Danny DeBelius

Kevin Quealy :

…no one was really super thrilled with maps as the main conduit for the analysis. Instead, they decided on minimizing the geography and using “bins” for states. (Shan has sort of been obsessed with “bins” since 2008, when his dream of having states magically fall into buckets on election night ultimately didn’t pan out. I personally had to cheer him up after that and it was not pretty.)

Here is another great reminder for map-happy news nerds that sometimes the important patterns of a story are not really geographic in a way that is best conveyed through a choropleth or proportional symbol map. This graphic is brilliant and the process behind it is well worth your time.

(via drewvigal)

The indecently smart folks at Development Seed put together a beautiful map of today’s seismic event along with a quick write-up of the process:

This afternoon at 1:51 pm our office started shaking, pretty strongly. And then we all ran outside. Turns out a 5.9 earthquake hit Northern, VA, with its epicenter just northwest of Richmond, and we definitely felt it here in Washington, DC. After talking to the neighbors outside for a few minutes and of course checking twitter, we got down to work.

Using open data released almost immediately from the U.S. Geological Survey, Dave, Nate, and Matt mapped the earthquake using TileMill, our open source map design studio. This map shows the earthquake’s strength in the area where USGS tracked it.