geobloggers

Tom and Mike release Oakland Crimespotting, the rather fancy Virtual Earth map/data/visualising thing that they (Stamen) do so well.

What you cant see here is all the useful fade and highlighting effects that take place as you move your cursor around, giving you handy information. Basically because it vanishes as my screen grabbing application takes over.

Anyway that aside, it’s this bit down here that attracts my attention…

“This project is a work in progress; a way of discovering what kinds of questions we can ask. We hope that it will open up a space for even more questions, and provide some answers. We invite the public to use this data to become better informed about what’s happening in their communities and to draw new conclusions of their own.”

The project is an attempt to put data into a context in which useful questions can be formed. I often find myself having to throw code together just to be able to see the data to then work out what the actual questions I should be asking are. Mapping and mapping over time is just one way of doing that.

Which in turn reminds me that we are still right at the very start of this whole mapping thing. When we’ve all had enough experience with mapping data, which has already been going on forever, then we may know how to ask smarter questions.

Example: A few years ago, I may not have thought to ask if the house I was about to buy was on a flood plain. If I’d really sat down and thought about it, sure I could have come up with the question. But now I would instinctively be able to ask (and probably) answer smarter location based questions.

Things like Crime Maps are moving us beyond the “Where does crime happen” to Why and What can we do about it.