nickwilgruber

Mapping watersheds in Allegheny County

2016-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

My goals with this map were to successfully apply that hover-over-a-watershed-and-the-polygon-lights-up technique that you can see in the live map and to create a watershed map that was more interactive than I typically see. I also ended up learning about how water flows through the city. Cool.

Watersheds

Veiw the live version of the map | Check out the code

The goals were visual. Given that, the hue (darkness/lightness) of the small watersheds is basically meaningless. The shading helps differentiate between neighboring polygons, but it is based on the size of the watershed (which is redundant and cartographic bad practice). Instead, I should have had hue based on something that adds information density to the map (e.g. a water quality metric). I didn’t do that because I’m trying to keep my projects small, focused, and complete-able for now. The watershed names and shapes are correct.

WUGC tweets part 2

2016-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by Andrew Hill’s post on alternative methods using Torque maps, I wanted to play around with other ways to display the Twitter data I posted about last week. Again, I’m using tweets with the hashtag WUGC2016 pulled over a 30 day period.

Bubbles

This is the more striking map of the two. As people tweet in a given location, the bubbles expand. The visualization, I think, makes it a little easier to see Twitter activity in areas with less tweets. On the other end of that, I love how chaotic the UK gets as the bubbles expand. It’s visually quite fun.

Static tweets

While not as stunning (or as animated), this map makes the range location of tweets clear. There’s hundreds a tweets around London, but South Africa and the Philippines also have a strong twitter presence.

Alright. Enough Twitter maps for now.

Animated mapping with WUGC tweets

2016-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

This past week, the World Ultimate and Guts Championships (WUGC) were held in London. The USA swept all divisions, Team Canada’s Danielle Fortin executed an impressive greatest, and people around the globe tweeted about the championships. I had been thinking about playing with twitter data for some time – particularly with respect to ultimate and WUGC seemed like the perfect oppurtunity. WUGC is an international event and it lends itself well to showing ultimate’s influence around the world, and with the hashtag #WUGC2016 prominently displayed on the WUGC website and plenty of tweets using it, I was hopeful I could make something cool.

The Map

CartoDB makes this kind of map easy to build. I pulled tweets with #WUGC2016 over a 30 day period, styled the map with CSS, and used torque.js to animate the tweets by timestamp.

I really enjoy watching this animation. It starts with a slow build-up and scattered tweets all over the globe. Then London lights up with a pulse of tweets during each day of competition. My favorite part is watching teams get support from their home countries during play. Check out Colombia, India, South Africa, the Philippines, and UAE – all have pulses of tweets from fans back home.

Allow me to get nerdy for a minute…

While the map is cool to look at, don’t go trying to derive any strong scientific conclusions from it. There are a few things to note here: This map only uses tweets that are geolocated (i.e. Tweets that have location data enabled). Geolocated tweets make up about 5% of all tweets – so this is a small (and not necessarily representative) sample. CartoDB uses what they call “geo-enrichment” to increase those Twitter search results up to 15% to 20%. Much of that additional 10% - 15% seems to come from tweets that have country-specific location data – but no finer geographic detail. In those cases, CartoDB uses a fixed point near the geographic center of that country to plot the tweet location. As a result, there are tweets popping up in places you might not expect. Go back and watch the animation again. A constant stream of tweets from northern Kansas? The Northwest Territories in Canada? The middle of the Sibuyan Sea in the Philippines? Central Australia? Doubtful. With all that in mind, we can draw broad conclusions about when and how often people in specific countries are tweeting, but beyond that – approach with caution.

More maps are coming soon. Until then, enjoy the eye candy.

Hello world

2016-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Hello world. I’m not sure what form(s) this website will take, but I am excited about all the learning that’s sure to come along with it taking shape. Stay tuned. <3