Reading
- Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012.
Blog Post
- Post to blog by 8am on Wednesday 10/24 a link to an example of a powerful graphical representation of data. Say what data is being represented, and why you think it’s done in a powerful way.
Since i have a lot of family that does not live in new york, every time someone comes over to visit my family and i give them a crash course of the buildings (with the exception of the wall st bull) in the city. So these are the must see buildings around the city.
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=206612609781441001855.0004ccac4acbff98fffee&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=40.72947,-73.994452&spn=0.047928,0.038135&t=m&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
Maps
- Review what you’ve produced
- Theorize additional possibilities
Reading
- Edward Tufte, “PowerPoint is Evil,” Wired, September 2003.
- What is Tufte’s argument?
- The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, by Peter Norvig
- Examples of well-presented data:
Within this map shows the data for the leading Countries in respect to the amount of television sets that their people own. A tool such as this is invaluable to what our group, Instigators, needs to display the data we will utilize to tell the impact of the debates on swing state voters.
Being able to visualize exactly the impact of the debates will add depth to the information, and in return give the audience a more nuanced expression of what we are presenting. This tool will play an extremely vital role in our process as we now have the ability to present multi-dimensional data to tell our story.
This was quite an interesting experience for me. Frankly, I was unaware that I was able to create my own personal maps on Google Maps and I had quite a lot of fun learning in the ins and outs of it. Personally, even though the professors showed us a couple of tutorials on how to create our own maps, I did not bother to look at them. I have always been like this, especially when I start using something new or start a new game, I never bother to look at the instructions or the tutorials — I find it a lot more satisfying when I take the time to go through everything, learn all the different functions that were available to me through trial and error. I think that I did just fine considering.
The reason why I decided to do poll sites in Kings County, was to get myself to try to look at a lot of data and try to combine it together. For some reason, the poll location list given by NYC listed almost all of their locations several times, and thus I had to keep track of which locations I had already inputed into my map, and which were new. This would be a valuable skill for me when I am working on my group project, as it ties in with data mining, in the sense that there will be a lot of material out there for my group to research, and we have to keep track of what information we already have, what information is new, and what information will ultimately be useful for our final work.
I also learned that being a historian, or someone who inputs data constantly, has quite a tedious job. There are 20 assembly districts in the Kings County, but I decided not to input them all for this assignment (the whole point of the assignment was to try a new tool, right?). In my map, I inputted the voting polls for the 41st, 42nd, 47th Assembly District and then the 48th Assembly District as I am registered to vote within that district.
View &
This map shows the presidential candidates and their running mates schedules for today 10/22/2012. The map tool could be a very optimal tool in our group project, particularly because it helps to give people a visual take on a topic that might otherwise be a bit boring without some kind of visual aid. Since our topic is based on how the debates effects the winner of the presidential election, having a map that shows the changes in different states and county’s might be a good aid for our project.
Overall I find Google’s my map tool very useful for other projects that I might want to incorporate it into. I recall playing with Google my map about two or three years ago but now that I understand how you can imbed it in your own writings and blog post it makes much more sense to me.
First off, mapping this train route is a very frustrating process. More time consuming than I imagine.
From the beginning I had this mindset that this assignment is going to be a cake walk. I thought I will just Google csv files and imported to Google fusion table and click visualize. Well, that did work out like what I expected because not csv has locations where the fusion table can plotted on the map. That plan failed. So I decide to use http://research.google.com/tables to find one table and click visualizes and writes about it. But my historical morale decide this was too easy and that was not what the professors intended us to learn from it. So I ponder and came to the idea, that lets make a map about my commute to Baruch College. How hard could it be? Right………………?
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=200302427878000694292.0004cc89a522decb2d381&ie=UTF8&ll=40.71548,-73.89885&spn=0.084069,0.175567&t=m&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
Boy I was WRONG! The plotting was easy but drawing out the exactly route was a pain in a place sun don’t shine. I could honestly say it took me a good 30 minute to an hour trying to draw out the route, while plotting the location only took 5 minute.
While in the process of making this map, it got me to reflect about the historical thinking that can be applied to my journey to Baruch. What was the reason I taking this route? What are other alternates? What is the thought process behind my decision? How did my past route decision affect today? How might my map become a larger argument? How does it involve Spatial history? Does my map tell a story? “how the spatialization of data deepens your understanding of the data itself?”
I took this route because it’s the fastest route. I have taken other route before; its 30 minute slower. Find the fastest route to Baruch, and this route is the fastest.
The hardest question to me is how my map might become a larger argument and how does it involve spatial history? My answer is I’m not sure. My guess is that, my map could be use, if there ever a historical projects done about the commute to Baruch College. It involves Spatial history because it tell a unique individual story about my journey to Baruch College. The only answer I could come up with for the last questions is that my commute is 11.08 miles to Baruch, give or talk few feet.
The end result was not I exactly expected but it was pretty close.
- Source: My Brain , Google Map
[entry-title]
I really struggled to get any sort of map off the ground using Google Fusion Maps. It literally took me the entire weekend just to figure out how to use the right data and how to embed it into the blog and I still don’t think I’m doing this right!!!
I really would LOVE to be able to do this, and maybe if there was a way for my group to find data on Voting Ages in the United States we could use this program, but the fact of the matter is the Fusion Maps is really picky with its data – by that I mean, it really doesn’t work unless you have super accurate data that’s presented in a certain way.
The map shows the life expectancy for countries in Africa between 3 – 100. Red being the youngest deaths and blue being the oldest.
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=216987665134513771442.0004cc9dbd62678cbb8e8&ie=UTF8&ll=12.991044,-33.9917&spn=80.100339,137.856445&t=h&iwloc=0004cc9ddede31f93b7fe&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
Mapping data will prove essential in visualizing certain raw data we come across. Laying things out visually can prove to give us another perspective on the information. In this example, I’ve highlighted the United States epidemic when it come to incarnation. We are by far leading all of the major powers in the world with the number of people we are imprisoning each year. Our crime rates have fluctuated over the years, but our imprisonment rate has steadily increased. When this data is expressed on a global map, we can comparatively look at the United States and other countries around the world.
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