Posts tagged: gis

  • Thursday
  • December 16
  • 2010

The best GIS map. Ever.

You’ve got to see this to believe it. The New York Times has pushed its Mapping America project to a whole new level with Mapping America: Every City, Every Block. Pop in an address, zip code or city and you get visualizations of race, ethnicity, income, housing and education census data from 2005-2009, for every census tract in the United States.

The debut of this latest GIS mapping project from the Times is a companion piece to Immigrants Make Paths to Suburbia, Not Cities, detailing more recent migration patterns of immigrant families in the United States.

  • Saturday
  • January 30
  • 2010

GIS mapping: What discrimination looks like

Want to get a feel for how GIS mapping is being used effectively as a tool in the progressive community? Then read this: The Revolution Will Be Mapped, a recent article published by Miller-McCune Online Magazine. The article highlights the well regarded work of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities. And here’s a plug for the home team: The article also quotes Eric Schultheis, former GIS honcho at LSNC’s Race Equity Project, the gravitational center of LSNC’s ongoing GIS mapping projects.

  • Thursday
  • October 8
  • 2009

Mapping, the essential tool

This is a cross post from a LSNC sister site, but a well worthy share at this site: Mapping Out Success, an article from the current issue of California Lawyer, features Legal Services of Northern California as an example how California lawyers are increasingly relying on mapping to better analyze data, to get the job done. “One example is when LSNC in 2007 began using maps to show how a proposed gas-storage area in Sacramento would place a ‘disproportionate environmental burden’ on a densely populated minority neighborhood. … Similarly, LSNC has targeted its foreclosure-outreach program by mapping foreclosure data.”

The examples cited in the article are both products of LSNC’s Race Equity Project. For more information about mapping, visit the LSNC GIS Mapping Resources page.

  • Sunday
  • March 15
  • 2009

Visually analyzing immigration patterns and student diversity

This is a cross-post from the LSNC Advocate Feed but it is worth noting here as well: Today’s New York Times features Immigration Explorer, an interactive GIS map based on census data revealing settlement patterns for 20+ foreign-born groups between 1880 and 2000. The Immigration Explorer map is simply a companion piece to the NYT’s “Remade in America,” with today’s feature article about Diversity in the Classroom, which itself has a separate interactive statistical graph illustrating how student demographics break out by state and county and school district. For example, the Grant Joint Union High school district in Sacramento County, California.

  • Tuesday
  • February 17
  • 2009

GIS makes the cover of Clearinghouse Review

You know GIS is at the heart of poverty law advocacy when it makes the cover of Clearinghouse Review, which it did in the current issue. The feature article is: The Use of Geographic Information Systems in Poverty Advocacy, by Jason Reece, a senior researcher at the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and my two-doors-down compadre Eric Schultheis, who oversees all the great GIS work published at the Race Equity Project. Great stuff, all.

  • Friday
  • November 21
  • 2008

Major refresh of LSNC GIS mapping page

Here at Webdogs 2.0, there have been periodic postings on GIS. But there is vastly more GIS information available at LSNC’s GIS Mapping Resources page.

This morning LSNC — with considerable help from Eric Schultheis at the Race Equity Project, reigning GIS guru at LSNC — completed a major update, minor reorganization and full-on link refresh of that page.

Among new additions are links to GISTools Freeware, an especially effective tool for extracting census data; Websites for Digital GIS Data, a comprehensive listing of GIS resources available on the web, courtesy of Stanford University; the Free Geocoding, Address Processing and GIS Data Capture web-based application created by the GIS geekmeisters over at the University of Southern California; and a handy dandy compilation of links to the growing collection of Race Equity Project GIS Tutorials.

Worth a revist, if you haven’t been over there for a while.

  • Thursday
  • November 6
  • 2008

Same underlying data, different visualizations

The day of the presidential election, the New York Times created yet another of its superb dynamic national GIS maps, visualizing the results by state with the usual red and blue breakouts. Among the many virtues of this map is a slider on the left that redisplays the national map to show how the red and blue states broke down during the four prior presidential elections, back to 1992.

But getting back to the 2008 election, to see an even more dramatic national map, click on the “Voting shifts” button on the left, mapped at the county level and revealing how broadly across the country voting shifted in one direction rather than the other. Stunning.

