The 2010 Census: The Ridiculously Detailed New York Times Map

(Ahem: Based on 2005-2009 American Community Survey data, for the sticklers out there.) A racial profile of the United States, block by block, courtesy of the New York Times:



As you can see, this map divides human beings into the five standard types: white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and other. And it characterizes every single city block in the country according to those types. It scales up show whole regions of the country, and scales down so you can check out your own corner of your neighborhood. It is, as the title of this blog post indicates, ridiculously detailed. Which is to say, if you are the sort of person who can spend hours pouring over the patterns of segregation/integration in various US cities (hi!), an enormous time sink.

And, for good measure, they include maps like this, which shows Hispanic population by county, and scales down to individual census tracts:

Netflixography

The New York Times raided Netflix's queue data and came up with this:



It shows Netflix rental patterns by zipcode in twelve great American cities, plus Dallas. Shown above is the popularity of Gus Van Sant's Milk in New York City. They've got maps for the current top 50 rentals for every zip code in all 13 cities, which is kind of nuts.

A few patterns tend to recur. In particular (based on my limited knowledge of the geography of these cities, especially NYC, which I know best) a lot of titles seem to fit into one of three categories:

Movies that are popular in wealthy urban areas: the yuppie and hipster neighborhoods. Includes Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, Milk (they're not big fans in surburban Atlanta), Revolutionary Road (but suburbs, too), Rachel Getting Married, Pineapple Express, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, W., Sunshine Cleaning, Religulous, Man on Wire, and Mad Men: Season 1.

Movies that are popular in poorer or working class urban areas . Includes Seven Pounds, Twilight, Body of Lies, Eagle Eye, The Soloist, Wanted, Pride and Glory, Push, Obsessed, Transporter 3 (never heard of this franchise), The Taking of Pelham 123 (only 31st most popular in Pelham), and RocknRolla.

Movies that are popular in suburbs. Includes Gran Torino, The Proposal, Mall Cop, Taken (never heard of it), Defiance, Nights in Rodanthe (city people hate it!), Yes Man, Marley and Me, Last Chance Harvey, Australia, and Bride Wars.

Lots of movies don't fit any of those patterns, of course, including I Love You, Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen. New in Town is just hugely popular in Minneapolis and nowhere else. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is inexplicably popular pretty much everywhere.

NASA Creates Best Topographical Map of the World Yet

Via New Scientist, the most detailed and complete topographical map of the world ever produced has been created with data from NASA's Terra satellite.



Says NS:

The map incorporates more than 1 million digital images and covers 99 per cent of the globe, a substantial increase over previous maps, which surveyed just 80 per cent of the planet. The new map covers latitudes between 83° north and 83° south, resolving patches of land as narrow as 30 metres across – three times the resolution of the next best digital topographical map, which was made by the space shuttle Endeavour during an 11-day mission in 2000.

According to the LA Times' L.A. Now blog, "the resolution is so clear that you can plainly see Dodger Stadium and other landmarks in pictures of Los Angeles," viz. this one:



And, via The Daily Mail, which has several large images, here's Europe:



The full data set is online and available for free.

Maps Can Save the World

Or make it a bit better, at least. The Economist has an article this week about using mapping tools for political advocacy. Here, for instance, is a map of Los Angeles that shows that areas with more parks (darker green) have lower rates of childhood obesity (smaller circles):



Says The Economist:

mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice. Whether it is to promote health, safety, fair politics or a cleaner environment, foundations, non-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers or press releases.

“Today you are allowed to visualise data in ways you couldn’t even understand just a few years ago,” says Jeff Vining of Gartner, a consulting firm. Along with web-based resources, coalescence around more advanced tools has also helped, such as the emergence of ESRI, based in Redlands, California, as the market leader in mapping software. And the rise of open-source projects such as MapServer, PostGIS and GRASS GIS have made sophisticated mapping available to non-profit groups with limited resources.

I think what you've got here is another case where the proliferation of technology and information has a democratizing effect in that it allows people the means to form a clearer view of the world, and by extension a better understanding of how to redress injustices, improve their lives, or just become aware of opportunities which previously would have been obscure to them. New technologies don't always have such propitious effects, but this is one case where they do. Also note that maps are great.

Via gvlt.

The Geography of Buzz

The Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University has been documenting the geography of buzz.




Those are maps of Manhattan. According to SIDL (as I assume they call themselves):

In the summer of 2008, the Spatial Information Design Lab set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles. Working with Elizabeth Currid from the University of Southern California, the lab used a database of arts and entertainment event photography by Getty Images as a proxy for social interaction in geographical space. Because photographs taken by Getty are tagged with location information, they are transformed into data with an unexpectedly powerful spatial component.

The results of the research showed that both Los Angeles and New York have unique “event geographies”, or locations of interest to Getty photographers that reappear at a statistically high [sic] rate than the rest of the city. While each separate arts industry showed some tendencies toward specific geographic locations the events geographies of all the industries are largely held in very similar locations, suggesting that event geographies appear to be closely linked to iconic symbols in both cities.

Now this is all very interesting, but something about this project strikes me as fundamentally tautological: they are determining which places are culturally significant in terms of which places are most frequently photographed. But a place is only going to be frequently photographed if it is deemed culturally significant. So they're determining what places should be deemed culturally significant by determining which places are already deemed culturally significant.

Don't get me wrong - there's value in that. It's interesting to see a map of what are essentially our culture's collective perception of a place; such documentation is a good way for us to become self-aware about those perceptions. But I don't think we should expect to gain any great new insights from these methods. (There's a lot of theatre activity near Broadway? You don't say.) After all, if there are biases in what we (or, more specifically, Getty photographers) deem culturally significant, then these maps will display the same biases.

Like, look at this, from a NY Times article on the project:

That the buzzy locales weren’t associated with the artistic underground was a quirk of the data set — there were not enough events in Brooklyn to be statistically significant — and of timing. “If we took a snapshot two years from now, the Lower East Side would become a much larger place in how we understand New York,” Ms. Currid said.

That doesn't sound like a "quirk of the data set" to me. That just sounds like a method that is keyed to pick up on the most prominent cultural events, which by definition won't be underground or cutting-edge, and which will therefore be confirming of conventional wisdom.

Still, it's cool to be able to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable. I always say: if the rich texture and ambiguity of emotional experience can't be reduced to the barren certainties of mathematics, then what good are feelings anyway?

No, I kid. To quote a man named Junior, "Saying that the quantification of the seemingly unquantifiable aspects of human experience* undermines 'enjoyment' and the 'human factor' is like creationists saying that evolution takes away the 'wonder' and 'mystery' of the universe. It doesn't. It makes it awesomer."

Indeed.

Bonus map of LA (more here):



*Instead of 'the quantification of the seemingly unquantifiable aspects of human experience,' Junior actually said 'VORP.' But the point stands.