I had great unobstructed front rows seats for last night’s Hacks/Hackers Meetup NYC. Exiled to the long waiting list, I instead watched a livestream of the interactive map making presentations with my MacBook propped on the coffee table in my living room while the rest of me was sprawled on the family couch.
I was taking a few notes, nodding in agreement, and coming to the realization that I should have looked into Google FusionTables months ago. I had seen this Googley table tool mentioned in the tech press, and then again it was referred to during a talk given by Simon Rogers, editor of the The Guardian‘s Datablog, on data-oriented journalism at the O’Reilly Strata Summit.
WNYC’s John Keefe led off with how to create an interactive Google Map without any code, using the aforementioned FusionTables. About a year ago, I was hacking my FCC broadband maps with the now discontinued Google Data Map APIs. It actually involved work .
That is not the case with Fusion: non-programmers merely upload geo-tagged data from a spreadsheet to create a Map overlay.
Without a stitch of code.
Keefe, who is WNYC’s Executive Director for News, showed us how he set up, prior to Hurricane Irene, the incredibly useful NYC flood zone maps. The flood location data came from NYC’s very own Datamine, and after a little geo translation, Keefe had a useable dataset. Fusion even handles, non-programatically that is, the shading of polygons based on a column in the table–it’s just a style customization.
And that’s it. FusionTables gives you an embeddable iframe object. Keefe’s flood zone map is just slightly more complicated: he added little JavaScript sauce to build the overlay with Map APIs and then stirred in an address finder (which does require jQuery). So this allowed residents to type in their location to learn whether they were in one of the evacuation zones.
If you want to do your own modest JavaScript modifications, there’s a great time-saver. Keefe mentioned a Google web app that automatically transforms a FusionTable into JS with the appropriate Map API hooks. Check out j.mp/FusionBuilder to see this in action–you need to have ready a mappable table.
Back to me. During my short lunch hour, I took my NY State FCC 477 competitive data out of the freezer, and uploaded the rows to Google Docs– into a table, not a spreadsheet. Thankfully, someone had already created a FusionTable that had zipcode polygons, and after joining or merging the two sets I now had the location column that’s required for visualization.
You can see the results above. Click on a zipcode to learn how many ISP are servicing your area.
The more interesting FCC broadband data involves download speeds based on census blocks. It turned out the next two speaker (WSJ’s Albert Sun, and Pro Publica’s Jeff Larson) were masters of using this census geo data for their own projects involving congressional and local redistricting.
I jotted down some good notes, have a few census resources to now look into, and with some freebie tools I should be able to craft a more practical broadband speed map.
Just waiting for the next rainy Sunday afternoon.