  • Friday
  • January 11
  • 2008

GIS tutorial for analyzing low-income foreclosures

A quick heads-up to readers interested in all things GIS: Eric Schultheis has posted a new, detailed GIS tutorial for identifying where low-income homeowners reside, to better target foreclosure related services. The tutorial uses the well regarded DataPlace web-based GIS platform, in combo with instructions on using the GISTools freeware to extract the data for use with DataPlace. Just the latest in a long series of posts at the LSNC’s Race Equity Project site to help advocates take advantage of GIS and other resources to better understand race issues. Good stuff.

  • Tuesday
  • October 23
  • 2007

SoCal fires: Talk about the GIS map of the day.

This is yet another cross post of an item from the LSNC main site, but it is a doozie, given what is happening in Southern California. And of likely interest to the GIS crowd out there:

Want a timely illustration of the effective use of GIS mapping? Take a look at the simple but effective wild fire maps created by the Los Angeles Times using the custom Google map features. They illustrate dramatically the areas affected. The first map was posted yesterday. A second, updated map illustrates conditions today. With either map click on the “flames” icon and you will get a (distressing) description of the area affected and the damage done.

  • Saturday
  • October 20
  • 2007

HUD groks GIS for subsidized housing

This is one of those occasional cross-posts I make to draw due attention to LSNC’s Race Equity Project (REP), where our colleague ElektroMoose (aka Eric Schultheis) and resident GIS czar at REP reports on mapping HUD subsidized housing, an interesting innovation at the HUD User – Data Sets site. The REP post provides a snapshot of how it all works and how well. If you take a second to view and scroll down the HUD’s Picture of Subsidized Households – 2000 article discussed by Eric, you find all the datasets you need and ArcGIS-specific instructions on creating maps with those datasets.

And Eric’s latest post is another reminder that the REP is available to help other legal services folks get in the swim with GIS mapping. The ElectraMoose is at your service, people. As the ‘Mooser himself says, “Feel free to contact us if you need some help.”

  • Thursday
  • August 9
  • 2007

GIS map of the day: Impact of USA Diversity

The big demographic story of the day is the Census Bureau’s news release reporting that more than 300 counties are now “majority-minority”. Predictably, my beloved New York Times ran the story in a very readable analysis of this latest data. Out of character, the NYT didn’t provide a GIS map to match the story.

But USA Today did, and then some, as part of its story in its Nation section entitled Hispanic growth extends eastward. The story includes an interactive flash-based map of the Impact of USA’s diversity that visually extrapolates the newly released demographic data from the Census. The maps offers three views: one mapping the patterns of the new “majority-minorities”; another illustrating migration patterns of Hispanics, with the fastest rates of growth of Hispanics occuring in the Midwest and the East Coast; and a third showing a trend among Blacks of moving toward the South. Plus, you get an interesting audio commentary from the demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Back to the Census Bureau for a second. Here’s a tip for all you demographic data geeks out there, something you may overlook in Census news releases: The Census usually embeds links to the underlying data on major stories like this, making it a breeze to find the source data. If you take a look at the Census news release linked above, you’ll notice links to both a detailed explanation of the underlying methodologies used, as well as a link to a page where you can download the entire data sets used. Your tax dollars at work, people.

  • Wednesday
  • August 1
  • 2007

CLIKS: GIS map of the day

Earlier today I posted an item at the LSNC main site that may be of interest to readers here: Stats on Steroids: “Kids Count 2007″ now available. But there is more than meets the eye with that linked item. The Kids Count site has always been a great resource for statistical data about children, but this latest iteration includes a slew of new interactive graphing and mapping tools that may be helpful to your advocates, wherever they are in the United States.

Allow me to exemplify: The site includes CLIKS, a set of tools for identifying “community-level information on kids.” If you select Maps, you are offered a very easily understood two-step process for creating a statewide map with county-level boundaries for viewing a wide range of select statistical indicators. For example, selecting California as the geographic area, you can then select a county-level indicator such as children living in poverty. That selection generates both a statewide map of California showing the relative concentration of child poverty by county, and a corresponding data table with the specific statistics for each county. You can then update the same map to select a different year or to change the size of the map and/or color-ramp scheme used.

But wait, there’s more! Generate a map and then hover your mouse over any of the counties and its displays the name and relative value mapped for the individual county! And if you call in the next ten minutes, you can click on a county in the map and it opens a new page with the statistical profile for that particular county!! And as if that all weren’t an extraordinary value in itself, at no extra cost you can save the map you created as a “web page complete” HTML file to your local desktop and the map image and clickable links all remain intact!!!

