Shapes, Maps & Massachusetts Campaign Contributions

At Faneuil Media we often use maps to make data more accessible to readers. Because it’s so simple and people are familiar with it, we frequently use Google’s mapping platform.

Unfortunately, Google’s API doesn’t make it easy to map shapes and areas. It’s simple to map specific points, like the location of crimes, but not areas, like neighborhoods.

To help readers really penetrate a body of geographic data, it’s often important to provide a detail-level view (specific points) AND a summary-level view (areas). But until now, we haven’t been able to do both with the Google API.

Now we can.

Last week we launched a package on Boston.com that maps campaign finance data for Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates. As in the past, we’ve plotted detail-level data on the map -- in this case, campaign contributions.

But this package is special because readers can also view summaries of the data. Readers can see that Chris Gabrieli’s contributions to his own campaign dominate Boston contributions, that Western Massachusetts is Deval Patrick country and that Tom Reilly leads fundraising in many of the state’s suburban and exurban communities.

This project stretched us further than anything else we’ve done. The data set was bigger and messier than anything we’ve worked with. Even after lots of cleanup, there were many contributions that we couldn’t find coordinates for and therefore were not able to map. Also, the layers are very resource-intensive and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to host the package.

But thanks to some amazing work on Theo’s part and a huge amount of patience at Boston.com, we addressed these problems, and ended up with a package that we’re very happy with. By building a deep, intuitive interface it’s now easy – not to mention kind of fun – to see who’s contributing to candidates. Hopefully we’ve made the election process in Massachusetts a little bit more transparent.

Now that this has been up for a few days, we’re beginning to think about next steps. If you have any thoughts or other feedback, let me know.

Comments

[Adrian Holovaty]

Nice work, guys! This looks really good (as usual). Do you have a custom map tile server, or did you just pre-generated the custom tiles?

[Adrian Holovaty]

Whoop, forgive the typo: "pre-generated" --> "pre-generate".

[Rick Burnes]

Forgiven ... and thanks for the comments. We did set up a custom map tile server. I think all the zoom levels would have made it difficult to pre-generate the tiles ... if you want more details on the set-up, definitely ping Theo (tvburry@gmail.com).

[Ben Tesch]

I'm curious as to where you got your area plotting information from, and how you structured it so that it easily loads in Google Maps. Do you have different levels of details in the coordinates? I've found drawing boundaries and areas in GMaps using data directly from the government is too detailed/cumbersome (you end up getting a zillion coordinates trying to follow a river, for example).

[Rick Burnes]

Hi Ben, We generated the area boundaries with shape files from the state of Massachusetts. They're available here: http://www.mass.gov/mgis/laylist.htm
Hope this helps. -- Rick

[Ben Tesch]

Was there a particular format that is instantly transferrable to Google Maps, or did you have to take a particular kind and convert it somehow? Did you have to use a GIS/mapping program at all?

[Theo Burry]

Ben,

I used geoserver as a wms.

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/Google+Maps

Theo