Category: Map Apps

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General GIS GIS in Psychology Map Apps Slideshow

Mapping happiness

New social media mapping sites are popping up all over the place these days – whether it’s crisis-mapping sites like Sinsai.info or this new ‘happiness’ map from PhD student Alex Davies.

Davies, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Computational and Biological Learning Lab, created a statistical model to analyze the sentiment (happy or sad) of Tweets from around the world.  In Davies’ model, individual words within Tweets were correlated with happiness or sadness, then used to predict the overall sentiment of the Tweet. Tweets were geo-tagged and summarized by area to calculate a composite ‘happiness’ ranking for states within the U.S. and for countries worldwide. The results are presented on Davies’ website in an interactive web map app. Raw data from the Tweets is presented alongside the maps to give viewers a sense of which Tweet words were correlated with happiness or sadness.  See below for maps of US happiness and world happiness – and an image showing some of the worldwide ‘happy’ words.

Happiness map of the United States:

 

Happiness map of the world:

Happy words for the world:

 

 

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Map Apps Slideshow

NPR Story on Crisis Mapping in Japan

Last week NPR ran a story on crisis mapping in Japan – focusing on the open-source, citizen-driven Sinsai.info website. Here’s the description from the NPR website:

Open source software called Ushahidi allows people to add and update information to maps that anyone with an Internet connection can access. In Tokyo, a crew of volunteers is using the software to map everything — from health services to the location of emergency aid workers — in Japan’s hardest hit areas. Patrick Meier, director of the crisis mapping segment of Ushahidi, says that because of the robust Internet infrastructure in Japan and tech-savvy citizenry, online crisis mapping is being utilized to its fullest potential.

Click here to hear the NPR audio clip. Thanks to Deb for the heads up about this story!

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Bucknell/Local Interest Data Environment General GIS Map Apps Slideshow

ChesapeakeView

Maurie Kelly and her team at PASDA (part of the Penn State Institute of Energy and the Environment) have just released ChesapeakeView, a website that provides free access to remotely sensed data about the Chesapeake Bay region. The website currently holds 263 datasets related to the Chesapeake Bay region – including remotely sensed data as well as habitat, land use, biodiversity, wildlife distribution, historical aerial photos, agricultural imagery, digital coastline images and other types of environmental data related to the region.

“No simple place existed to find remote sensing information about land use, habitat changes and biodiversity,” said Maurie Caitlin Kelly, director of informatics, Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment. “Researchers could spend days searching to find whatever data might be available.”

The data interface for ChesapeakeView will look familiar to anyone who has used PASDA’s website.  There are options for downloading the data via FTP, using an internet based data viewer/map tool or streaming it directly into your ArcMap session. ChesapeakeView is part of the AmericaView initiative.

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Map Apps Slideshow

Libya crisis map

Click here to check out the new Libya Crisis Map.  Courtesy of Adena Schutzberg over at AllPointsBlog:

OCHA, UNOSAT and NetHope have been collaborating with the Volunteer Technical Community (VTC) specifically CrisisMappers, Crisis Commons, Open Street Map, and the Google Crisis Response Team over the past week.

The CrisisMappers Standby Task Force has been undertaking a mapping of social media, news reports and official situation reports from within Libya and along the borders at the request of OCHA. The Task Force is also aiding in the collection and mapping of 3W information for the response. UNOSAT is kindly hosting the Common Operational Datasets to be used during the emergency. Interaction with these groups is being coordinated by OCHA’s Information Services Section.

The public version of this map does not include personal identifiers and does not include descriptions for the reports mapped. This restriction is for security reasons. All information included on this map is derived from information that is already publicly available online

 

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Bucknell/Local Interest Environment General GIS Map Apps Videos

WikiWatershed – Model My Watershed

WikiWatershed is another exciting project under development by the team at Azavea.  The project – a collaboration between the Stroud Water Research Center,  Azavea, University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab and Millersville University –  features a suite of web-based mapping and analysis tools designed for use by students and concerned citizens in sharing information about the streams, rivers and natural resources in their watersheds.  The first component of WikiWatershed to be released is the Model My Watershed tool which allows for web-based modeling of stormwater:

This game-like simulaton will enable students to modify underlying environmental conditions and simulate how these changes to the ecosystem affect the hydrologic cycle in their local watersheds …[and will] will use the latest version of Azavea’s DecisionTree geoprocessing framework to provide high performance, scalable modeling capabilities.

From the Stroud Water Research Center website:

When fully developed, [WikiWatershed] will leverage open source software and will function as an open collaborative resource for the community, enabling users to share geographically-tagged data, photos, videos, comments, educational curricula, simulation models and other tools on streams and rivers. As “Wiki” implies, content will be primarily contributed, enhanced and maintained by the user community. The WikiWatershed™ web portal will link a database of watershed information to geo-tagged visual content viewable on Google Maps®/Earth®, Flickr®, Panoramio®, YouTube®, etc.

Click here to explore the WikiWatershed mapping application.