Compare your State’s Economy Against the Rest of the World

The US economy is so big, that the economies of all 50 states are comparable in size to those of entire countries. To illustrate this, howmuch.net used national GDP data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and state data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to put together a map that displays a country of comparable size (in terms of GDP) for each US state. All of the countries shown have 2014 GDPs that are roughly equivalent (+/- 10%) to the GDP of the state on which it is shown.

See the methodology and more info at HowMuch.net

Every Country's Highest Valued Export

Which export makes your country the most money? Today's map comes from Simran Khosla at Global Post, who used data from the CIA Factbook to label each country by its highest valued export.

See the maps atMental Floss.

Mapping Migration in the United States

The charts show striking patterns for many states: You can trace the rise of migrant and immigrant populations all along the Southwest, particularly in Texas and Arizona; the influx of New Yorkers and other Northeasterners into Florida starting in the 1970s; and the growth in the Southern share of the Illinois population during the Great Migration.

In 1900, 95 percent of the people living in the Carolinas were born there, with similarly high numbers all through the Southeast. More than a hundred years later, those percentages are nearly cut in half.

More from the New York Times.

25th Anniversary of Technology That Propelled GIS, Digital and Online Mapping into 21st Century

U.S. Geological Survey Adds TIGER Roads as Basis for National Map

The convenience of getting directions today on smartphones and tablets can trace its roots to the digital geographic database created 25 years ago by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) database — the first nationwide digital map of roads, boundaries and water — was initially created for the 1990 Census to modernize the once-a-decade head count. However, its impact has extended well beyond its initial purpose by offering common map data in electronic form that powers today’s geographic information system industry.

“TIGER is just one example of how innovation in the government has spurred innovation and positive economic results in the private sector,”

Interactive Map of World Population by Point, Latitude, and Longitude

André Christoffer Andersen created this nifty interactive map that estimates world population at any coordinate. Andersen was inspired by Bill Rankin's data visualizations. According this this map, the most populous coordinate is in the Punjab region.

More from BoingBoing.

Watch 1000 Years of European Borders Change In 3 Minutes

The whole world is watching the crisis in Crimea, and Russia faces off with the USA and European superpowers. The dispute centers around which country the territory should belong to, and it may seem shocking in today’s modern era, but the borders of Europe have never been solid. In
this time-lapse video, you can see how 1000 years of European history plays havoc on the stability of the border we take for granted today.

U.S. Cluster Mapping Project

The U.S. Cluster Mapping Project is a national initiative that provides open data about regional clusters and economies to support U.S. business, innovation and policy.

The project is led by Professor Michael Porter through Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration.

"This tool reinforces the federal government's commitment to promote America's clusters and provide businesses and organizations with the data and strategies they need to capitalize on their region's assets," said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

Please note that this is the Beta version of a website that is still being refined and developed.

The Most Commonly Spoken Language in Each State Besides English and Spanish

From Mental Floss:
Today's map comes from Ben Blatt of Slate, who used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. He created several other language maps, too, including each state's top Native American, Scandinavian, and African language.

2010-2011 Migration Data and 2010 Controlled Foreign Corporations

The trends data page for the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics now includes data from the latest IRS release, HERE.

Within the section on IRS migration flows, there are two sub sections that you can expand by clicking. One concentrates on moves between NY counties (empty for NY state as a whole), the other is an attempt to create “rates” that are comparable over time and between counties.

This shows some maps that can be made using this data.

Public Mapping Project, for the drawing of electoral districts

The drawing of electoral districts is among the least transparent processes in democratic governance. All too often, redistricting authorities maintain their power by obstructing public participation. The resulting districts embody the goals of politicians to the detriment of the representational interests of communities and the public at large.

Members of the Public Mapping Project seek to change this power balance by making it possible for the public to draw the boundaries of their communities and to generate redistricting plans for their state and localities -- through their web-browsers. The Public Mapping Project is developing District Builder, an open source software redistricting application designed to give the public transparent, accessible, and easy-to-use on-line mapping tools.

This technological innovation will enable greater public participation where redistricting authorities solicit public input. Where redistricting authorities are not responsive to the representational needs of the public, plans drawn by the public may be used as a yardstick by which to compare a redistricting authority’s plan against. And where the courts must step in when the regular redistricting process breaks down, judges will have a greater menu of options to consider.

Democrats are from cities, Republicans are from exurbs

The first reaction many people may have when looking at a standard red/blue map of county-level election results is often "Holy crap, look at all that red!" While that huge red bulls-eye in the nation's middle is easily explained away—trees and tumbleweeds don't vote; only people do—when it's presented without disclaimers, it can help reinforce the perception that this is a "center-right nation." One of the best ways around that is with a cartogram (a map that distorts boundaries to account for another variable, like population) ... but how do we express that in a way that still looks like the United States, and not a piece of purple roadkill?

Princeton's Robert Vanderbei put together a fantastic 3-d map in 2012... that visualizes the country with blue skyscrapers towering over pink plains, reflecting the heavy concentration of votes in urban areas. However, I wanted to try going in a different direction, with a flat map, but one where the color varies by intensity according to the change in the number of votes over the years.

