september 2005 archives

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Election results: blue and red are the new black

Making my way through Rostock this morning to attend the Kartographentag 2005 organised by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie, there are still many election posters lining the streets. As Der Spiegel puts it: last Sunday, Germany lost its own election. No need to talk politics here, as there are enough maps of the election results to talk about! The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant only gives us a map of the 2002 elections. So let's look at what the neighbours are doing!

Browsing around the Der Spiegel website a bit longer, have a look at the excellent Flash animation. The first map shows you for every Wahlkreis whether the SPD or the CDU/CSU got the majority vote and whether they were able to keep the Wahlkreis from the previous parliamentary elections in 2002. Instead of an historical East-West divide, the map actually shows that the northern part voted for the SPD and the southern part for the CDU/CSU. Clicking on the party names on the right-hand side of the map, you get the choropleth maps showing the percentage of votes for that party for every Wahlkreis. In the Wahlkreis Aurich , Emden in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), the SPD received 55.9% of the votes. In the Wahlkreis Rottal-Inn in Bayern (Bavaria) the CDU/CSU received 60.4% of the votes. However, looking at the map for the newly-formed Linkspartei you can actually see a distinct East-West divide. Nevertheless, Der Spiegel remarks that the Left is moving West.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung comes with a similar interactive Flash map. It takes ages for all the areas to be filled and not much effort went into the graphic design as becomes apparant from the mouseover-effect. Once the areas are all filled, you can quickly change from one party to an another. Instead of the Bundesland by Bundesland navigation on the Der Spiegel website, users can freely pan and zoom. This is very useful as it is difficult to see some of the smaller areas. The legend shows more classes for the choropleth maps, but it's hard to distinguish for the colours green (die Grünen) and yellow (FDP).

Die Welt uses static maps and server-side logic to create an interactive experience. The overview map shows the winner in each Bundesland. Not a very attractive picture to make you go further. To zoom in to Bundesland and see the results for each Wahlkreis, you select the name of a Bundesland from the dropdown list. Clicking on the Wahlkreis, you get a table with the percentage of votes for each party. They still got a long way to go.

A few times I came across isotype.com that produced some of the graphics of the election results, but not the maps. Apparently, they do make some maps, though. There's even one showing the 2002 election results.  permanent link for this entry

Friday, September 02, 2005

Hotmaps

We don't blink an eye upon seeing online maps showing the percentage of one-person households or the percentage of the population who are single, married, separated, divorced or widowed at the national level. Being able to search for a person of the opposite sex who fancies a date by postcode is quite another thing! Of course, there's nothing new in being able to search for other members on an online dating site based on geography, but this is usually restricted to larger geographic areas, e.g. by state, by county, or province. On the Hotmaps website, a mash-up of Google Maps and HOTorNOT, you can now search for hot people by zip code.

This opens up many new options for the dating game. You just match the zip code to the marketing profile for that area and you get an interesting insight into your potential date. Is he likely to be a home owner, or what will be her probable annual income? What's the crime rate in the area, or actually, where were the crime scenes in that zip code area? Remember the well-intentioned dating tips that help steer you clear from possible trouble in paradise? Well, you can even find out in advance whether he happens to be a sex offender, just by the zip code.

Many of these sources have been available online for some time. It's only now that you can actually pinpoint the information on a map, that questions are being raised regarding security and privacy. Once something's on a map, it must be true. Here's an opportunity for cartographers to make people aware of map ethics. We're in a world J.B. Harley could only have nightmares about and Mark Monmonier has only just started to grasp.  permanent link for this entry