Visual Virginia

Saturday’s Mapping Party was fun. I’ve been wanting to get involved with OpenStreetMap for a while, and I feel like I understand the tools and process enough to participate now. Russ is a great guide.

Something is bothering me, though.

How does OSM deal with jerks?

On a Wikipedia article, you’re one click away from viewing it’s edit history, or adding it your watch list.

OSM doesn’t seem to have any such mechanism. It’s obviously less of an asshole-magnet than “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, but as it becomes a more useful resource, the griefers will come out. What’s gonna happen when 4chan (or, hell, Stephen Colbert) targets the map?

If you asked me yesterday, I would have said the answer was pretty obvious– you should be able to see the change history of any given bounding-box, and easily revert back to a previous version.

Chances are, that’d be too naive an approach. First, I’m not familiar enough with what the data looks like, but I wouldn’t be surprised if  it really couldn’t be presented in discrete “versions”, but the real sticky part would be scope– what does it looks like to revert changes on a given area, where a given feature might extend beyond that bounding box? Is the entire feature deleted, or pieces left behind outside of the area you’re focusing on?

I’ll keep trying to learn more– maybe there’s an obvious answer, or maybe I’m just plain wrong about the necessity of such a system.

Zillow recently released a set of Neighborhood Boundaries. Here’s how they describe the data:

The Zillow data team has created a database of nearly 7,000 neighborhood boundaries in the largest cities in the U.S. And we’d like to share them with you! We’re sharing these neighborhoods under a Creative Commons license to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database

I was immediately curious about what the “neighborhood” footprint for VA looked like, so loaded it up, over a standard map of the state. Here’s what it looks like (made with Quantum, labels added in Create, and my favorite font of the moment is Miso):

What began as a simple walk yesterday afternoon turned into something a bit more purposeful– but that’s a story for another day. In the meantime, here’s the path I took:

(If your RSS reader doesn’t display the map, you might have to click the permalink)

Visual Virginia is a blog about, well, visualizing Virginia. Expect to see maps, graphics, and tools that I build or find worth sharing. It’s still a blog– and any blog worth reading isn’t 100% about what it’s supposed to be about. I’ll try not to stray too far off-topic, though.

By vocation, I’m an IT professional and sometime web developer. Outside of work, I’m a student of GIS, data analysis, and visualization (the first formally, the other two not so much). To spell it out more explictly: I am not a GIS professional, or even an expert.  If something looks amateurish, it’s because I’m an amateur. I’ll always appreciate any feedback or criticism, especially if it comes with any tips or ideas to make things better.

The previous two posts are maps built in ArcGIS, as part of my GIS 200 term project. Some of what I post will continue to be classwork.

VV replaces my old blog, Ross Notes.  I wasn’t really getting any value out of a general-purpose “vanity” blog, so this is an experiment for me in picking-a-niche-and-covering-the-hell-out-of-it.

The blue areas are counties where the the unemployment rate has shrunk in the first three months of 2009. Empolyment data comes from VA Workforce Connection, and the county shapes from the US Census Bureau.

As I hinted earlier, my GIS term project this semester involves seeing how the economic stimulus funding lines up with actual need in Virginia. I’m still working out the best way to model the eventual spending (and/or hoping the Commonwealth makes a decision soon), but I also have to find several ways of indicating need.

Here’s the simplest– the latest available unemployment numbers are for January. Here’s what the unemployment rates are like for each county:

I have two more ideas:

• The rate of change of the unemployment numbers
• The difference between cost of living and median income

I’ll post those maps when they’re done.