The Nonprofit Technology Network has put together a great intro on how online maps actually work and the tools you can use. Implementing truly gorgeous online maps still requires some custom code and technical know-how – but, the cost and learning curve involved has dropped considerably.

Terms and Trends in DIY and Open Source Online Maps

From our fine colleagues at Social Planning Toronto, here is a followup on using maps to display how proposed cuts to the City of Toronto 2012 budget will affect low income residents in Toronto. For those location-specific cuts are known, they are disproportionately located in low income neighbourhoods.

http://www.socialplanningtoronto.org/news/january-10-mapping-the-cuts-part-ii/

From our fine colleagues at Social Planning Toronto, check out the use of maps to display how proposed cuts to the City of Toronto 2012 budget will affect low income residents in Toronto. For those location-specific cuts are known, they are disproportionately located in low income neighbourhoods.

http://www.socialplanningtoronto.org/news/december-6-mapping-the-cuts/

A volunteer effort to map all the food stores in Brooklyn, New York, is an example of two rising trends: citizen mapping and increasing scrutiny of urban Americans’ access to healthy food. Would be great to work on similar projects here in Canada. Read the full article here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mapping-the-food-desert

The online map can be found at http://foodcensus.org/

Check out this great blog highlights a project developed by the Tutor/Mentor Connection to “creates maps that look at the relationship among poverty, community resources, school performance, and locations of non-school tutoring/mentoring facilities for K-12 students.”

Mapping For Justice

This is something new from Statistics Canada today.

The Atlas of Canada, produced by Natural Resources Canada in partnership with Statistics Canada, presents a series of maps and accompanying analysis of national and regional data results from the 2006 Census. The first releases focus on Canadian population, age, marital status, immigration, visible minorities and mode of transportation. The maps are available on the Atlas of Canada website (http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/featureditems/index.html).

Future releases will cover topics such as educational attainment, the labour force, languages, housing and income.

Visible Minority Population 2006

Cool Infographics points to a nice GIS page on the BBC which shows crime data for the city of Oxford using heatmaps to map various crime patterns over a one year period. Check it out.

The Opportunity Agenda, with support from the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, commissioned a series of papers that explore best practices for integrating maps into health advocacy, using case studies to present key strategies for effective use and overcoming technical hurdles.

Using Maps to Promote Health Equity

Webware has the list here.

From the article:

“Google Maps is dynamic. Making customized maps through the service isn’t very difficult. But there are a variety of third-party tools on the Web that help you create fully customized Google Maps mashups. From Flickr geotag integration to wedding event mapping to just doodling, you can do it all.”

Check out this new resource. Pretty cool. My good friend Tracey was one of the persons involved in making this a reality. As she says in her blog posting on this:

The Atlas will soon be going live and I hope it starts a conversation between geographers, geomaticians, data providers and colleagues and front line workers in the social sector. We discovered that you have to mortgage the house to purchase data to study homelessness at a national scale in this country! Surely, that cannot be the sign of a democracy!

Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness

Executive Summary

The Pilot Cybercartographic Atlas of Risk of Homelessness is the first national and city scale mapping endeavour that represents risk of homelessness data in an interactive fashion using timelines, different scales and associated text and charts including regional and local scales. The Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness renders in maps and interactive graphs well defined and accepted Canadian risk indicators such as vacancy rates and rental markets, rent geared to income units, families spending 50% of their income on rent and housing starts. When these indicators are visualized in an engaging manner readers can more readily distinguish trends, patterns and issues that cannot be conveyed in static data tables. Atlas modules include the visualization of indicators across time at three scales: Canada, 23 municipalities and 3 featured cities/metropolitan areas. The City of Toronto provides data to show their aging social housing stock; poverty and the disproportionate spending on rent are explored in City of Calgary neighbourhoods while la Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) tells the story of social housing and housing affordability for lower-income renting populations. An interactive GraphoMap shows Vacancy rates, housing starts, and 50%+ spent on rent for 24 cities at three time points while the Canada map shows the rate of change between renters and owners over time. A map of Canada shows the rate of change between renters and owners and clearly demonstrates data issues associated with Canada’s ever changing and incompatible statistical geographic units.

The Atlas is intended as a pilot to demonstrate to a variety of stakeholders that cartographers, geographers and subject matter specialists can work together to create engaging, understandable and useful visual content representing the structural issues of homelessness in Canada. Modules are created with stakeholders so that they may use these to inform public policy. The Atlas is designed using the Nunaliit Cybercartographic Atlas Framework which is an open source software designed at the GCRC specifically to ensure that others can add content to it. For example, a research group, a community group or other cities may have data they have collected during the course of their work or research that could easily be rendered into maps of this kind and be added as a module. This is a living Atlas created specifically for that purpose – to continuously expand on this story and to disseminate the data in a way that is easily understandable. The Atlas could expand to include not only risk of homelessness data but also population health and homelessness, absolute homelessness and housing themes along the continuum of homelessness. Finally, access to and cost of public statistical data were considered barriers to the creation of some content, especially in the social sector.