chad day, election mapping

Quick Election MappingChad DayArkansas Democrat-Gazette

What we’re doing

This seminar walks you through how to make interactive election maps for your website on the fly with no money, no time and no hassle.

DISCLAIMER

This is a basic class.

If Raphael is just a ninja turtle, python(s) bite and JSON is that annoying guy from 11th grade English, you're in the right place. If not, (and you get my bad joke) this is probably not the class for you.

Why map?

The American political process is entirely based on geography.

Elected offices, taxes, bond issues — these all correspond to where people live, or for us, where readers live.

The payoff

Readers not only want to know who won and lost but why.

Good interactive maps help them (and you as reporters) answer that question.

http://www.google.fr/elections/ed/fr/results?hl=en

Not just elections

Summer Robberies

The tools you’ll need

1. Google Drive account2. Excel or GoogleDocs3. An Internet browser4. BBEdit/TextEdit5. Windows users will need Winzip, 7zip or some similar compression program.

What you don’t need

— Arcview or comparable GIS software— Any coding knowledge— A web developer

Source materials

1. Shapefile(s) of the area

2. Election results in spreadsheet form

What is a shapefile?

A shapefile is actually a grouping of files that contain geospatial information in database form.

Computers read this info to draw polygons, or in our case, maps.

Shapefile

Shapefile sources

— Tigerfiles, U.S. Census Bureau— State GIS website — Secretary of State’s office— Election commission— City/County government— Police Departments

Election results

Election results sources

— Secretary of State’s office— Election commission— City/County Clerk— AP

Demo

Open folder on your flash drives

Further learning

Github

Google— If you want to do it, there’s a tutorial out

there.

Further learning

USA Todayhttps://www.mapbox.com/blog/election-mapping-usatoday/Montreal Gazette; quick updatinghttp://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2013/09/10/updating-a-fusion-table-map-from-a-google-spreadsheet/

Further learning

http://blog.chrislkeller.com/

Questions?

Contact info

Chad DayArkansas Democrat-Gazettecday@arkansasonline.com@ChadSDay

What we’ll be makingtest.ardemgaz.com/admin/http://test.ardemgaz.com/testelection/