This description doesn’t begin to touch other tools like statistical graphing and rankings available at the same site. This is great stuff accessible and usable by all without the need for expertise in mapping or statistics. Everyday, it’s getting easier and easier to do this sort of thing on the Web.

  • Saturday
  • July 28
  • 2007

The “GeoWeb” as front page news

You know GIS mapping has gone totally mainstream, out of the hands of desktop geeks into the keystrokes of the web savvy hoi polloi, when the New York Times gives front-page prominence to the story: With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking. Mapping hipsters apparently now call it the GeoWeb. We’re all part of it now. Actually, the advocacy community has long already been a part of the web-based mapping revolution, courtesy of leading innovators like California’s Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA) and even more prominent national players like DataPlace. Map on, people!

  • Sunday
  • July 22
  • 2007

Using GIS to make your case

Just a quick heads up about a DataPlace online “expert chat” scheduled for Tuesday of next week, July 31: Using DataPlace to Make Your Case. We’re great fans of DataPlace, which provides a national platform for exploring, exploiting and visualizing Census and other data — including your own, via upload. This may be especially helpful for exec types who are still on the fence about committing institutional time and resources to the whole GIS mapping and statistical data thing they keep hearing about. This is a good starting point for learning more.

And since we’re on the topic of GIS, consider hooking into the feed at or at least an occasional visit to one of LSNC’s special project sister sites, the Race Equity Project. (Folks attending the NLADA Substantive Law Conference in San Jose had the opportunity last week to meet and learn from a stellar cast of advocates (led by Bill Kennedy of LSNC) who created a wholly new track on race equity issues in legal services practice. There are regular postings on use of GIS as an advocacy tool, with examples of how LSNC and others are using GIS and statistical data to get the job done. Plus, tips and reviews on mapping options, generally. For example, take a look at Swivel me timbers . . . arrrrgh, with a concise review of the new mapping features integrated into the Swivel platform? There, aren’t you happy you know that?

  • Sunday
  • May 13
  • 2007

Death is easy. GIS is hard.

Well, not necessarily. But it can seem that way. In any event, following up on our post of last week on zippy love, a modestly punched up collection of zip code-related links, we’ve added a few additional links to the LSNC GIS Mapping page:

  • GIS Dictionary, which derives from ESRI’s hard bound A to Z GIS published last year. Befuddled by the difference between a quantile and a natural break? We can’t promise you’ll understand it but at least you can get a legit answer here.
  • It bears repeating: Some of the most interesting things LSNC is currently doing with GIS are being documented over at the Race Equity Project. For example, last week Eric Schultheis (who has amiably been riding herd over the project since its inception last November) posted an item about TGR2SHP, a piece of freeware from the geography department at the University of Tennessee that enables you to convert TigerLine files into shape files. Plus, they offer other tools as well that facilitate extraction of select Census data. (Caveat: At the time of this posting, the UT geography department’s server appears to be down, so check back later as needed.)
  • Last week the folks over at LSNTAP conducted their first official training on use of the Legal Services GIS Mapping National Server Project. (LSNTAP’s prototype site is also hosted at the University of Tennessee, so may not be accessible this weekend for the same reasons described, above.) For those interested, you can download the training. (We wish them well. And for what it’s worth, we feel your pain.)
  • Monday
  • April 2
  • 2007

On designing good maps

One final note in the wake of the Denver GIS presentation: In response to a question I put to her at the presentation, fellow panelist Amy Glasmeier sent me a list of books she recommends on the “design” of good maps, including several by her colleague at Penn State, Cynthia Brewer. In no particular order they are:

Cynthia Brewer’s name may be familiar to some from her ColorBrewer tool for selecting good color schemes for maps. The ColorBrewer site includes substantial help content to learn more about basic map design elements, an explanation of the mappping and visualization guidelines she used for designing her schemes, and examples to illustrate each color scheme type.

And as if all this weren’t enough, there’s also Linda Pickle’s Usability Testing of Map Designs!

Make those maps happen, people!

