Blog: Maps

Richard Florida posts this great map and a few others showing international calls made from New York. This one breaks down individual zones of NYC by how many calls go to which countries. I'm not sure why some squares are filled and others aren't, though.

From National Geographic via Strange Maps, here's a map of which metropolitan areas have more single men than women, or vice versa:

More data behind the map would be very helpful; for example, this map's key is based on the absolute number of single men versus women, but since New York and LA are so huge, having the most disparity in absolute terms doesn't mean that they're the hardest places to find mates. And as several commenters point out on Strange Maps, many of the single women could be elderly widows, for example.

From one commenter, here's a census map comparing relative gender percentages by county, but not specifically for singles:

Colorado and Seattle are in trouble on both maps.

Today Google Maps launched a really amazing feature, Google Street View, where you can see street-level images taken from a vehicle that drove all around various cities. Here's where I live. And here's one of San Francisco's most famous screetscapes.

Here are some more great demographic maps, including religous membership and language use by county. For a good overview, see the maps on leading religion and primary non-English language.

Also fascinating are the maps of average family size, median income, and percent of adults lacking a high school diploma.

A few years ago I saw a map someone had made of the Bay Area with each town color-coded by race - green for towns that were majority white, gray for majority black, red for Latino, and purple for Asian, with the darkness of each color representing how large the majority was. I've never been able to find that map again, but this site has created a Google Maps mashup that lets you see the percentage of each race by census tract across the whole country.

The Bay Area is pretty segregated - Cupertino, Fremont, and a few other South Bay towns are majority Asian, Oakland majority black, parts of San Jose majority Latino, and most other areas majority white. You can play with it here. But an even more stunning depiction of segregation are this map versus this one of Washington, DC. It's as if someone drew a line straight down the middle of the District and surrounding counties and said, white people on this side, black people on that side.

What's America's most segregated city? Atlanta? Chicago? Miami? Detroit?

I didn't work on Google Maps. I wish I did, though, because it's surpassed Google Web search as my favorite Web site of all.

And I'm not the only one, just looking at the number of clever remixes people have created, like this display of Craigslist housing ads on a Google Maps interface. Or, for a different kind of cleverness, "What mere mortals see from the ground when people GoogleMap a spot nearby."

Update: this one of the view from ground level when someone makes a trip route with Googlemaps, by the same author, is even better.

The way information is presented can have a huge impact on perception. Exhibit A: electoral maps. A lot of people on the left see those maps with an enormous sea of red and feel demoralized. They start thinking, hmm, all the libreals are in the northeast and west, we'll have to secede. It's the information presentation that leads to memes like Jesusland.

But, in fact, the truth is being greatly distorted. The Purple America map helps remind us that most states were very very close, but the best one is this map (by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan) with counties distorted by their population. Notice how small the solid red areas are. While a lot of land votes solid Republican, there are very, very few people there.

See how this image was generated and more like it here. This image could be reposted thanks to the wonderful existence of Creative Commons, whose licenses Mark uses on his map site and I use here.