Kaitlyn Sprague – DataViz

I chose to use the measurement as percentages of households that make less than $10,000 annually to demonstrate the amount of severe poverty in differing census tracts in central Connecticut. In the “lying” map, someone that takes a quick look would make the assumption that there isn’t much severe poverty or disparity in the region. Well that’s because one color represents zero to thirty percent of people in the tract that are below the $10,000 threshold. Zero to thirty is a very large range, and few tracts, even in the poorest cities, will have more than 30 percent. The second map is much less deceptive, and actually depicts the income inequality on the West Hartford-Hartford border with its better use of cutpoints of percentages.

Comparing Various Mapping Tools

February 24, 2016March 9, 2016Kaitlyn Sprague

MapMe

BatchGeo

Google Fusion Tables

Of the three mapping programs, BatchGeo was my favorite. In addition to being the most aesthetically pleasing, it was by far the easiest to use. I was easily able to import my data and I did not have to reformat my Excel document in any way. However, the free version does not support more than 250 entires, so I was not able to geocode all food establishments in Hartford. Thus, I chose to just map restaurants around Trinity. I also appreciate that BatchGeo uses Google Maps as its source.

On the other hand, MapMe was the most difficult. In order to import data, I had to download their Excel template, and then I had to transfer all of my data into the template for it to be imported. This took a considerable amount of time.

In regards to Google Fusion Tables, I’m not exactly sure how I feel yet. I think that it is the most difficult to learn, but will eventually yield the best results once learned. I have just learned how to set a column to “location” and I am still struggling to embed this map.