Dotspotting: The great map data equalizer
Reminds me of a really interesting chapter about state practices of standardization and legibility in Scott’s Seeing Like a State last week - I think you’d like it. Can send pdf…
The problem
Diverse city agencies and planners continue to geographically define their areas of authority using radically different, methodologies, from sophisticated digital technology to stickers and paper. These differences create a significant “black box” effect in some cities, where data about a place is centralized into the hands of a few. The folks over at STAMEN describe the problem as follows:
It’s great that San Francisco and New York are releasing structured XML data, but Oakland is still uploading Excel spreadsheets (it’s actually awesome that they do), and the Tenderloin police lieutenants are printing out paper maps and hand-placing colored stickers on them. At some point, if this really is the way things are going, we’re going to need to meet the needs of actual functioning city agencies—and while APIs are great and necessary, for now that means Excel spreadsheets and Word docs. It also means being able to easily read in data that people have uploaded to google maps, interface with SMS systems like those that Ushahidi are pioneering. And it means being able to export to things like PowerPoint and Keynote, scary as that may seem.
(via STAMEN)Through a neat bit of coding, the folks at STAMEN SF have produced a system for..systematizing otherwise disparate and non-represented map data. It’s called Dotspotting. I don’t fully get it yet, but it’s awesome.
