[Geoinquiets Barcelona] Maps aren't easy

Wed Apr 13 02:38:05 EDT 2011

There is an art to data journalism, and in many cases that art requires an
involved and arduous process. In a recent
interview<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/simon-rogers-guardian-wikileaks.html>,
Simon Rogers <https://twitter.com/#!/smfrogers>, editor of the Guardian's
Datablog and Datastore <http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog>, discussed
many of the issues his team faced when they assembled databases and reports
from the WikiLeaks releases <http://213.251.145.96/>. More recently,
journalists have been building
scads<http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2011/japan.quake/map/>of interactive
maps<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704713004576209173693411838.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories>to
illustrate
news <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12722187> from the disaster
in Japan<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/japan-earthquake-hundreds-of-aftershocks-rock-island-nation-dozens-preceded-the-great-quake.html>and
the political situation
in Libya<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8367083/Libya-interactive-map-of-the-key-battle-zones.html>.

A recent story at
Poynter<http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/125206/explainer-maps-locate-contextualize-and-localize-news-from-libya-japan/>looking
at the importance of such maps also briefly noted their return on
investment:

"The data-driven interactives take a lot of time and teamwork to produce,
but they have the greatest value and generate good traffic and time-spent on
the site,” said Juan Thomassie, senior interactive developer at USA Today.

So, hard work yields strong engagement. Sounds good. But that same Poynter
article included this eye-opening aside: the New York Times has
*four*cartographers. On first blush, my editor cringed at the
(seemingly)
exceptional number of hours and resources the Times is dedicating to map
production. Does a news org really need four cartographers? I turned to Pete
Warden <http://petewarden.typepad.com/>, founder of
OpenHeatMap<http://www.openheatmap.com/>,
for some informed answers.

Warden walked me through the labor-intensive process — one that may very
well justify a full cartography team *[Ed. duly noted]*. He also discussed a
few tools that can streamline data journalism production.

Our interview follows.
------------------------------
What are the steps involved in making an interactive map?

[image: PeteWarden]*Pete Warden:* Usually one of the hardest parts is
gathering the data. A good example might be the map
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/mar/24/fukushima-radiation-levels>Alasdair
Allan <http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/aa/>, Gemma Hobson, and I did for
the Guardian (see the screen shot below; find the dataset
here<http://d2l1at02t09aem.cloudfront.net/Fukushima-Data.zip>).

Alasdair spotted that the Japanese government had released some data on the
radiation levels around the
country<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/japan-radiation-visualizations.html>.
Unfortunately, it was only available in PDF forms, so Gemma and I did a
combination of cutting-and-pasting and manual typing to get all the readings
and locations into a spreadsheet. Once they were in a spreadsheet, we then
had to pick exactly what we wanted to display in the final map.

Alasdair took charge of that process and spent a lot of time trying out
different scales and units — for example, showing the difference between the
current values and the background levels at each location since some areas
had naturally higher levels of radiation. That involved understanding what
the story was we wanted to tell — similar to the way reporters put together
quotes and other evidence to support the points of their articles. It also
meant repeatedly uploading different versions and iterating until there was
something that looked interesting and informative.

[image: PeteMap.png]<http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/mar/24/fukushima-radiation-levels>
Click here<http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/mar/24/fukushima-radiation-levels>to
visit the Guardian's original story.
Are there tools that can make the data acquisition and mapping processes
more efficient?

*Pete Warden:* I'm obviously a big fan of OpenHeatMap, but I've also been
very impressed by both Google's Fusion
Tables<http://www.google.com/fusiontables/>and the Tableau
Public <http://www.tableausoftware.com/public> tool. This gives users a lot
of choices. My design bias is toward simplicity, so OpenHeatMap's audience
includes users unfamiliar with traditional
GIS<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system>
.
You recently released the Data Science
Toolkit<http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/>.
How can the open source tools in that kit be applied to data journalism?

*Pete Warden:* The toolkit contains a lot of tools based on common requests
from journalists. In particular, the command-line
tools<http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#commandline>,
like street2coordinates and coordinates2politics, can be very handy for
taking large spreadsheets of addresses and calculating their positions,
along with information like which congressional districts, neighborhoods,
cities, states and countries they are in. You can then take that data and do
further processing to break down your statistics by those categories.

*Related:*

   - Book: Data Source Handbook <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449303143/>

   - Before you interrogate data, you must tame
it<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/simon-rogers-guardian-wikileaks.html>

   - Radiation visualizations paint a different picture of
Japan<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/japan-radiation-visualizations.html>

   - 4 free data tools for journalists (and
snoops)<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/journalist-data-tools.html>

   - Visualization deconstructed: New York Times "Mapping
America"<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/visualization-mapping-america.html>

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