Fun Friday: geoGreeting

geoGreeting is a fun way for you to send your friends short greetings from the surface of the Earth! Jesse Vig, the site's creator, noticed, while working in Google Maps, that certain buildings looked like letters from above.

Visit geoGreetings to create and share your own greetings.

Click on the provided link to view a special GDC message! (If the animation does not load, you can view a still shot here.)

Fun Friday: Name Mapper

The Baby Name Wizard website, which is the self-proclaimed "expert source for baby names", recently added a mapping application to their site. Their NameMapper came out in 2008, and it shows geographic name trends from 1960 to 2007. The NameMapper has two visual outputs: a map display and a timeline. The name database was created using reports from the Social Security Administration.

The following image is a map display of the popularity of the name Jack in the U.S. in 2007:

The monochromatic scale indicates the relative popularity of the name based on a ranking of the top 100 names in each state for that year. NameMapper also tells you the peak, or highest historical ranking, of that name. The name Jack peaked in popularity in Minnesota in 2005.

The timeline output option allows you to sort name statistics by income, population density, Republican/Democratic voting tendency, and name region. The results are based on an analysis of state-by-state naming tendencies, with an emphasis on names that are either more or less common in that state than in the nation overall, and groupings are determined by shared naming patterns. The timelines can be represented by shaded boxes, graphs, or circles. The following is a shaded timeline of the popularity of the name Jack based on name region:

 

Finally, the Super Multi-Map output allows one to observe the popularity trend of a given name in each of the 50 states from year to year. The following image is a Super Multi-Map for the name Sarah.

Fun Friday: The Map of Springfield

The Simpsons, one of the most well-known families in America, live in the town of Springfield.  As anyone who has ever watched the show knows, this town has bloomed and blossomed into an extremely complex television town since its creation in 1989. Just check out this interactive map adapted by Adrien Noterdaem from the original made by Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan.  Here you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about the Simpson’s hometown.  This detailed map shows the location of what seems like very shop, prison, gorge, apartment, park, and mountain ever mentioned, and includes pop-up images of dozens of locations around the town as they would appear on the show (see the screenshot below of Springfield Elementary School). Explore the world of the Simpsons for yourself through Lerma and Hogan's Guide to Springfield USA.

Fun Friday: Middle East Geography Quiz

Test your geographic knowledge of the Middle East with this interactive Geography Quiz developed by Rethinking Schools.

Fun Friday: Sin Maps

What is the greediest region in the United States? Where will you find the most individuals that indulge their lusty desires? A team from Kansas State, interested in making a splash at the annual Association of American Geographers’ meeting, created a series of maps to answer these questions and more. The team conducted a study titled "The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins within Nevada", first defining, then displaying the distribution of each of the seven deadly sins across the state of Nevada. However, in order to put the data into a more universal context, the team took their research a step further and applied their statistics to the entire nation.

The researchers defined each of the seven deadly sins as follows (click on the link for each of the sins to get a close up view of their respective distributions): greed (average income compared with number of people living below the poverty line); envy (total thefts [robbery, burglary, larceny, and grand theft auto] per capita); lust (number of STD cases reported per capita); gluttony (number of fast-food restaurants per capita); sloth (expenditures on art, entertainment, and recreation compared with employment); wrath (number of violent crimes (murder, assault, and rape) per capita); pride (an aggregate of the other six offenses—suggesting that pride is the root of all sin). The team then took statistical data for each of their defined sins and displayed it on a map, ranking the states from "saintly to devilish".

Though this information is extremely subjective (how does one really quantify a deadly sin?), the Kansas State researchers came up with a well-defined sin index, gave the viewer a chuckle and  left to door open for continued research (think about changing the definition for each of the sins, analyzing each of the states on a smaller scale, or even extending the scope to other countries across the globe).To read more about the team and their Seven Deadly Sins project, check out this article from the Las Vegas Sun, "One nation, seven sin".

Fun Friday: Where Does Thanksgiving Dinner Grow?

"When far-flung families get together for Thanksgiving dinners, much of their food will have logged more miles than their relatives and friends around the table," according to the Worldwatch Institute, who recently released a new study titled Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market.

Linda Zellmer, a Government Information and Data Services Librarian at Western Illinois University, has created a series of maps showing where many of the common ingredients in a traditional Thanksgiving meal are grown.  The maps were created with GIS using data obtained from the 2007 Census of Agriculture, as discussed in yesterday's post. Check out all of her Thanksgiving Maps & Posters on her website.  She even provides downloads of the data she used, so you can try creating your own maps! (Click on the map below to see the original.)

