,” is a collaboration between the database team at USA Today and Gannett Digital’s interactive applications and design teams. We chatted with Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital, with input from colleagues Juan Thomassie and Destin Frasier, on how the project came together.
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The Code Behind AJAM’s Displaced Syrians App
By Michael Keller
Posted onAl Jazeera America’s Michael Keller introduces the three new open source libraries behind AJA’s displaced Syrians interactive app.
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US Elections Roundup, November 2013
By Erin Kissane
Posted onA light round of elections were held this week in the US, giving news developers an opportunity to outdo their usual coverage. We’ve rounded up a few highlights.
Journalists: If you’ve worked with others to change your newsroom, you’re probably an organizer