KYF Compass Map
This map shows USDA grants to programs related to local food systems from 2009-2011. You can zoom in and out, search by theme (infrastructure, careers in agriculture, farm to institution). Originally part of a mandatory report to congress, it also has data sets, photo and video for stakeholders. Each colored circle is a grant, colored according to theme. If you click each one a window pops up with information about the grant amount, the program that it falls in, relevant congressional areas, and grant recipient.
I chose this map because I care about good, healthy food--sustainably and ethically produced, good for the workers, good for the planet--and do my best to support the livelihoods of farmers in my local community. A debate just recently fired around the sustainable food world when Sam Sexton from the Freakonomics blog posted an article about the inefficiency of local food. One of the things I thought was misleading about that article was how much Sexton made of the "local food lobby," which is relatively non-existant. I'd argue that most of the push for supporting small farmers and local food institutions has been very grassroots. Anyway, this map is interesting because it shows you exactly what funding the federal government has been giving the movement, when it was given, and to whom.
Source Map: Laptop Computers
Source: http://sourcemap.com/view/744
Source map is a crowd-sourced directory of product supply chains, mapping everything from Chiquita Bananas to TOMS shoes to hockey pucks and your iPhone 3. This particular image shows the birth and life of a laptop computer, marking upstream and downstream travel, including it's chip assembly location (Southeast Asia) where all that manganese comes from (Eastern Europe), and the wafer fabrication (The UKand the US). I like that Sourcemap tries to answer the big consumer question that growing more and more poppular--where do our products come from?--collaboratively, with crowds-sourced data (if The Man won't tell us we'll figure it out for ourselves!). But I do wonder about the accuracy of these maps, if anyone can contribute, and how correct information is filtered from inaccurate information, if it is at all.
Source map is a crowd-sourced directory of product supply chains, mapping everything from Chiquita Bananas to TOMS shoes to hockey pucks and your iPhone 3. This particular image shows the birth and life of a laptop computer, marking upstream and downstream travel, including it's chip assembly location (Southeast Asia) where all that manganese comes from (Eastern Europe), and the wafer fabrication (The UKand the US). I like that Sourcemap tries to answer the big consumer question that growing more and more poppular--where do our products come from?--collaboratively, with crowds-sourced data (if The Man won't tell us we'll figure it out for ourselves!). But I do wonder about the accuracy of these maps, if anyone can contribute, and how correct information is filtered from inaccurate information, if it is at all.
Wind Map
Source: http://hint.fm/wind/
I would be lying if I told you I thought this map was thematically or dynamically interesting. I might be an environmental studies major, but that doesn't mean I'm sitting at home watching the weather man for my daily meteorology fix, looking for patterns that hark evidence of climate change. The real reason I love this map is because it's beautiful. It also moves. I highly recommend clicking the source link and losing yourself in the silent, symphonic data. The surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database, but was designed and executed by a dataviz collaborative called hint.fm. It's revised once per hour, tracking the tracery of wind flowing over the US with a time stamp to mark the last download. Some major cities are depicted for reference, but the primary information presented is the flow and velocity of wind, with brighter areas representing stronger wind flow.
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