Catching up | patrickcain.ca

Between being out of the country and starting a new job, I’ve been fairly delinquent about updating this blog. Here’s an attempt at catching up.

First, Cedric Sam mashes up 2008 political donation data to create a map of political contributors by party based on full (six-character) postal codes.

Cedric explains:

There were also some cleverly hidden public data that consists in the postal code of a single contributor. Using a Web browser, it was impossible to compile this data into a database. But using simple scripts with a command-line tool like curl, it was possible to know the location that a donor used to make its donation, including private residence. It might be of questionable good taste to reveal those on a map, but in an era of data mashups and visualisation, it makes perfect sense for what is after all public data.

A man after my own heart. Another way of presenting this data would be to sum totals for each party at all levels by FSA, then map a rate (dollars per 1,000 of population, something like that.)

From the University of Toronto map library: a visualization of Toronto’s afternoon rush hour, 1915.

From the Guardian: maps of teen pregnancy rates and child poverty in Britain.

twitterdots.posterous.com maps 24 hours of a term on Twitter across the globe:

24 Hours of Good Morning on Twitter from Rio Akasaka on Vimeo.

The Map Room points to a map of profanity on Twitter, in which the coastal South glows bright red:

Daniel P. Huffman has created a map of profanity on Twitter (original PDF here). It takes a sample of 1.5 million geocoded tweets in March and April 2010 and maps the percentage of words in said tweets that are profanities. Salt Lake City never swears, apparently.

In the Times, a followup of sorts to our baby name maps:

A new study finds that parents in newer, “frontier” states choose less-common baby names than parents in older states (like the original 13).

And the Norwegian paper Bergens Tidende maps a decade’s worth of road accident data for that country.