Ben Welsh palewire

Locating the story: The latest in mapping

A collection of links for a NICAR 2012 presentation. It will suggest broad themes for the past year, and try to support them with examples from work in the field. This is a work in progress. Feel free to crap on it, or add your own ideas.

Escape from Google Maps

Google changed the rules of the game. There are now usage limits. Read about them here
TileMill, custom tiles, need examples
Links to ranty blog posts from Nestoria guy and others
One replacement is simple line maps drawn using HTML5 technologies like SVG, Canvas and VML. You saw this example a lot in election maps during the GOP primaries, like NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, LAT

	def roundint2precision(value, count):
	"""
	Accepts an integer and rounds it to the nearest number
	at the specified precision, measured in "significant digits."

	Example usage:

	>> roundint2precision(1211111, 2)
	1200000
	>> roundint2precision(1211111, 3)

	def strip_dict(d):
	"""
	Strip all leading and trailing whitespace in dictionary keys and values.
	"""
	return dict((k.strip(), v.strip()) for k, v in d.items())

	import csv
	from googlegeocoder import GoogleGeocoder

	geocoder = GoogleGeocoder()
	data = list(csv.DictReader(open('/home/ben/Downloads/latest.csv', 'r')))
	outfile = open("out.csv", "w")
	s = "%s, %s"

	for row in data:
	a = s % (row['Address'], row['Zip'])

	"""
	Before you can use this, install the @LATdatadesk DocumentCloud wrapper for Python. Like so:

	$ sudo pip install python-documentcloud
	"""
	import csv
	from documentcloud import DocumentCloud

	path = '/home/ben/Desktop/docs.csv'
	data = csv.DictReader(open(path, 'r'))

	from fabric.api import *
	from openstack.compute import Compute

	def bootstrap():
	install_chef()
	update_chef()

	def install_chef():
	"""
	Install Chef on your server

	In my Django error messages...

	File "/apps/projects/lib/django/db/models/sql/query.py", line 2347, in execute_sql
	cursor.execute(sql, params)

	OperationalError: could not write block 341 of temporary file: No space left on device
	HINT: Perhaps out of disk space?

	...

	LOGGING = {
	'version': 1,
	'disable_existing_loggers': False,
	'handlers': {
	'mail_admins': {
	'level': 'ERROR',
	'class': 'django.utils.log.AdminEmailHandler'
	},
	'null': {
	'level':'DEBUG',

	File "/home/ben/Code/.../lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 984, in getreader
	return lookup(encoding).streamreader
	LookupError: unknown encoding: r