neighborhood USA heat maps

26 October 2006

a set of heat maps of the US displaying several data datasets (e.g. politics, air quality, home price, crime rate, unemployment, race) on a similar color scale, based on the Google Maps interface.

[link: neighboroo.com]

aesthetic & locative . comments (2)

recent entries

air pollution helium balloon brand-based collaborative tag clouds tkaap video tracking interface BMW kinetic sculpture flokoon visual search pulsating emotion organism cinema redux film mosaics laser-cut sound analysis sculptures caffeine usage arcs zoomii visual amazon store mapping scientific citations collective prediction network all the water in the world reflect conversation table

extra

comments

neat stuff. just checked out the maps. they actually show a bunch of different things.

peter . 26 October 2006

Unfortunately the poor choice of colors make nearly all of the maps useless. For example, some weird color gradients are chosen where the density of the colors is highest for _both_ the lowest and highest values being displayed, thus you cannot visually discern patterns of, say, concentrations of wealth or poverty, it is all mixed up. Generally speaking, mixing colors and density of color in a gradient makes it impossible to visually compare anything. Add in the lack of decent map control and you get something that looks pretty from afar but is not a very good tool. Give me control over the color, some filtering, let me see a larger map, let me hide roads and state names and let me zoom out to see all info at once and you might have something. This aint rocket science, folks, how long ago did Tufte cover this stuff?

fran . 1 November 2006

shop