Boston in red and blue

Robert David Sullivan has a fascinating piece in the Boston Globe today on Eric Fischer, who has plotted on maps of Boston (left) and other cities where tourists (red) and residents (blue) take photos in their hometowns, based on what they post to the social-networking photo site Flickr.

As you might expect, Fenway Park and Faneuil Hall are heavily red, whereas blue predominates in the neighborhoods. Sullivan observes that neither captures the true Boston — it’s the tourist spots and the neighborhood joints together that form the most complete picture.

And it’s a great example of how coming up with new ways to visualize data help us tell stories we might not have even known existed.

Mapping a class project

View Newcomer’s guide to NU in a larger map
I love this. My Reinventing the News class has put together a Google map of their favorite places within a mile of Northeastern. Each student wrote a blog post, took some pictures and then plotted it on a map, with a link.

The result — a “Newcomer’s guide to NU” — is a modest but useful example of how to use mapping as a journalism tool. The idea is to provide multiple points of entry for readers, which encourages them to explore and to come back.

The project was a bit of a high-wire act. I was having a hard time creating the map during the weekend, which may have been due to problems Google was having. Then, when everyone began adding to the map during class on Monday, we had barely controlled chaos, as random addresses began weirdly showing up and disappearing. Yet I think the end result turned out rather well.

Google Maps may not be the most sophisticated mapping tool available, but it’s free and ubiquitous. Understanding how to use it is just one of the skills today’s young journalists need to know.

What’s up with Google maps?

I’m looking for help with, or at least an explanation for, why I can’t create a Google map — something I’ve done a number of times before. I spent the better part of last night and this morning on it, and I’m ready to tear my hair out.

The problem is that the map I keep trying to create is not sticky. I create it, I save it, but then, when I go back to it, it’s showing a different map. And the link it generates is completely inconsistent, sometimes taking me to the middle of the country. (Mind you, the map I want has Northeastern University in the middle of it.)

This is for an in-class project we’re doing on Monday, so I really need to solve the problem. It is essentially the same project I did a little more than a year ago without incident, so, despite my ability to screw up even the simplest of tech tasks, I’m inclined to think it’s not me.

Have you heard anything? Do you have any suggestions?