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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.
- USDA Forest Service: MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program: View fire detection data and incident information
- USGS Earthquake Hazards Program: real-time earthquake data (updated every 5 minutes!), geologic features and virtual tours of historic earthquakes.
- FEMA Flood Hazards: Stay Dry provides basic flood hazard map information from FEMA’s National Flood Hazard Layer for specific addresses while NFHL (National Flood Hazard Layer) appears to be a more general application that displays flood hazard zones, floodways, base flood elevations, cross sections and coastal transects and much more.
- NASA: Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio: provides various visualization layers including Tectonic Plates Boundaries and African Fires during 2002. Dig through the various categories, there is a lot here.
- Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory OnEarth: multiple options are available for viewing daily updated views of earth from satellites. Very striking!
- gCensus: provides access to data from the 2000 US Census. The site lets you browse for various elements of data and generate a KML file you can then view via Google Earth.
- Air Quality Now: provides current and forcasted air quality conditions for locations across the USA. It is a product of a partnership of multiple US Government agencies.
- National Weather Service: has a full page of KML layers related to all aspects of weather – past, present and predicted.
- National Gallery of Art: Afghanistan Hidden Treasures from the National Museum: visit Aï Khanum, Tillya Tepe, and Begram—that and examine Afghan Treasures
- National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places: provides Google Earth layers per region of the USA that mark historic places.
- District of Columbia Data Catalog: provides a wide range of data about our nations capital. You must supply some simple data to identify yourself before downloading these KML files. This is just a taste of what various regional governments are providing. Give your home state, district or territory’s website a look to see if you can find KML data available.
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!
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