  • Tuesday
  • March 27
  • 2007

Denver GIS post-mortem

As you would expect, Amy Glasmeier gave a killer presentation at the ABA Equal Justice Conference on what GIS is all about, and how and why legal services programs should grab hold of it as a basic accounting and advocacy tool. Among the examples she used, Amy displayed and explained a series of maps detailing demographic and income data relative to Food Stamp household eligibility in Pennsylvania. Really good stuff. An amusing personal note: Before the presentation, fellow panelist Klaus Sitte of Montana Legal Services Association and I were chatting and discovered we both owned a copy of Amy’s Atlas of Poverty in America. We both agreed it is a must-have. Within the legal services world, she’s a GIS rock star, that’s for sure. I only wish I had brought my copy of her book, to get her to sign it.

The maps Amy displayed were all created with CensusMapper, a still-free GIS software application that includes “pre-loaded quality assured/quality controlled data available for immediate analysis and a pre-defined set of mapping and statistical tools to process it. No data acquisition and validation, GIS technicians, or graphic artists are necessary to produce publication quality results.” You need to order CensusMapper from its site, but it’s free. If you buy her book, you’ll discover that it comes with a free copy of CensusMapper attached to the inside of the back cover. It’s definitely still a work in progress, and the interface needs a lot of attention, but it is well worth trying out and a singularly useful way to dip your toe into the world of GIS, with a very low learning curve.

So, what’s it like to follow a rock star? As I explained it to someone at the conference, “I was like a kid who knows a few good blues licks on the guitar, goes to open-mike night at a local bar, and discovers he’s gotta follow Eric Clapton.” Really.

My assignment on the panel was to highlight how and why LSNC has promoted GIS over the last few years. Judging from comments and questions I got, during and after the presentation, there is still considerable institutional resistance or misunderstanding in some quarters within the legal services community about the whole GIS thing. But clearly, the interest and enthusiasm is there among many others.

I’m not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations, in general, but I admit to using them like everyone else. Why? Because our increasingly attention-deficit-dependent culture demands it. In any event, for the curious, here are the slides I currently use for basic GIS orientation within LSNC, adapted for the EJC presentation, to explain the LSNC GIS Project. As alluded to in an earlier post, during the presentation I also stressed my concerns about how legal services programs track client race and ethnicity data, and how it risks diminishing the value of mapping that same data against Census data.

Think you know how the Census defines race and ethnicity? Think again.

  • Thursday
  • March 22
  • 2007

PolicyLink report on Nonprofit tech divide

Bridging the Innovation Divide: An Agenda for Disseminating Technology Innovations within the Nonprofit Sector has just been published by PolicyLink, the prominent national nonprofit research center focusing on economic and social equity issues. This 65-page report articulates and addresses the significant gaps that exist between the needs and benefits of new technologies in advancing the nonprofit sector and the shortage of actual innovation in adopting those technologies. The full report is available as a PDF download. (Full disclosure: I was one of the interviewees for the section on “Neighborhood Information Systems.”)

  • Thursday
  • March 22
  • 2007

EJC + GIS = Denver encounter

On Saturday I will be in Denver at the in-progress 2007 ABA Equal Justice Conference, on a panel discussion about “Using Demographics to Identify and Serve Vulnerable Populations.” Notably, the panel includes Amy Glasmeier, author of the extraordinary An Atlas of Poverty in America: One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960-2003, which itself is supported by a dedicated blog maintained by Professor Glasmeier.

In anticipation of whatever modest contribution I have to make to the discussion, I am reposting here for archive purposes two brief items published last year to which I am likely to make reference:

  • Tuesday
  • March 13
  • 2007

gCensus / Google Earth mashup

… and since we’re talking about GIS today, and as noted this week at our sister site The Race Equity Project, you can have some really quick and easy mapping fun with the beta mashup of gCensus. It’s a way spiffy, if rough-at-the-edges, and easy-to-use mashup of basic Census 2000 SF1 (summary file 1) data and Google Earth. Download and install the free version of Google Earth. Then start playing with gCensus. Just click the obvious and in seconds you have your map ready for viewing in Google Earth. Zoom, baby, zoom! Awesome fun!

  • Wednesday
  • February 28
  • 2007

Google Maps creation tools

For those into the the Google Maps API mashup mapping lifestyle thang, consider a gander at the recently updated Google Maps Creation Tools Mega-Post, an excellent, comprehensive collection of links to varied online Google map creation tools. Brought to you courtesy of Google Maps Mania, one of the better blogs for tracking developments in the world of the Google map. We’ve updated the LSNC GIS Mapping Resources page so you can find this particular Mega-Post, should you forget where it is.

  • Wednesday
  • February 14
  • 2007

Getting collaborative with DataPlace Groups

DataPlace, one of our favorite web-based GIS mapping and data analytical sites—with a national scope to boot—raised the bar today with the beta debut of DataPlace Groups. This is one very major, expansive collaborative feature-set upgrade to the DataPlace interface. You need to register (for free) to tap into it, but it offers the type of collaborative tools that are becoming more common with web-based applications. Managing and collaborating on a map or data project within DataPlace groups is not as simple and intuitive and user friendly as say, Basecamp, but then Basecamp does not even begin to attempt anything as complex as DataPlace does. So, there is more of a learning curve but you can now do a whole lot more with others on mapping and data projects. Very, very impressive stuff.

  • Friday
  • February 2
  • 2007

GIS for the people, people!

A tip o’ the hat to Jen Flory, Skadden fellow at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, for the heads up about Group Maps City Access to Healthy Foods, an NPR story on how GIS mapping has been used to dramatic effect by advocates in Philadelphia to show that “people in poor neighborhoods need more places to shop for healthy food.” One eye opener for us was the history lesson revealed in the story: “Mapping” is anything but a new idea for advocates. “In the late 1890s, the civil-rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois created a map of houses in a narrow strip of central Philadelphia. The map showed houses where African-Americans lived, highlighted and color-coded to indicate their class.”

  • Tuesday
  • January 30
  • 2007

Data is So Dope II: The REP connection

So many postings, so little time. So we’re going to punt today and offer a modest but worthwhile set of self-promoting cross-postings. (You get what you pay for, people.)

LSNC a few months back launched an innovative sister site called the Race Equity Project, previously noted here. (Everybody here calls it “The REP.”) So, now you’re asking, “Okay, but what’s that got to do with tech stuff, bunky?” Well, the answer is that Webdogs 2.0 most definitely has plans, yet unrealized to add content to the still empty Data : GIS : Analytics page. For starters, we will (hopefully) soon be posting some real-world examples of how GIS has been used by LSNC as both an advocacy and an administrative tool. And that work has synergy with the goals of the REP. As explained in its most recent newsletter, the REP is available internally at LSNC and externally to the larger legal services community to assist with identifying, analyzing and presenting race-based data. It is worth tracking what is happening at the Race Equity Project site, which is incrementally building a specialized “syllabus” about key data and demographic resources, and periodically posts items about GIS mapping and data sites that may not be on your radar. For example, last week REP impresario Eric Schultheis posted a great write-up about the Prisoners of the Census site, which inlcudes a heads-up link to FairData, one of the many community-based mapping projects that has helped build the GIS movement to a point of critical mass.

(For those interested, yes, there actually is a Data is So Dope I, posted pre-Webdogs at LSNC.net.)

  • Thursday
  • November 30
  • 2006

GIS map du jour, and then some

Those familiar with LSNC.net know that we regularly post links to interesting (if not necessarily related to poverty) examples of how GIS mapping is used to visualize data. Another recent example we ran across is the HIT Dashboard Map, which is likely of little interest for the specific data it maps (Health IT activity and initiatives) but of considerable curiosity because of how it maps that information. Apparently built with Adobe (née Macromedia) Flashmaps, it offers an interesting and entertaining example of how a highly interactive map, with data filtering, can be built or exemplified. Just click on or hover over stuff and you’ll see what we mean. Very cool stuff.

And since we’re on the topic of GIS mapping, generally, consider visiting (or revisiting, if you haven’t been there for a while) the really extraordinary DataPlace. The site is inherently essential because of its origins in supporting the development of “freely workable” public data in the areas of low-income economic and housing analysis. That’s been a long-time given. But DataPlace has dramatically improved its user-side flexibility and ease of use, no small task given the daunting scale of data it offers to manipulate and visualize for you. Most notably, they have finally launched in beta tools for uploading your own data for mapping and other data analytics. (To gain access to the upload feature, you have to use the free registration to create a user account.) DataPlace is a subset of KnowledgePlex, which has been offering monthly web demo overviews of what DataPlace can do for you, called Expert Chats. Highly recommended.

  • Wednesday
  • November 8
  • 2006

GIS Map of the Year

This here is a dup post of the same item posted concurrently at our mothership, but it is Webdogs apropos and Wow!—this is simply one totally frickin’ awesome example of using GIS mapping to visualize data: Check out this interactive wonder from the ever resourceful New York Times: Election 2006, mapping the results nationally and by state for House, Senate and Governor races.