TUTORIAL: How to create an interactive map for your readers – for dummies like me
Geo-location, crowdsourcing, collaborative journalism... these are some of the buzz words of our business right now and it's quite an adventure getting your head into all of these trends and finding ways to apply them in every day journalism.
One of the most obviously useful applications is to create an interactive map where your readers can contribute information which has a geographic context. Say you wanted to map potholes in your community, or have a tool to report broken street lights and so on? This would be very useful.
Google Maps provides some powerful technology for online mapping and it's really easy to whip up a map illustrating a series of stories or an unfolding trend, but, unless you are a programmer, it can be a heck of a lot more difficult to create a map that your users can help build. The Google Map API is incredibly powerful but if, like me, you are not a programmer's bottom, you need to find other ways as a journalist to get things moving.
A mega-map of schools
The other day I came across a great spreadsheet which included geo-location information for more than 4000 Eastern Cape schools.
I thought it would be fun to see if I could map these schools and include details about pupil/teacher rations and so on. It could be a useful resouce.
Well it took me quite some time but I managed to do it using Map-A-List - brilliant site which generates maps from spreadsheets of addresses. Once your data is in shape it's a piece of cake to use.
It will link directly to a Google Docs spreadsheet. I uploaded the file to my Google Docs account and then used Map-A-List to generate the map you can see below. You need to really zoom in too make sense of the wave of schools. Clicking on the icon will give you some more info about a school.
The joy of Google Docs and Gadgets
I've had a huge amount of fun in my recent holidays fooling around with Google Docs and Google Gadgets which are incredibly powerful tools for journalists.
The most amazing discovery was the importhtml function within Google Docs which allows you to scrape web content on the fly and bring it into Google Docs to have some fun with it.
I did a Wikipedia search for the highest grossing films of all time and then used the importhtml function to pull that info into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I spent a few minutes cleaning up the info and then applied it to the Google Gadget which allows you to represent this information in a pyramid. Below is the result.
Now, I know this is not going to win me any awards but I think it's quite an effective example of how a complete non-designer and journalist like myself can generate acceptable web info-graphics on the fly using nothing other than free Google tools.