Curious how these individual maps might add up together, we downloaded Linda Zellmer's data and created a summary map of all the Thanksgiving crops.  While most crops were measured in acres harvested, turkeys were measured in shear number and wheat was measured in bushels harvested, making a direct sum of all crops difficult.  Instead, we calculated the fraction of each crop grown in each state and summed those fractions to create a Thanksgiving Food Production Index of sorts, symbolized in six classes using natural breaks, resulting in the map below.  For example, if one state grew 10% of the sweet potatoes, 2% of the turkeys and 4% of the wheat, it's index score would be 0.16.  Since the index is a fairly meaningless number on its own, a legend was not included.

To account for the enormous difference in size between Texas and Rhode Island, we then took the Thanksgiving Food Production Index and divided by the area of each state, resulting in the map below.  Though Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Delaware may not account for a large percentage of crops, due to their small size, their percentage of crops per area is just as big as the largest state producers.

 

So where did your Thanksgiving dinner grow?  While California, Wisconsin, and Tennessee seem like likely candidates, the answer could be just about anywhere in the U.S. or even abroad.  There are definitely severe economic and environmental implications of transporting food such long distances; however, there is something appropriate to the Thanksgiving spirit that the food on your one table could have been harvested from every state in the country.

Fun Friday: Ohio is a Piano

Cartographer Andy Woodruff has developed an interactive map that capitalizes on the fact that Ohio has 88 counties- the same number of keys on a piano. The basic premise behind Woodruff's map is this: each of the musical notes associated with the 88 piano keys are assigned to a single county in Ohio. The result is a "musical map" that is very interesting and fun to experiment with.  Notes can be assigned to counties based on a selected attribute. For instance, if the attribute chosen is square miles, the county with the lowest square mileage will be assigned the lowest frequency note that can be played on a piano and the county with the highest square mileage will be assigned the highest frequency note.

Once the notes are assigned according to an attribute, the map allows you to play a song, play the data, play a metro area, or play a route.  Playing a song (the options are The Entertainer or Beethoven's Fifth) allows you to "see the geography of music" as the different counties are darkened to represent the different notes in the song. Playing the data tracks the 'scale' of the selected attribute (from lowest note to highest note), as the counties once again are darkened as their associated notes are played. Playing a metro area just allows you to hear the musical chord based on a metropolitan area based on the selected attribute. Finally, playing a route is a very interesting application of this map. You can enter a start county and a destination county, and a route is formed through Google Maps (the 'avoid highways' option is selected to allow for more interesting routes). The sequence of counties in this route is then played.

There is definitely room for this map to evolve into a much more powerful application. Currently, you don't have the ability to compose your own geographic music by either importing songs or sequencing counties into songs. You also can not interface with the virtual piano, so you are limited to moving the mouse of the map to compose sounds. Also, the numerical data is not displayed anywhere, so you can really only interpret the ordinal attributes of the counties (the overall order and their values with relation to one another).

Overall, this map is a very interesting application of the sonification of data. Woodruff points out that metal detectors and Geiger counters are practical examples of representing spatial data using sound. Although Woodruff's map is more artistic in nature, it is possible that his work could lead to some more interesting revelations in understanding the music of data, especially in the case of those who are visually impaired.

Fun Friday: McDistance Map

Ever wonder how many McDonald's locations there are in the U.S or how far you live from one?  Well someone has and they have helped others answer this question.

Below is Stephen Von Worley's visualization of the contiguous United States based on distance to the nearest McDonald's.  He created the map using geocoded data provided on the AggData website.

You can read more about his inspiration for creating this map on his blog post.  Currently, he is working on a series of close-ups, the first of which focuses on the Midwest.

Welcome to the GIS/Data Center Blog

Welcome to the first of many blog posts brought to you by the staff of the GIS/Data Center in Fondren Library at Rice University. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems and makes use of hardware and software to support people in displaying, querying, manipulating, and analyzing spatial data.

This blog will be geared towards the Rice community and will highlight resources at the GIS/Data Center and in the Houston area; however, most of the information will be equally applicable to anyone with an interest in or curiosity about GIS. We will be highlighting data, tools, techniques, and applications that we hope will be useful to those just getting started, as well as those with more experience who are looking for new and exciting innovations in the field. Therefore, our posts will feature a mixture of recent developments and well-established practices.

We've come up with some fun daily themes to keep you reading and us writing:

Miscellaneous Monday - general GIS news, Houston and Fondren Library GIS information and events, Rice faculty and student projects utilizing GIS

Tuesday Tools - tools that can be used online or downloaded to perform special functions in GIS and cartography

Web Wednesday - websites that either allow you to browse and query existing data online or to create online content using your own data

Thursday Data - sources of free, high-quality, GIS-related data

Fun Friday - interesting, novel, and downright fun maps and applications

If you would like more information or one-on-one training related to the any of the topics covered in the blog, feel free to visit us at the GIS/Data Center in the basement of Fondren Library (B40). Please also refer to our website for our contact information and more details regarding our computer lab, data, training, and assistance.

While comments will not be displayed on this blog, we do welcome your feedback and will take your comments into consideration for the future development of our blog.