Tag: USA

Mapping Broadband Access (or Lack Thereof) in America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Map showing U.S. counties where less than 15% of U.S. households access the internet at broadband speed
The Verge

The Verge maps the gaps in U.S. broadband coverage. “This map shows where the broadband problem is worst—the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed. (That’s already a pretty low threshold for calling something ‘high-speed internet,’ but since it’s the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, we’ll stick with it.)” They’re using anonymized Microsoft cloud data rather than the FCC’s numbers (which don’t have a good track record reflecting real-world speeds).

Previously: The FCC’s Broadband Map ‘Hallucinates’ Broadband Access.

Mapping Vaccine Hesitancy in the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data and maps showing the estimated rate of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. on a county-by-county basis. The data is based on a question in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey that asked respondents whether they’d get a vaccine for COVID-19 once it was available to them. Methodology and datasets here. [Boston.com]

Mapping Partisan Sorting in America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Partisanship in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and New York (New York Times)
The New York Times

The New York Times maps partisan sorting in America—the tendency for voters to self-select into areas where people think and vote the same way they do—down to the neighbourhood level.

The maps above—and throughout this article—show their estimates of partisanship down to the individual voter, colored by the researchers’ best guess based on public data like demographic information, voter registration and whether voters participated in party primaries.

We can’t know how any individual actually voted. But these maps show how Democrats and Republicans can live in very different places, even within the same city, in ways that go beyond the urban-suburban-rural patterns visible in aggregated election results.

It goes beyond racial, urban vs. suburban vs. rural and house vs. apartment splits, to the point where researchers are wondering whether Americans are “paying attention to the politics of their neighbors” when they decide where to live. This has implications not only in terms of electoral targeting (e.g. gerrymandering, voter suppression), but in terms of basic social cohesion.

The maps are based on research by Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos published earlier this month in Nature Human Behavior.

Previously: Red and Blue vs. Gray and Green.

How Black Cartographers Have Mapped Racism in America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Library of Congress

Writing at The Conversation, geographers Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood explore African American examples of “counter-mapping,” from maps made by the Black Panthers proposing new police districts to modern interactive maps of lynchings and police violence. “Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.” [Osher]

Previously: ‘Counter-Mapping’ the Amazon.

Field Releases Dot Density Map for the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Dasymetric dot density poster of the 2020 US Presidential election
Kenneth Field. Creative Commons licence.

Kenneth Field has released a dasymetric dot density map of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results. One dot equals one vote. “Data at a county level has been reapportioned to urban areas. Dots are positioned randomly.” It’s in the same vein as his 2016 map, which went all kinds of viral when he posted it in early 2018. A high-resolution downloadable poster is here; an interactive version is here.

Previously: Kenneth Field’s Dot Density Election Map; Kenneth Field’s Dot Density Election Map Redux.

COVID-19 in the United States: A Map Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

County-level map of the United States showing willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine (MIT Technology Review)

The New York Times maps the risk of getting COVID-19 in the United States on a county-by-county basis (previously: Mapping COVID-19 Exposure Risk at Events). [Maps Mania]

Now that vaccines are available, they can be mapped as well. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s COVID Data Tracker includes this map of total doses administered in the U.S.; this NBC News county-level map showing the percentage of Americans living within 50 miles of a pharmacy expected to carry a vaccine dates from December and is probably out of date by now. [Maps Mania]

According to a survey, more than a quarter of the U.S. population would not get a COVID-19 vaccine if it was available to them. This number is not evenly distributed: this map from MIT Technology Review, presented as a map showing whether your neighbours want to get vaccinated, reveals the regional pockets of vaccine hesitancy (see above). (What the actual hell, Louisiana?)

xkcd’s 2020 Election Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe, “2020 Election Map.” xkcd, 16 Dec 2020.

xkcd did another map thing, so I have to post about it; it’s a rule. This time Randall revisits the design of the map he did for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which one figure represents 250,000 votes for each candidate. In a Twitter thread, he explains the rationale for the map:

It tries to address something that I find frustrating about election maps: Very few of them do a good job of showing where voters are. […] There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

Previously: xkcd’s 2016 Election Map.

Mapping COVID-19 Hospitalizations

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The thing that seems to worry authorities most about COVID-19 is its potential to overwhelm hospitals, at which point the mortality rate really begins to shoot up. In March, the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management released the COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which maps, on a county-by-county, basis, the percentage of hospital and ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. [Maps Mania]

The Contiguous 41 States—Wait, What?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Contiguous 41 States (xkcd)
Randall Munroe, “Contiguous 41 States.” xkcd, 4 Dec 2020.

The thing about this xkcd cartoon is that at first glance it’s entirely plausible: Randall has done violence to state boundaries while maintaining the rough overall shape of the lower 48. He’s snipped out seven states without anyone noticing if they don’t look too closely.

Previously: xkcd’s United States Map; ‘They Just Wanted to Fix Some Things About the State Borders’.

Mapping Climate Risk in the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The New York Times (screenshot)

Climate change isn’t just one thing: rising temperatures, or sea level rise. It’s also changes to rainfall, increased risk of wildfires, more powerful hurricanes. The extent to which any of these are threats depends on where you live: North Dakota doesn’t have much to worry about rising sea levels, but it should think about drought. That’s what this interactive map from the New York Times attempts to measure: the climate risks to the United States on a county-by-county basis.

Previously: How Climate Change Will Transform the United States.

Beaded Maps of Canada and the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

CBC News reports on a collaborative project to create province-by-province and state-by-state beaded maps of Canada and the United States. “Since March, dozens of Indigenous artists had been taking up a challenge to bead their states and provinces. Their hard work, diversity in beading styles, techniques, and cultural influences can be seen in a final map that was recently unveiled of both countries.” The project was coordinated by CeeJay Johnson of Kooteen Creations.

How Climate Change Will Transform the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

ProPublica map

ProPublica has released a series of climate maps showing the impact of warming temperatures, rising seas and changes in rainfall on the United States. “Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.”

Mapping the California Heat Wave

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NASA Earth Observatory: California Heatwave 2020
NASA Earth Observatory (Joshua Stevens)

NASA Earth Observatory: “The map above shows air temperatures across the United States on September 6, 2020, when much of the Southwest roasted in a dramatic heatwave. The map was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model and represents temperatures at 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) above the ground. The darkest red areas are where the model shows temperatures surpassing 113°F (45°C).” Heat waves in southern California have become “more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting,” the article goes on to say.

Mapping Far-Right Vigilantism

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Alexander Reid Ross of Portland State University has created an interactive map that tracks incidents of far-right extremist vigilantism in the United States. Laura Biss has the story at MapLab:

The map shows that certain regions seem to be hotspots for extremism, including Southern California, Oregon and Washington. Ross fears for what might be coming to Texas, which has seen pockets of violence at protests and is home to people whom Ross calls “experienced racists, armed to the teeth.” He views the concentration of incidents in the Pacific Northwest as “an inverted funhouse,” considering their historic parallel in the terror of the Civil Rights-era South, which has fewer incidents today.”

[Boing Boing]