Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Indiemapper Mapping Tool

Here's a useful new online tool to play with: Indiemapper. It's a new low-cost ($30 per month) online mapping tool that aims to simplify the data mapping process significantly.

Nathan Yau of the excellent Flowing Data blog has written a good review accessible here. Yau writes:
While there are a lot of free options available, none come to mind that work as well as indiemapper, as far as fully customizable maps go. So it's an in between the no-cost and high-cost GIS tools. Info designers who want to include maps in their graphics will probably find indiemapper especially useful. CSV import will also be a huge plus if they can work that in.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Traffic Visualizations

A fun post from the Flowing Data blog:
Traffic visualizations, mostly in the form of geographic maps, have been popular lately. Governments and organizations have been releasing lots of GPS data, and as a result, we get to see some impressive animations and explore some slick interactives.

We don't often get to see how cars, trains, subways, airplanes, etc move in physical space, because, well, we're usually in them, so it's always interesting to see the big picture. The activity feels very organic as traffic peaks during rush hours and slows down during the night, taxis provide service to and from the airport, and air traffic continues into the late hours. The maps pulsate with energy.

The images are quite compelling. One example below; more here.


Thursday, April 15, 2010

Video Tutoral: Working with Census Data in GIS

Mason Libaries Government Document unit has recently developed a video tutorial on how to work with Census Data and ArcGIS. A basic, five part of this tutorial contains
1. Acquiring Data
2. Working in Excel
3. Converting With Access
4. Mapping with ArcGIS
5. Presenting Data

See the website at
**http://library.gmu.edu/education/students/tutorials.html

**http://infoguides.gmu.edu/content.php?pid=11647&sid=736431


Any comments and suggestions are welcome to improve it better. I also hope you can integrate this into your classroom environment.