maps

Wow! xkcd maps Congress's political leanings since the start of the republic

Randall Munroe has outdone himself. XKCD, the "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language," just posted another amazing, wall-sized infographic, this one depicting the historical ideological swings of left, right and center of the US Senate and House of Representatives (here are Randall's other *huge* and hugely fascinating infographics).

Be sure to read the side boxes and especially the one on methodology of how ideology was calculated. He meticulously accounts for the historical shift in the left/right spectrum between Republicans and Democrats.

That is all.

[HT BoingBoing!]

Good news for census/maps/GIS geeks: TIGERweb set to release

This looks like a great new tool to access geographic data from the US Census Bureau. For more, check out Introduction to TIGERweb (YouTube video below).


The U.S. Census Bureau is going through the final integration tests for the next TIGERweb release. TIGERweb v2.0 (beta) will consist of a new set of map services using American Community Survey (ACS) 2011 source data, an upgraded viewer application based on comments received from our users, and a relocation of our Census 2010 viewer to TIGERweb2010. We hope to release this new version the week of September 17, 2012. Expect more information about this release later this week.

If you have any questions or comments about TIGERweb, you may contact us by sending a message to geo.tigerweb@census.gov.



NARA, Sweden, ILO, Online Maps, Voting, Statistics, NASA, TOXNET, Transporation, DOT, Smithsonian, Federal Regulations, Energy

New & Free: USGS Releases More than 200,000 Historical Maps From 1884-2006

Via INFOdocket:

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Historical Quadrangle Scanning Project (HQSP) is in the process of releasing all editions and all scales of more than 200,000 historic topographic maps of the United States dating from 1884-2006.

[Clip]

The historical topographic map collection includes all States and U.S. territories mapped by the USGS. The HQSP creates a master catalogue and digital archive for all topographic maps and provides easy access to the public to download this historical data to accompany topographic maps that are no longer available for distribution as lithographic prints.

Historical maps are available to the public at no cost in GeoPDF format from the USGS Store. These maps are georeferenced and can be used in conjunction with the new USGS digital topographic map, the US Topo.

News Release and Links

From Federal CIO: Data Center Consolidation Interactive Map

From Tech Insider:

"Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s office has launched an interactive map listing the 137 data centers it has either already closed or plans to close by the end of this year.

The map lists data centers’ names and locations — down to geographic coordinates — and whether the center is among the 39 already closed as of April or is still operating but slated for closure."

Direct to Interactive Map

Another Map:

Last month the White House released an interactive map showing excess federal properties. The map provides info about 7000 out of 12,000 properties.

List

The Tech Insider article also points out a new list with info about what operations federal agencies plan to migrate to the cloud.

Printable Congressional District Maps: Behind The Scenes

Printable Congressional District Maps: Behind The Scenes, Joshua Tauberer, February 26th, 2010.

I missed this when it came out a couple of months ago, so this may be old news to some of you. Seems worth mentioning for those who missed it.

Today I’m releasing print-quality maps of congressional districts, with street-level detail and county border lines. This has been one of the most sought-after resources based on emails I’ve received over the last some four years and I don’t think you can find this anywhere else. (At least not comprehensively for the whole nation. Local state clerk’s offices may have them. NationalAtlas.gov has maps but not with very much detail.)

This was a solid 2-day project with less than 300 lines of code and it’s something that only recently became this easy to do.

Eleven Great Sources of Government Data Sets to View in Google Earth

One great way to get your head around a large government dataset is to view it using Google Earth. I went on a hunt for the most interesting, striking and geography based government data sets currently available in the KML format used by Google Earth. There is a large gallery of tours and layers available from Google Earth's site, including some based on government data - but I wanted to look beyond them.

Here are eleven data sources (in no particular order) that have KML files ready and waiting for you to download. For some of these you will need to read the instructions associated with the KML to understand what you are looking at and what special features are enabled. Some have multiple datasets within a single KML file -- others include animations. Often when you open them in Google Earth they will start out with either a helpful note or a built in graphical key.

Have a favorite KML formatted government data set I missed? Please share it in the comments. I found many of these by starting in Goggle's US Government Search and searching for Google Earth.

Following/mapping the election

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

Daily maps from National Geographic

A map a day keeps the doctor away right? Well now you can browse through history with National Geographic's daily maps site of historical news events and milestones. And they've even got an RSS feed.

Your feed reader getting too full? Thunderbird slowing down because of too many feeds? Then do what I do: tag it to your del.icio.us account with a tag like "daily." Because each tag has an RSS feed, you can simply add the feed to your Firefox toolbar as a live bookmark. Just click on the orange icon ( in your location bar (upper right). That's how I read GOVDOC-L too!

WV Tax Assessor sues to remove state tax maps from website

According to a story in Ars Technica, a tax assessor in Kanawha County, West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to stop a company called Seneca Technologies from publishing  tax maps of the whole state of West Virginia online.  The tax assessor is citing a state law that prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission and enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for  $8 each. She asserts that  the online maps constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.
Seneca Technologies has already battled with the state tax department about the project. Seneca got the maps through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  The state tax department tried to force Seneca to pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488) and Seneca sued  to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs. Seneca then made the maps freely available online so that they could be accessed by the general public on their website (called FOIAmaps). Seneca plans to use indexing technology to create a search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases.

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