More from Daily Kos.

Map: Local Government Employees in New York State

A look at census data relating to employment patterns in New York State constructed by Andy Arthur.

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

If you’re a visual learner like myself, then you know maps, charts and info graphics can really help bring data and information to life. Maps can make a point resonate with readers and this collection aims to do just that.
Hopefully some of these maps will surprise you and you’ll learn something new. A few are important to know, some interpret and display data in a beautiful or creative way, and a few may even make you chuckle or shake your head.

See more at A Sheep No More.

A Makeover for Maps

Like many designers, Eric Rodenbeck has had a long relationship with bar graphs and pie charts. He just thinks they are a little old school for today’s data-filled world.

Mr. Rodenbeck has experimented with animation, three-dimensional maps that show the height of buildings by color changes and a representation of how photos spread on Facebook that looks like ice crystals forming on a car window. He’s even tried to characterize in a graphic how people were communicating in back channels at business conferences, with the biggest talkers at the center of a series of circles.

He is, in short, trying to rethink how data is presented.

More from the New York Times.

MAPS: What Your State Is Good At, And What It's Lame At

From Upworthy:

Just when you thought you knew everything about a red state or a blue state, these cool maps show that each state is No. 1 in some kind of environmental or public health initiative.

Histomaps of 4,000 years of human civilization and 10,000 years of evolution

From BoingBoing:
John B. Sparks' 1931 Histomap charted 4,000 years of human civilization with beautiful, reductive clarity. Here's John Brownlee, at Fast Company: "From a modern perspective, Sparks’ Histomap will raise a few eyebrows. For one, it subscribes to an outdated (but, at the time, quite in vogue) idea about how different cultures throughout history could be grouped into various 'peoples.' The chart also underestimates or omits certain cultures that historians at the time didn’t truly appreciate the importance of... It seems hard to find in print form at a reasonable price. I've embedded an enormous 2MB image."

Also from BoingBoing:
Sparks also made a version charting the evolutionary tree. "Embedded below is a great big 5MB JPG of the evolutionary map, spotted by Slate's Rebecca Onion at Samphan Sittiwantana's Pinterest page."

The literal meanings of places in the U.S., mapped

From Slate:

It’s easy to think of words such as California or Texas or New York as just the places on the map, but those words actually meant something, once, and those meanings offer a little glimpse into history. The map, designed by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, labels states, cities, and landmarks with the literal meanings of their official names.

Most of the meanings are bland descriptions of the terrain or climate of the places they describe. Michigan, for example, is the "Land of the Big Lakes" (duh), and Mississippi is the "Land of the Great River." Others carry baffling specificity, like Alabama’s "Land of the Thicket Clearers" or Missouri’s "Land of the People with Dugout Canoes." Some are poetic, like Mexico’s "Navel of the Moon" and Houston’s "Heart’s Farm." Others are more worldly: Cuba is the "Place to Find Gold," and Chicago apparently means "Stink Onions."

Welcome to NYC Open Data

This catalog supplies hundreds of sets of public data produced by New York City agencies and other City organizations. The data sets are now available as APIs and in a variety of machine-readable formats, making it easier than ever to consume City data and better serve New York City’s residents, visitors, developer community and all!

What 100 years of voting looks like

From Salon.com:

The story of American politics over the last few generations is one of ever increasing partisan polarization. Barack Obama was able to pick off a few Republican states in 2008, but ideology and party identity have largely synced up, draining the electoral map of much of its fluidity. When it comes to presidential politics, there are a lot of red states, a lot of blue states, and only a few true swing states...

To fully appreciate the journey that produced today’s polarized electoral map and the trends that will shape the future, Salon’s art director, Benjamin Wheelock, pored over a century’s worth of presidential, congressional and gubernatorial election results from every state, assigning each a shade of blue or red for each election year. Watch as the map travels backward from the divide we know today...

Newly developed 2010 PUMA reference files for NYS

The Program on Applied Demographics has just completed mapping the recently released 2010 PUMA reference files for New York. These are available for viewing and/or downloading via the http://pad.human.cornell.edu/maps2010/maps/NYS_PUMAs.pdf PAD website. The entire set are in PDF format. As an aid to those of you that might want to make comparisons to their work on 2000 PUMAs, reference maps showing the relationship between the delineations for 2000 and for 2010 are also provided. Recall that in the process of building the 2010 PUMA boundaries, the NY SDC strove to get sets of PUMAs to coincide with the ten economic development regions developed by the NY DED in collaboration with NY DOL. Accordingly the PAD maps reflect this. That is, all the 2010 PUMAS in the Capital region are presented on one map. All those contained in the Central region are in another map and so forth. Note #1: these are boundary maps only; the PUMS data corresponding to these have not been released yet. Note #2: these are packaged into a large PDF file (approximately 18 Mbyes) so be patient for the download. As always, let PAD know of problems with the file or individual maps.