In search of maps with a higher purpose

November 12, 2007 8:06 AM

I'm looking for Web sites that use interactive maps to display social phenomena, such as Oakland CrimeSpotting. They don't need to be that sophisticated. I'm especially interested in maps related to poverty and education.
posted by desjardins to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Your link to Oakland Crimespotting doesn't work. Try this:
http://oakland.crimespotting.org/

There are tons of Google Earth maps that are constantly updated by many users...I just can't find any right now. Scroll through this site and you might find some.
posted by HotPatatta at 8:35 AM on November 12, 2007

Map your rotten neighbors.
posted by HotPatatta at 8:40 AM on November 12, 2007

oakland.crimespotting.org has no crime data in it, unfortunately, so it's not that fun to play with. I'm assuming that the interactivity you're looking for involves dynamically enabling and disabling overlays, yes? So just a more GUI-ey way of manipulating all the data available from the census.gov site? Or if, as you say, they needn't be all that sophisticated, then perhaps the census.gov maps of income and education are sufficient for your purposes?

Social Explorer?

Neighboroo.com used to do this, I think, but they appear to have gone away. Given that their domain registration has lapsed I wouldn't hold out much hope, but it might be worth bookmarking just in case.
posted by mumkin at 9:11 AM on November 12, 2007

Houston has two different sites that map crime: (1 , 2)
posted by chrisamiller at 9:12 AM on November 12, 2007

We've been trying fruitlessly to get our data back from Oakland City Hall for most of October. At this point, we're trying to get a little outside assistance to help speed things along. The site is still up at all only because we have hope that we can bring it back to a usable, informative state.
posted by migurski at 9:50 AM on November 12, 2007

ProgrammableWeb has some good stuff -- eg, Best New Mashups of the Census.

Also, I don't think this is necessarily what you're looking for, but an interesting project nonetheless -- San Francisco Emotion Map.
posted by salvia at 10:02 AM on November 12, 2007

2007 Toronto Homicides Map
posted by Melsky at 10:05 AM on November 12, 2007

San Francisco Police Dept. CrimeMaps is definitely worth a look. You have to agree to a lot of agreements and then put in some data about what kind of crimes, where, and what time period, and then you get a nice map.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:25 AM on November 12, 2007

You know what, the SF CrimeMaps I linked above are just one application of the SFGIS. Click that link for some others, including SFViewer which has information about schools and SF Prospector which has economic information aimed at businesses.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:30 AM on November 12, 2007

Finding housing - Craigslist meets Google Maps

US vehicle and pedestrian fatalities

Google Maps Mania - a blog. Right now, the top post is about mapping the oil spill

(What exactly are you looking for? There are a ton of google mashups out there - do those count?)
posted by salvia at 11:54 AM on November 12, 2007