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5 items tagged "Mapping and Politics"

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All Points Blog

In this Election Cycle...It's All About the Map

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 11:50pm CET

Tags: Politics and Mapping

In my 'geocentric' world, if Google Earth didn't excite your feelings about maps and mapping technology, then this year's U.S. presidential election should have told you it was 'all about the map.' Since the summer, I've been blogging at our other publication, Map Hawk, about how the media uses mapping technology. Many of the maps in use by online media outlets were using Flash technology, some were on Google, and some still just static maps. Because of the nature of our red vs. blue leanings, it has been somewhat easy to identify the country's persuasion best by putting them on a map. More so than at any time in the past, maps are the platform to more easily convey results. They technology has been there, and as CNN has so marvelously shown, the display technology has been there as well. I suspect this has changed the way the mainstream media will forever report news. It already has because of the use of Google Earth was prevalent before this, but the specificity with which the campaigns where pinpointing candidate rallies and thus the emphasis on certain states and districts, maps became both the reporting mechanism...and sometimes the news themselves. And that's where the use of the technology must eventually lead...much greater detail must be paid to reporting the results at the precinct level (not just county), real-time information I suspect will be more readily available as results could be reported electronically, and there will be an ever greater use of web services to support news flow. We've seen maps, GIS, and other forms of location technology in this cycle come to the forefront plus websites like TwitterVoteReport and other social networking platforms display geospatial information. I guess maps really are..."cool."
A History Lesson of Presidential Elections...Put to Music and Maps

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 11:22pm CET

Tags: Politics and Mapping

I have to admit, if I were in school again, I actually might learn something about presidential elections by watching this YouTube video of the history of elections put to music. From 1789 to 2004...From Washington to Bush...this video traces the elections on maps...nicely done.
Continue reading "A History Lesson of Presidential Elections...Put to Music and Maps"
Maps of Georgia (or lack thereof) Cause Google to Scramble; Use Virtual Earth

Posted: August 14th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Where's the street map of the Republic of Georgia? Some media outlets are crying foul as Google scrambles to explain why they did not have any maps of the war-torn region. You can get satellite images for sure but the road detail is vacant. So, don't go searching for detail around Tbilisi or Gori. Miguel Helft, writing in the New York Times, interviews folks at Google who say simply that they never had very good coverage in this region and did not intentionally remove any data.

Not so for Yahoo Maps. Road data on Yahoo does exist but looks no better than the old 1:100,000 Defence Mapping Agency (now NGA) maps so it, too, is somewhat incomplete. Zooming to street level will show that neither Yahoo nor Google has any coverage.

But the winner is Microsoft Virtual Earth. Now, whether this was done recently, only they know for sure, but the road detail is excellent. Perhaps folks from the VE group can chime in here.

I would not put this all on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Politically sensitive regions have little detail. Take the disputed region of Kashmir. It has great satellite imagery (almost too good) but no road data. And the imagery is spotty. For an interesting example, use this link to a KMZ file of Skardu, a small town in Pakistan, very close to the border with India. The imagery is extraordinary but don't pan away too far or you will lose the higher resolution image.
Map Hawk - Watching the Media and How it Uses Maps

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 10:46am CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Map Hawk is a newly launched blog that will focus on maps and mapping technology in use by the mainstream media. With the upcoming U.S. elections the Olympics and ongoing world events, Map Hawk will document and explore the use of maps in print, online and televised media. You'll find my coverage both here on APB and at MapHawk.blogspot.com. I hope you'll join the conversation, send comment s, subscribe to the daily newsletter and participate in the ongoing polls. See the first poll on how CNN should improve their mapping capabilities for the presidential election.
CNN Exemplifies Problems with Static Web Services in Election Coverage

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:02pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Yes, I too saw John King of CNN doing the "stretch and shrink" act on the touch screen last night and Paul Well's comments notwithstanding, I have a different take. What's going simply illustrates the problem that many users of web services, like Google Earth, are and will face when it comes down to wanting more than what it was designed to do.

First, King does a fantastic job and to the extent that CNN has the right statistics at his fingertips is quite good...for what it was intended to do. What is was NOT intended to do was get down into finer demographic detail and display additional political boundaries nor could it query the political districts for certain data that King so desperately wanted at his fingertips.

The CNN political geography map web service that they constructed becomes inadequate when situations like the one that occured last night for Lake County Indiana. Lake County had votes outstanding and was late in reporting results. Everyone is focused on this single county to give them the Clinton/Obama vote given the closeness of the primary election. And here's Mr. King manually drawing in the congressional districts with his finger to try to assess where he "expected" each candidate to have a better chance of pulling votes. It didn't work. The level of voting detail was not there for him to truly predict the results. What he was trying to do was to mark the congressional district boundaries and then overlay the satellite image to those boundaries to look as rural versus urban areas. Obama was pulling better statewide from the urban areas; Clinton from the rural, white communities.

It served as an example of what happens to the expectations of users who believe that a static, web service will do just fine until there is a need to drill into the details. We saw this happen to products like MapPoint 2000 when just simple thematic mapping quickly becomes inadequate when you try to do more advanced analysis and ask questions that it was never designed to accept. The same is true for the CNN Touch Screen. It doesn't have all the boundary data like congressional district maps or precinct maps (which I am sure will be needed eventually). And while the satellite maps are nice it, seemed like Mr. King was a little ill-prepared to describe the geography other than being able to point to rural vs. urban areas and found himself not knowing some of the geography (like the I90 toll road for which he was grasping). He really needed another overlay of the road network and additional POI data.

So, I continue to revel in the CNN coverage just because the maps are now a highlight of the evening..and yet there is so much more that could be done. Linking to live vote counts by precinct? You know it's coming.

GISWiki.NEWS.Reader » Tags » Mapping and Politics

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5 items tagged "Mapping and Politics"

All Points Blog

In this Election Cycle...It's All About the Map

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 11:50pm CET

Tags: Politics and Mapping

A History Lesson of Presidential Elections...Put to Music and Maps

Posted: November 4th, 2008, 11:22pm CET

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Maps of Georgia (or lack thereof) Cause Google to Scramble; Use Virtual Earth

Posted: August 14th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Map Hawk - Watching the Media and How it Uses Maps

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 10:46am CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

CNN Exemplifies Problems with Static Web Services in Election Coverage

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:02pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping