Ambulance Response Times on Google Maps

The inaugural Data Journalism Awards were announced this week. Yesterday I looked at one of the six winners, Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk.

Today I want to mention, How Quickly Did Help Arrive?, which was given an honourable mention by the judges. This Google Maps visualisation, from The Detail, explores ambulance response times in different locations in Northern Ireland.

The map uses coloured map markers to show the ambulance response time in different postcode districts in Northern Ireland. The province has a target that says that at least 72.5% of life threatening incidents should be responded to within eight minute.

Using the map it is easy to find the 12 of the 80 postcode districts where only 10% or less of all life threatening incidents were responded to within the key target of eight minutes.

Italian Prisoner Deaths on Google Maps

Italian journalist Jacopo Ottaviani (twitter.com/jackottaviani) has been investigating the deaths of prisoners within the Italian justice system. You can read Jacopo's report in Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italian) or in the Guardian (English).

Using a Google Map Jacopo has plotted nearly a thousand prisoner deaths from 2002 until 2012. At different zoom levels you can view pie charts on the map showing the percentages of the causes of death in that region. The figures show that over half of the deaths in Italian prisons are the result of suicide.

In the Guardian Jacopo explains how he created the map. The "Data was scraped using ScraperWiki and refined with Google Refine; the resultant tables were merged using Google Fusion and finally visualised through Batchgeo."

Telling Stories with Google Maps

Meograph is an interesting new narrative tool for telling stories with the Google Earth browser plug-in and Google Maps.

 The application is currently in beta testing (you can apply for beta testing access). However, even if you can't yet create your own Meographs yet, you can browse the demo stories already created.

A good example is the Meograph created to explore the Trayvon Martin shooting. The demo uses the Google Earth plug-in to show the locations in the case and includes a narrated explanation of the story and embedded photographs and YouTube videos.

Meograph stories include playback controls to pause, rewind and fast forward the narrative, "More context" buttons to explore more details about any element of the narrative and options to view the locations with Google Maps rather than the default Google Earth view.

What Your Phone Company Knows About You

Cal Flyn, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph, has used Google Maps to map one year of her movements. Using Freedom of Information laws Cal obtained all the location data held about her by her mobile phone company.

Digital surveillance: what my phone records say about me, animates through the year's location data showing Cal's to and from work, visiting her parents in Scotland and everywhere else she visited.

The Daily Telegraph article is obviously inspired by German Green party politician, Malte Spit's Google Map, published in the German newspaper Zeit last year. Verräterisches Handy uses Google Maps to animate Spitz' movements over six months.

 The amount of data collected by Spit's and Flyn's phone companies is amazing (some would say frightening). Spit's location was logged 35,000 times in a six month period. Flyn's map shows her whereabouts for a whole year, with only two days missing (when on vacation and she had left her phone charger at home).

Danish Data Journalism Award

Google, The Guardian and the Danish newspaper Information have announced the winner of the Danish data journalism competition, Nyhedshacker 2012.

The winning project, Doctors for Sale was created by Anders Pedersen. Doctors for Sale is a Google Map, created with Fusion Tables, that shows all the Danish doctors who are sponsored by the medical industry. The information is designed to inform patients about which of their local doctors might be prescribing drugs based on their sponsorship rather than based on strict medical reasons or prescribing the cheapest drugs available.

Anders Pedersen's prize for winning the competition is €2,500 and a one month secondment with the Guardian newspaper in London working with the paper's Datablog team.

Hat-tip: microformats.dk

Mapping the Panic on the Streets of London

In the UK a government minister responded to a threat of strike action by the country's fuel haulage truck drivers by telling the population to stock up on gasoline. The result has led to huge queues at gas stations and led to many gas stations running out of gas.

So even without an actual strike the UK government appear to have spurred panic buying and the start of a fuel shortage. As ever The Guardian has been quick to map the rising panic. It has asked its readers if they have seen cars queuing at gas stations or if they have been stocking up on gas themselves.

Here is a Google Map of the responses so far.

CNN iReports on Google Maps

CNN iReport is a portal for individuals to tell their own news stories. iReport includes many tools to help contributors tell their stories and discuss the issues that interest them.

The CNN iReport Map is a Google Map showing the location of user contributed stories. As well as browsing the stories by location via the map the submitted stories can be searched by 'most viewed', 'most commented' and 'most shared'.

If you click on a story's marker on the map you can read a brief introduction and, if the story interests you, click through to read the complete submitted story.

An Edmonton Property Tax Assessment Map

The Edmonton Property Tax Assessment Map is a great example of using Google Fusions Tables with Google Maps.

The Edmonton Journal created the map to visualise Edmonton's 2012 property assessments. The map allows readers to compare the average assessment of single-family homes by neighbourhood in 2012 and 2011; as well as the percent change from 2010 to 2011, 2011 to 2012 and during the five years from 2007 to 2012.

The map include selectable layers, a dynamic legend (that updates automatically when different layers are selected) and even includes the Edmonton Journal masthead.

If you want to know how to create a dynamic legend with Fusion Tables and Google Maps then you should dive into the code in this Fusion Tables API Example Map.

The Google Map of the World's News

Hubii has to be the slickest and easiest to use news map that I have seen yet.

With Hubii users can zoom in on any location on Google Maps and find local newspapers. As users pan and zoom the map news stories from that location are automatically loaded into the map sidebar.

If a user clicks on one of the news map markers, that are placed on major cities around the world, they can view the newspapers available at that location. Users can then select to view the particular newspapers that they are interested in or even select which sections in a newspaper that they wish to view.

Registered users can create their own personalised 'Mapazine'. As they browse the map they can add individual newspapers to their own personalised news reader so that each time they log-in to Hubii they can instantly view their own personalised news stories.

The World's News on Google Maps

Newsonmap.in is a new Google Maps based application for finding the latest news for any location in the world.

By default the map loads the news based on the user's home country. You can zoom in on an area on the map to get more localised news. To load news for a particular location you can also click on the map or use the search function.

The news for the selected location is automatically loaded into the map sidebar. If you click on the sidebar news headline the full news story will open in a new browser window.

Polling Results with Google Maps

Danish TV and Radio company DR Forside are using Google Maps to present the results of a poll into gay weddings in churches.

The media company carried out a poll, asking priests if they were in favour or against gay couples being allowed to marry in church. The results of the poll have been overlaid on a Google Map so that readers can see where priests voted yes or no to the question.

The map is a great visualisation of the poll's results but it does need a key. I can work out that a green overlay on the map corresponds to a 'yes' answer and red is 'no' but what does yellow mean? Does it stand for undecided?.

The map reflects the answers to three questions:

1. Homosexual couples should have same marriage rights as hetro couples?
2. If asked, will you give your church blessing to a homosexual couple that have entered into a domestic partnership?
3. Do you think that the Danish church needs a wedding ritual for homosexual couples?

The results were then calculated based on an average of each priest and of all the priests in the 98 municipalities in Denmark.

RED indicates that the priests answered 'no'.
GREEN means they answered 'yes.
YELLOW means they have answered both 'yes' and 'no'.

Press Freedom on Google Maps

Great Name, the creators of the ever popular Newspaper Map have released a new map called Freedom of the Press 2011.

Newspaper Map uses Google Maps to help you find and translate newspapers around the world. The new Freedom of the Press map shows you the relative press freedom in each of those countries.

Each country is ranked on the map using data from Freedom House.

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Side-by-Side Street View Comparisons

I missed this impressive use of custom Street Views by the New York Times when it was published back in May. However it is so good that it is worth posting even this long after the event.

Panoramas of Joplin Before and After the Tornado uses Google Map Street Views of Joplin side by side with panoramas taken after the Joplin tornado hit.

A number of newspapers have created clever visualisations of the damage caused by natural disasters by using before and after satellite imagery. For example both ABC News and The NYT published comparisons of satellite imagery of Japan before and after this year's earthquake.



The New York Times however are the first newspaper to create a before and after visualisation using Street View. The paper took a number of 360 degree photos of areas of Joplin after the May tornado. They then used the Custom Street View functionality in the Google Maps API to create Street Views from their panoramas.

The custom panoramas have been placed side-by-side with the Google Maps Street Views from the same location. As you pan the Street View the custom panorama moves to show exactly the same view, to show the devastation caused by the earthquake.

Via: Google Maps for Journalists

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Browse the New York Times by Location

You can now browse the New York Times by location using the Longitude Google Map.



Geotagged news stories are displayed on the map with a Times 'T' logo. If you click on a map marker an information window opens with ten recent articles from the paper for that location.



Beneath the map you can view a list of locations from today's edition of the paper. Clicking on these links will also open the relevant information window on the map.



Via: Read Write Web



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Unrest in the Arab World on Google Maps

CNN has created a time-line and Google Map of the unrest sparked by the Arab Spring.



CNN's Unrest in the Arab World allows you to click on individual countries and read an overview of events since the unrest began earlier this year. The time-line presents a chronology of the events from the anti-government protests that started in December in Tunisia up until current events.





Mibazaar's Middle East Protest Tweets Map is a little more immediate. This map lets you read the latest Tweets posted from Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia.



You can select to view the latest Tweets from the individual countries and sit back and watch as the latest Twitter messages from that country are shown on a Google Map.



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The London Riots & Social Equality

In the UK I think it is now illegal to try and connect the recent rioting with social deprivation or economic inequality. The government and the mainstream media has decided that unless you blame bad parenting, social networking sites or a breakdown of moral order for the riots then you should be publicly castigated as a supporter and excuser of wanton criminality.



The Centre of Full Employment and Equity seem to be ignoring this new political orthodoxy by creating a Google Map overlaying the location of riot incidents on top of unemployment data.



The British Local Unemployment and the August 2011 Riots Map includes two layers: the local area unemployment rate range and riot incident data from the UK Guardian Open Data Blog.



The dark blue areas on the map show areas with high employment rates. At the risk of encouraging a visit from the UK thought police I have to say that the areas with high employment rates seem to have been largely unaffected by the recent rioting.



The Guardian themselves have used the riot incident data to create a Riots & Poverty Data Map.







The Guardian says that "The darker reds represent poorer places, the blues are the richer areas. What do you think? Is there a correlation between the two?" I'm going to say it - 'Yes, there is'.



Someone has also taken a KML from the London Riots - Verified Areas map and displayed it on MapTube Map with the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The IMD is a method of identifying deprived areas across the UK.







Overlaying the locations of the riots and looting on top of the IMD layer reveals that most of the trouble is occurring more in areas with high deprivation than in more affluent locations.



Curating Geodata from Social Media to Map the London Riots:

Whilst we are on the subject of the UK riots Directions Magazine has a good podcast discussion looking at the challenge of using social media as geodata and what journalists, geospatial professionals and the public can learn from these efforts.





OK, with that done we can now get back to blaming the parents and Twitter.



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The Rise and Fall of American Newspapers

For the last few years Paper Cuts has been documenting layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers with the help of Google Maps.



This year's map from Paper Cuts already shows over 2,500 layoffs at newspapers throughout the country. As newspaper readership and advertising revenues continue to dwindle I suspect Paper Cuts will become busier and busier mapping the loss of newspaper jobs and newspapers.





Whilst Paper Cuts seems to be mapping the decline of American newspapers The Growth of U.S. Newspapers has created a great map visualisation that documents the growth of newspapers in the U.S. over three centuries.



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The visualisation from Stanford University plots the growth of newspapers since the publication of 'Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick' in Boston in 1690. It is possible to filter the data shown on the map by date, language of publication and by frequency of publication.

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Local Bay News on Google Maps

The California Newspapers Partnership has released an iPad app that uses Google Maps to present local news for the Bay Area in California. The app presents coupons, events, restaurant and other business listings, and feature stories, photos and video on a Google Map of the Bay Area.

The application includes three main modes. 'On tap' presents the day's local news and local deals. 'Explore' uses Google Maps to present local events. The third mode, 'Find,' allows users to search the application for news, deals and other features.

The app is currently free but there are plans to charge a monthly subscription fee in the future.

TapIn (iTunes link)

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An Asian in New York

The latest U.S. census has revealed that for the first time the number of Asians in New York has topped one million. This means that now nearly 1 in 8 New Yorkers are Asian.

This Google Map from the New York Times shows the distribution of the Asian population in New York by country of origin. You can refine the data shown on the map by country and you can also view the New York Times' summary of a number of districts via the links in the sidebar.

Asians in New York City

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Deaths in Afghanistan by U.S. State

Afghanistan Casualties and Deaths by U.S. State

The Guardian has used Fusion Tables to create a map to show the number of casualties and deaths suffered by each U.S. state in the ten years of the war in Afghanistan.

The map lets you click on the map to view the details of deaths and casualties for the selected state. It is also possible to view a heat map for a number of different data sets.

The drop-down menu at the top of the map allows you to select the data for the number of soldiers killed in action, killed not in action, wounded in action and deaths as a percentage of state population.

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