Can you help the graphically challenged?
July 28, 2016 12:16 PM   Subscribe

I need to create an easy visualization of some data and then overlay it on top of a map. Without resorting to coloring on tracing paper, can you help me with a digital solution?

I am working with a group of folks (mostly neighborhood representatives, some park advisory boards, no specialists) and we have been tasked to come together and help advise the city on our big City Park.

One of the more pressing issues is that some neighbors think the park is over burdened by permitted events and would like to see rest days implemented to ensure that the park is passive and pastoral more frequently. Another group of folks disagrees strongly and thinks its possible the park is underutilized and we could have more permitted events.

To me it is clear that 1. no one really knows because "Parks" is reluctant to actually disseminate permitting figures and 2. its a huge park but really only one little zone/quadrant is very frequently permitted. To that end, I FINALLY convinced "Parks" to give me a spreadsheet of their permitted events for the previous year with the understanding, I wasn't going to distribute it and that I would only use this knowledge for good.

To get a better understanding of usage I would like to measure each event's "impact score". I imagine this would be the estimated attendance (on a scale from 1-10) plus hours of impact .

Then using the spreadsheet, I think I can get a good idea of where the event was. The park is thankfully pretty rectangular, so I was thinking of dividing it into a 4x4 grid, so 16 zones or whatever. Where the event is held would be coded/colored in/shaded whatever based on the impact score. There are three vehicular entrances into the park, so the zones containing the roadways would also get coded/colored in/shaded whatever, but perhaps weighted less since there are 3 generally equally used access points AND activity there would mostly be at the beginning and end of the event.

Soooo..HELP! I can visualize how to do this by hand or with tracing paper, but I know there has to be an easier way. If I had a shapefile, maybe I could do it with GIS software, but I have neither the software or shapefile. :) Bonus: once I get this all in, can I do a visualization of say am vs pm use or winter vs summer etc?

(Oh, and I have access to everything Google of course, but I don't have much of anything else)

Thank you in advance!
posted by stormygrey to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
1. Create a 4x4 spread sheet. Each cell represents a zone from the park, so A1 is the northwest corner and D4 is the southeast.
2. Color or shade each zone appropriately, using colors on a scale from yellow to red.
3. Print it out.
4. Put the paper back in the printer.
5. Print a grayscale-only satellite photo or Google Maps image I've the park on the paper, so the park is overlaid over the spreadsheet.
It may take some futzing to get the sizing right, but having the spreadsheet cells just be approximately over the regions of the map will be fine.
posted by ejs at 1:17 PM on July 28, 2016


I saw this post a while ago about using pivot tables in Excel to hack together a heat map of the US. It seems like the general technique might work for you, and if you set up date and time columns, you should be able to filter your data to make multiple versions for morning vs night, etc.
posted by yeahlikethat at 1:22 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


Can you use layers in a free graphics program like GIMP to put different overlays on top of a layer with the park map? You can adjust colors, transparency, etc.

You can screenshot the map or use an existing image file as the base layer.

I might be missing what you're trying to do but if not then I think this would work.

Unless this has to be an image, you could also try a table or simplified list.
posted by ramenopres at 2:51 PM on July 28, 2016


Best answer: Excel to Google Earth?

At its most basic GIS is just a database with mapping software attached to a place-based column of data. Spreadsheets are frequently importable. Standard file types, like Excel, can often be imported into existing GIS programs. If your data is compatible with an existing program, in theory, you can just import it and use existing maps to create what you want.

If the above link does not work for you, there are others (example). I just googled excel import to google earth.
posted by Michele in California at 4:59 PM on July 28, 2016


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