Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Finding a cheap library of maps with consistent style isn't always easy, especially if those maps have to work on the Web, in print and/or PowerPoint presentations. Today Directions Magazine points us to such sets (usually priced for less than $50) that meets those criteria. See “Trumpet Marketing Group, LLC Announces Collection of Royalty-Free United States Presentation Maps“
Says the company:
PresentationMall.com US State Maps are provided in a number of formats, including Adobe� Illustrator(.AI), Windows Meta File (WMF), JPG and GIF.
Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are layered, vector format files and are fully editable. This means you can add your own elements to the maps change borders, separate counties, change colors, show or hide layers and more. You can resize the images without losing quality. Additionally, county names are provided on a different layer, so they can be manipulated as needed.
The WMF files (.wmf) can be imported into popular applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint� and Office� and edited for presentations, reports, demonstrations and more!
For those analytic journalists slipping toward geezer-dom, eWEEK magazine offers up an interesting blast from many pasts this week with “Peter Coffee's 25 Killer Apps of All Time.”
Says he: “Microsoft's Vista has widely inspired the 'Why do I need that?' question, which past 'killer applications' have answered in different ways for different platforms during three decades of personal computing.”
It seems to us that comparing Vista to a break-through tool like Visicalc is a bit of a stretch, but check out Coffee's slide show anyway, just for fun.
A couple days before Christmas, Jesse Theodore — a writer at ESRI — interviewed Tom Johnson about the use of GIS in journalism. That interview is now available as a podcast at http://www.esri.com/news/podcasts/audio/speaker/tom_johnson.mp3
No story? Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data — and the display of data — that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature. And often a news feature that could be localized.Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005 illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data. (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)
The number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.
a large-scale news paper analysis system that is able to create “entity datamaps”, a spatial visualization of the interest in a given named entity. the aim of this system is to identify entities which display regional biases, by estimating the frequency of reference of an entity in any given city.
entities likely to be geographically-biased include United States cities & local sports teams. entities likely to have little bias include foreign cities, country names, & national political figures. The text is acquired from about 800 US online newspaper sources.
see also mood news & what's up & news attention & vanishing point & newsquakes.
[link: sunysb.edu (pdf)]
Friend Matt Waite, of the St. Petersburg Times, has an interesting post on his personal blog wherein he lists the 19 different software programs he used to prepare the latest installment of his ongoing work on the disappearance of wetlands in Florida. (Who could ever imagine such a thing?)We wonder how many journalism educators could identify these programs and what they are used for?The online version of “Vanishing Wetlands” (Craig Pittman is the lead byline on this episode.) is rich with details and interactive features, including a fine mash-up of Google Maps to show the location of some land in so-called “mitigation banks.” Best of all, for the analytic journalism crowd, is the explication of the story's methodology. It's in some sort of embedded code that delivers the text in a pop-up. Look to the upper right of the homepage for a hot button.By the way, these guys have been working this story for three years. Now THAT's the kind of dedication that produces insight and context.
And there's another good angle on this effort at “Working backward on the last wetlands story.”
A number of friends and associates, for whom we have the greatest respect, say this is one of the best, most enriching conferences in the U.S. It is not cheap, but there are vacation condos to be found in the area that would help to make this affordable.
The IAJ plans to be there. Hope to see you there.
We are back with our 4th UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference on Human Complex Systems. from Wednesday April 25, 2007 through Sunday April 29, 2007.
We look forward to another cross-disciplinary gathering of social scientists who employ cutting-edge agent-based computational modeling and related computational ideas and methods in their research and teaching. As in past years, dozens of presenters from numerous disciplines are presenting. We are also hosting evening panels, a live simulation, and opportunities for networking and relaxation amid gorgeous surroundings.
Advancing Agent Modeling in the Social Sciences The conference is a forum for sharing the most recent advances — in theory, methodology and application – in the area of agent modeling throughout the social sciences (e.g., Anthropology, Communication Studies, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Sociology, Urban Planning). We also welcome social scientists in professional schools (e.g., Business, Education, International Relations, Public Health, Public Policy, Social Welfare) and in the public and private sectors. Researchers and theorists in Psychology, Media Studies and social aspects of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and related disciplines also welcome!
For a paper presentation, authors present for 20 minutes and receive an additional 10 minutes for Q&A. We also welcome 90-120 minute symposium proposals consisting of 3-4 individual papers on a related topic of inquiry. Finally, we are open to someone wishing to organize an evening panel discussion on a �hot topic� in agent modeling.
We're not wild about using “image” as a verb, but the conference looks promising and certainly appropriate for those journalists who understand that we have to learn to tell stories with more than just words and pictures. Yup, “HCI” is where it's at, or where it's going to be at.
Imaging the City:
Recent technological developments mark the city as a central and perhaps special space for human-computer interaction research and practice. Visions of ubiquitous computing, the resonance of the ‘urban probe’, and the proliferation of interactive mapping services speak to the significance of the urban landscape to studies of Human-Computer Interaction. But such visions and technologies require, produce and reproduce images of urban space that influence what these systems, and our interactions with them, are and might be. Developing and employing technologies for the urban environment requires visualization techniques that both reflect and challenge how we image, and consequently imagine, the city.
A few days back we reported on a verbal dust-up betweeen ASU (and IAJ's) Prof. Steve Doig and the PIO for the Maricopa County's district attorney's office. Seems the spokesman didn't think much of mere “student journalists” wanting to attend the DA's press conferences. (Of course, journalists are little more than just citizens doing a special task, but that's a sub-set discussion for another day.) In the end, changes have been made; the DA's public non-information officer has been redeployed.
The Rrove blog — no, no, not THAT Rove (different spelling) — delivers a round-up review of nine sites related to community mapping tools. See http://www.rrove.com/blog/2006/12/04/9-awesome-community-mapping-websites/
Disclosure: Rrove.com plays in the community mapping space. This post aims to highlight the innovations and the usefulness that others have made in this game. We haven’t added ourselves to this list – if you want to know more about Rrove, click here.
A community mapping website, in our definition, is a service that gets its members to map and define places. Through crowd-sourcing, these sites are building a database/directory of local and nearby locations that their users can discover and visit. Why is this important? We all know that search advertising is the fastest growing industry in the Internet. Within that market, local search is the up-and-comer. In the next few years, it will be the largest segment within search!
It’s refreshing to see how others have approached community mapping. Some have focused on map creation while others do it through mobile apps. More than that, some players have mapped the community of users to map the physical community (i.e. neighborhoods). Here’s how nine websites (all free) are doing it, what makes them awesome and how you can use their services in your Internet life.
