The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic

Kevin Quealy, a graphic editor at the New York Times, reveals the method to the radness of the interactive Netflix queue graphic that went up on the Times’ website last week. His discussion of their primary design considerations hits upon precisely what makes the map a popular success:

the hardest part about this graphic was designing the interface. We wanted readers to be able to find a given movie quickly, but a search box didn’t really work visually. We also wanted to give readers an idea which movies were most popular and which were most critically acclaimed.

I mocked up at least ten versions. None were any good. The challenge was navigation. As a user, I wanted to be able to see one movie in a bunch of different cities, fast, or I wanted to see a bunch of movies in one city just as fast. So there are two major navigation elements – cities and movies – but the map itself still needed to be the visual focal point of the graphic.

The ability to jump from city to city without worrying about the formalities of zooms in and out makes playing with it plenty pleasant. Not mentioned but nearly as important is the second sentence of the two sentence summary, just below the map title (the bolding is mine):

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Some titles with distinct patterns are Mad Men, Obsessed and Last Chance Harvey.

A statement as intriguing as that is like a sheet of bubble wrap left in your path on the way to work: it’s not a clear invitation to play, but you’ll pop it anyway.

Definition of "black-boxing"

Bruno Latour, in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies:

scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Uncovering what’s inside these black-boxes could become an important task for people researching the processes by which we construct everything from budgets to automobiles to maps. In their forthcoming book, Rethinking Maps, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins encourage researchers of maps and mapping

to open the “black-boxes” of mapping software, to start to interrogate algorithms and databases, and in particular to investigate the production of ready-made maps that appear almost magically on the interfaces of gadgets and devices we carry and use everyday, often without much overt thought about how they work and whose map they project onto their interface.

A couple of chapter downloads from Rethinking Maps are available on Martin Dodge’s website.

Unbuilt Robert Moses Highway Maps

Not only does this post include two great (and chilling) maps of how Robert Moses’ New York City might have looked, but it warns us against our impulse to accept online base maps as apolitical representations.

I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways … Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before … but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context … We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps (or some other online mapping software) that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.

I’m reminded of the introduction to Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps, in which he says maps “enable the past to become part of our living . . . now . . . here.”

The Geography of a Recession

Another great New York Times map, with four options for sorting counties. Be sure to use the zoom option.

Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates.

The kids are alright

On London’s absurd anti-anti-social behavior zones.

There’s a curfew for unsupervised under-16s, from 9pm to 6am. Any group of 2 or more people can be broken up and/or that the member of the group have to leave the designated area (if they do not live there). Crucially, police do not have to see actual anti-social behaviour, but a constable in uniform has reasonable grounds for believing that the presence or behaviour of a group of two or more persons in any public place in the relevant locality has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed.

When I checked to see who had bookmarked this, all but one of the seven were already in my network (I’ve since added the outlier, dotx3).

This link is a perfect candidate for becoming a shibboleth (shibbolink?) by which I identify people I might add to my network. If somebody saves this link, there’s a good chance they’re interested in any number of things that also interest me (e.g., geography, mapping, London, and the rights of marginalized groups).

I’ve begun keeping track of similarly distinguishing bookmarks using the shibbolink tag. We’ll see how it goes.

Is the Crime Mapping initiative failing UK communities?

A Cimex study looked at a bunch of police-operated crime maps in the UK and found them confusing and difficult to use, even when compared to the tabular crime data presented on UpMyStreet, a non-governmental website offering information for people planning a move within or to the UK.

The police websites mentioned in the article include:

West Yorkshire Police Authority
Greater Manchester Police
West Midlands Police
Metropolitan Police

Where is the path (or street)

A split-screen map, with the Ordnance Survey map on one side and your choice of Google map on the other.

It might be interesting to try two types of Google map on either side of the screen, or four types in each corner. Overlay maps—and I’m thinking specifically of Google’s hybrid version—obscure some of the visual data. With side-by-side you don’t get this; it just takes up more space—a forgivable sin if you’re building a map for monitors only.

Migurski found this via Tom Taylor.

NYTimes: 365/360

A Flickr set containing some absolutely stunning visualizations created by Jer Thorp using Processing and the New York Times article search API.

These visualizations show the top organizations and personalities for every year from 1985 to 2001. Connections between these people & organizations are indicated by lines.

He must have added some recently, because he’s got 1984 to 2009 represented now.

Update: there’s more information about the visualizations over at blprnt.

Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco (part deux)

Urban tree locations come courtesy of Friends of the Urban Forest, one day’s worth of taxi cab locations from Yellow Cab (via Cabspotting), and a week’s worth of reported crime incidents from Crime Reports.

Originally uploaded by shawnbot

MapWatch

Like a worst dressed photo spread for British rail maps.

For a more theoretical critique of maps and mapping, you want to check out the field of Critical Cartography, particularly this introduction [PDF] by Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier.