Race and maps

I'm reading What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, by the anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who I met earlier this year at a symposium (he signed my book "100% human"!). Marks is an authority on race and genetics and his recent work has covered the intellectual history of race as a cultural construct.

In the book Marks compares the different approaches taken by Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon on the question of classification of species. Linnaeus favored a hierarchical structure of species--genera--orders--classes (or families). Now all life could be placed within this structure. Linnaeus had three special cases where he subdivided species into subspecies and humans were one of these (the others were dogs and sheep, showing perhaps what breeds were important in the 17th century!).

Buffon however spoke in a very different way. He rejected the classification of nature into units and instead emphasized its continually varying diversity. Where Linnaeus saw difference and discrete boun daries, Buffon saw continuity and variation.

Aha! This is like the two major approaches to mapping thematic data, one based on discrete boundaries and the other on continuity. In other words, like the choropleth map and the isopleth map. The two naturalists are emblematic of the way that we approach our problems today. While Linnaeus didn't use the term "race" for his subspecies, later scholars did, and it was around this time that the modern concept of race as a small group of well-defined peoples was invented. The parallel concept of the choropleth was not invented until the early 19th century (1826 to be precise). The conjunction of these concepts (race and discrete geographical units or race mapping) also came to prominance in the 19th century.

The trouble with both the Linnaean system and choropleth maps (despite the fact that they are both very popular) is that they take a continually varying phenomenon and apply a category over the top of it.

Take this cancer cluster for example (shown in red):



If we see this cancer through the grid of a choropleth map, say using counties (gray lines) we would likely conclude that 3 of the 4 counties have a high cancer risk and 1 of them has a negligible risk. We would be justified in making this conclusion and yet it is misleading. Even in those 3 high risk counties the risk is not everywhere and yet no doubt the public health message would be that people in those counties are at risk, when clearly many are not. Also even in the county with negligible risk (on the left) there are some people who are at risk and yet no doubt again the public health message would be based on the county as a whole (because that is what our data would show in the choropleth map).

This is analogous to the fallacy of race-based medicine, by the way (eg., sickle cell anemia) where the message goes out that blacks are at risk from it. Well no, it's got nothing to do with race, it depends on your hereditary exposure to malaria. Many light-skinned African peoples in North Africa, and others around the Mediterranean are also at higher risk from it. And of course not all blacks are at risk from it. Yet this becomes a "black" disease, unnecessarily worrying many people and not worrying others enough.

Marks also offers an interesting insight into why we are "mammals" which I hadn't heard before. On what basis did Linnaeus choose the mammae as his defining criterion? Mammals have lots of features that distinguish them from other species, including hair and the fact that we only have one bone in the lower jaw. Why didn't he choose those? It turns out that in the 17th century there was a controversy over breast-feeding. Many richer families were sending out their newborns to wetnurses. Linnaeus was an active opponenet of this and he called us mammals to underline the fact that we should be breast-feeding our own young. (Marks credits Schiebinger's book Nature's Body for this account.)

So the lesson is that while we use categories to order things these very categories are constructs to help us order the world and do not exist in nature itself. This can lead to insights--or equally to mistakes and obfuscations when we believe the categories are natural. This goes both for race and for the choropleth map.

Philip K. Dick and drugs (again)

Today's article in The Guardian by Philip Purser-Hallard about Philip K. Dick's drug use repeats the myth that Dick was a consistent and avid consumer of drugs, and that this is the key to his success as a writer:

Many of Dick's writings contain such pharmaceutical themes, with their protagonists (usually cops) suffering catastrophic changes in perception, often brought about by exotic substances. These "reality shifts" generally lead to an understanding of the true nature of the universe - an effect that Dick, whose drug intake was as prolific as his fiction output, believed he had experienced personally...
His writing had always been fuelled by vast quantities of amphetamines, but he soon branched out into marijuana, mescaline, LSD, sodium pentothal and even PCP...

Dick's relationship with drugs is far more complex than Purser-Hallard suggests. By highlighting, even glorifying, the drug use it gives the impression that Dick's life was primarily oriented around drugs, and rather cheekily suggests that his fiction was inspired by drugs.

What's funny is that this is a comment on Dick's most moving work, an anti-drug novel, A Scanner Darkly. This book, published in 1977 is often cited as a turning point in Dick's relationship with drugs. It's a pretty dark book, about how a drug (Substance D for death) can fry your brains.

According to his biographers, Dick's main drug was speed or uppers, which he started using early in his career to produce enough wordage to support himself (early sci-fi magazines in the 50s and 60s paid by the word). By the 1970s he had had enough of drug use and often volunteered at anti-drug meetings and talks to youth groups. Writing to the county drug abuse program in late 1972--five years before the publication of A Scanner Darkly, Dick said:

Street drugs--especially heroin--are the most serious problem in this country, and perhaps the world, today (source)

"Heroin was one drug Dick never did mess with" according to Lawrence Sutin, his biographer (p. 192). "Never again did Phil take speed on a regular basis" (p. 194).

Dick also wrote to his former doctor that Fall that since his treatment in a Canadian drug clinic he was "without any chemicals; I take no legal drugs either, no tranquilizers or anything. We don't even have an aspirin in the apartment" (Letters of Philip K. Dick 1972-73, pp. 67-8). A Scanner Darkly was written during late 1972 and 1973, exactly at the time then when he was clear of drugs, and as far as I know never again seriously did drugs. In fact his most stunning and visionary work such as VALIS, The Divine Invasion, his Exegesis etc. in other words all the 2/3-1974 stuff, occurred after his rehabilitation at X-Kalay. Well OK, there was one drug that he took in large quantities--snuff.

Reducing the story of Dick's work and life to drugs is I think just lazy and facile. There's more than enough of interest in the work itself to keep people busy.

Scanner Darkly (the film) is now going into wide release. It's a fairly close adaptation of the novel but suffers from the rotoscoping technique somewhat, but more importantly manages to dilute the impact by concentrating too much on stoner-hippie yucks (Woody Harrelson is particularly guilty here, and Keanu Reeves' laid back style is infused with it). A lot of this is played for straight laughs where Dick played it for dark comedic perspective on how drugs fry your brain--the number of gears on the bike scene for example.

It's this scene which in the book first alerts the authorities that the protagonist, Bob Arctor, is in cognitive trouble, because he's there and can't figure out the gears either. In the book they all traipse outside and ask the first person they meet--a 17-year guy--where the "missing" gears are, and he calmly explains it to them. The contrast between the young man "driving an incredibly beat-up old transportation-type car" and the group is written by Dick as a sad commentary on their confusion and child-like intelligence:

"None of you could look at the bike and perceive the simple mathematical operation involved in determining the number of its very small system of gear ratios." In the deputy's voice Fred heard a certain compassion, a measure of being kind. "An operation like that constitutes a junior high school aptitude test. Were you all stoned?"
"No," Fred said.

The other key scene in the book is where Arctor wakes up and sees his one-night stand morph into his girfriend, Donna. The fact that this is recorded on tape and later viewed by Fred (his alter ego) shows something deeply troubling that raises all kinds of Dickian possibilities. It's not just Arctor having a drug episode because the morph (and here the rotoscoping does come into good effect) can be viewed by Fred the cop persona. But is therefore Fred also under the influence? Or did somehow reality change in some way? To reveal some deeper reality?

Dick says in an afterword that the book has no moral: "it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were." But it's clear the price is too high:

In this particular life-style the motto is 'Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,' but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Poll: Bush at new low

CQPolitics map

There was a lot of prognostication (particularly from the Republicans) following the Lamont victory in CT that this spelled trouble for Democrats in the forthcoming midterms. The idea was supposedly that there are "leftist" elements in the Democratic party (not "Democrat Party" as Republicans like to slur) which pushed/manufactured this win, which are therefore of course out of step with the country as a whole. Unfortunately for this line of reasoning it falls down in two main ways: 1. The voters of CT behind the Lamont win were pretty widespread throughout the state and not an elite urban core, and in this they are in step with most Americans--62% of whom disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq, and 71% of whom think the country is heading in the wrong direction; 2. The clear majority of Americans (by 2 to 1) disapprove of Bush in a new AP poll, and a Fox News poll shows Dems with the largest lead since 1982 in the House.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted this week found the president's approval rating has dropped to 33 percent, matching his low in May. His handling of nearly every issue, from the Iraq war to foreign policy, contributed to the president's decline around the nation, even in the Republican-friendly South (AP).

Those are the only two possible bases for the Republican argument, but reality pretty much destroys it.

In fact, the Center for Politics recently updated its overall assessment to predict that Democrats will pick up 12-15 House seats (15 needed), 3-6 Senate seats (6 needed) and 4-6 governorships. CQPolitics meanwhile also reassess favorably for Democrats and their prediction map is shown above.

More on GOTV and micro-politics

Following the Lamont victory in Connecticut on Tuesday, there has been some analysis of the different characteristics of the places that favored either Lamont or Lieberman.

The report shows that Lamont's support was not geographically isolated, but spread throughout the state. The map is not really "micro-politics" in the sense I've used it previously (precinct level or very fine geographies if done by raster) but the analysts expect to do that level of analysis later.

Places that went for Lamont:

• Rural areas
• Areas with a high median household income
• Areas with a high housing value
• Areas with a higher percentage of voters with college degrees or graduate degrees
• Areas with a high percentage of owner-occupied housing
• Areas with a high percentage of married couples
• Areas with a high percentage of children in private schools
• Areas with low turnover in housing
• Areas with high percentage in white-collar occupations
• Areas where many voters have long commute times
• Areas with high concentrations of veterans

Places that went for Liberman:

• Urban areas
• Areas with high numbers of single women
• Areas with high numbers of unmarried partners, including same-sex partners
• Areas with a high percentage of renter-occupied housing
• Areas with a high property tax burden
• Areas with a high percentage of voters working in blue-collar occupations
• Areas with a high percentage of voters working in service sector occupations
• Areas with a high concentration of people receiving social security
• Areas with high concentrations of individuals currently serving in the armed forces


This kind of analysis is tricky because you may be confounding variables; eg., Lamont did well in rural areas, rural areas are where agricultural workers are, but agricultural workers may or may not be significantly on Lamont's side. Similarly with gay voters and urban areas (gays are predominantly in urban areas). There is more than a whiff of the ecological fallacy in this stuff.

Here's a company that does a geographical text search

Here's a company that does a geographical text search and displays the results on an interactive map: Metacartography. I hadn't heard of them before, but they sound like a recent startup. As usual with these things the people involved have little or no formal cartographic/GIS training, but rather stumbled upon geographic visualization. Here's the blurb about the founder:

John founded MetaCarta in 1999 while beginning work on his Ph.D. in physics as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While studying the microclimates of forests, John encountered a need for a new way to view collections of documents: geographically.

Well, geography isn't exactly new, but whatever. Here's what they do--their software "ingests" a ton of different kinds of documents (including web pages and Word docs) and finds all the geographic references (explicit and somehow implied) and then tags them with a locational reference. These can then be produced on an interactive map. So presumably (I haven't played with it) if you type your city name in or perhaps even your street name you could find all the documents that refer to it; maybe even an obscure planning permission from the basement of city hall).

This is another step toward the vision in Mapping Hacks:

Imagine a world in which we can move about physical places, accessing not only what is stored in our brains but also multiple layers of information that have previously been inaccessible: experiences of friends, colleagues and complete strangers in the same space; information about who lives and works in the place...perhaps their political affiliations; crime statistics, the history of community events...This is precisely the physical landscape we will likely inhabit in 10 years"

"The physical landscape we move in will become "deep" with vast amounts of digital information--in text, images, and other sensory forms"

Mapping Hacks, Schuyler Erle, p. xxii, 2005.

Erle will be Guest of Honor at this year's NACIS conference, October 2006.

New online GIS of medieval towns

A team at Queen's University, Belfast has released an online GIS of several medieval towns based on archaeological fieldwork:

Using mapping as a medium, the project examined how urban landscapes were shaped in the middle ages, the project furthers an understanding of the forms and formation of medieval towns. It is the first project to have used spatial technologies – Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) – as a basis for mapping and analysing medieval urban landscapes...

The project focused on a group of ‘new towns’ situated in Wales and England and established in the reign of King Edward I. The towns were all founded between 1277 and 1303. The project looked at thirteen of them in detail: Aberystwyth, Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Caerwys, Conwy, Cricieth, Flint, Harlech, Holt, Newborough, Overton, Rhuddlan, and Winchelsea.

This project combines several of my favorite things, including the overlaying of historic maps in GIS (a la the David Rumsey site) and the characterization of urban areas in terms of its population. You can also download historic data files in shapefile format for offline analysis.

Via the History of Geography listserv

the end of cartographic information or just the beginning?

OK, here's something that confuses me.

There are two grand theories out there right now that relate to maps and cartographic information. You've heard of both of them, but I've never seen them compared. They promise almost exactly opposite results.

The first and most trendy is the so-called "long tail" of information. Adena's recent article summarizes it well:

The "long tail" coined by Chris Anderson (editor of Wired, who followed up with an article in that publication recently and published a book by that name this week, which was referenced in The New York Times) refers to the phenomenon whereby there's lots of demand for a few popular products (movies, books, albums/songs) and hence they produce a lot of revenue for companies (NetFlix, Amazon, iTunes), but there's little demand for lots of other similar products. For example, many people are going to want to rent Stephen Spielberg's Munich (like my brother and my parents and others), but only a few will want to rent Running on the Sun, about a long race through the desert (like me and other crazies who think that's interesting/fun).

So, Blockbuster will make a lot from Munich and other "blockbusters." It'll make less from Running on the Sun, but… and this is the key thing… it doesn't cost Blockbuster (NetFlix, Amazon, fill in your favorite Business 2.0 company here) that much to stock those films that are in "less demand." In fact, by making available all of those "long tail" films for a long time and serving them to the few who want to see them, it can make a pretty penny.

(Actually the key idea here isn't so new; it was invented by the economist Pareto in 1906, you can read about him in Wikipedia here. His principle is more commonly known as the 80:20 rule or the Pareto law.)

On the other hand we have an even more trendy idea known as "globalization." As it relates to maps and mapping, globalization will reduce the choices that we have through corporate integration, the replacement of smaller, diverse stores with gloobally international ones, and the homogenization of world culture. This was recently discussed in the context of WalMart in last month's Harper's (available online here). The author, Barry C. Lynn, argues that Walmart is a latter-day Standard Oil. A staggering 1 in 5 of every retail purchase in America is done at a Walmart's, and they delibaretely and successfully reduce choice:

The idea that Wal-Mart's power actually subverts the functioning of the free market will seem shocking to some. After all, the firm rose to dominance in the same way that many thousands of other companies before it did -- through smart innovation, a unique culture, and a focus on serving the customer. Even a decade ago, Americans could fairly conclude that, in most respects, Wal-Mart's rise had been good for the nation. But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market.

So on the one hand the long tail will provide us with tons of choice and different types of maps, and mappings, while on the other globalization will do exactly the opposite. Which is the real story here?

Brian Harley and the Middle East map

An interesting article from Zaman Online, a Turkish news source discusses the influence of Harley's work in the context of the Middle East, specifically Turkey and the Kurds.

According to the new global imperial regime, the Middle East map will be defined once again; geographies will be erased and cut out again, and borders will shift in accordance with certain objectives. Just as at Brest-Litovsk, just as at Sevres, and just as at Versailles and Yalta, the maps on our desks will quickly be tossed into the wastepaper basket. In other words, once again the maps aren’t real; they will show what the boss wants. The jolting insight of the indefatigable map decipherer of our age, J. B. Harley, comes to mind: “The history of the use of maps shows us that they never show the truth; they only serve to produce a different truth”...

Today the name of the workshop where the draft is feverishly being made is just under our nose – the “Great Middle East Project.” First we learned its name from the American press, and then we heard statements from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that they wanted to make Diyarbakir the center of this project, and we gave credit to Harley one more time. The map-makers have got to work. Who could have prevented it? The Middle East map grows and shrinks; countries, peoples, and cultures enter and exit.

See also here.

Armin Lobeck (1886-1958)

NARA April 06 032
Originally uploaded by ubikcan.
Source: NARA RG256, Entry 52 Folder 1-37

Detail of Armin Lobeck's block map of Albania, prepared for the American Inquiry in 1918. A particularly beautiful piece of work, Lobeck was renowned for his perspectival maps such as this example.

His work was so good that he taken by the American government to Paris to make maps for the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He was a good observer and an evocative writer. Here is an extract of a letter he wrote while on board the ship with the president. It gives a good idea of daily life on the ship and the time it took to cross the Atlantic:

Dec. 12, 1918. [On board the USS Washington].
How are we idling our time at sea? With numerous and distinguished guests on board, all willing to talk of interesting experiences and fascinating topics, with the beautiful sea spread before our eyes and the finest of semi-tropical weather to tempt us always on deck, with three libraries of books, with a large Conference Room filled with maps, with the President and Mrs. Wilson, and Secretary [of State] and Mrs. Lansing, and Ambassador Davis, and ex-Ambassador White and Jusserand, General Churchill, Colonel Ayers, George Creel and others bobbing around and demanding attention, with three good meals a day and a frequent salt water shower, with an interesting ship filled with interesting machinery, coal bunkers, stoking rooms, troop quarters, bakery shops, all to be looked over, with the experiences of 1200 sailors to be listened to, with boxing and wrestling matches, pie eating contests, depth-bomb exhibitions by the convoying destroyers, target practice by the Pennsylvania, with two band concerts a day and a moving picture show every evening, with crew song recitals and a crew vaudeville, with the Azores relieving the journey by the anticipation of seeing them, the charming reality and the delightful memory of looking back at them, with the official photographer continually at work taking large groups and singles and moving pictures of all of us in little groups, with games of chess and discussions of affairs, with a long wireless report to be read every morning, and the need of brushing up on French, with an odd job or two now and then, there remain but few unoccupied moments on this momentous journey...

The French soldiers say France went into the war to win back Alsace-Lorraine, the British to get the German African colonies, and the Americans to get souvenirs...

His classic book Things Maps Don't Tell Us, is still in print.

Princess Margaret's Face Lift

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an eclectic terrain of limousines and bodyguards, private helicopters and state functions. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

--J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 111.

Check out atlas(t)

Just discovered this fantastic new blog, atlas(t), on maps and ways of defining (lots of stuff on naming; several posts on Monmonier's new book). From their opening statement:

We will be explicitly and unapologetically political; we will speak/write from our own cultural context and perspective and not pretend to any impossible journalistic objectivity; we will rant and complain all we like.

We will behave as if this blog is in itself a political act, and furthermore as if the "real estate" or virtual space occupied by this blog is of socio-political and cultural importance ... as if, in fact, our being here mattered.

Wish I'd said that! Mucho cool stuff, check it out.

Study: Cell Phone Users as Bad as Drunk Drivers!

I knew it!

Even using the hands free option, cell phone drivers drive as poorly as those legally over the limit. What's also interesting is that cell phone users deny being affected and think they are driving just fine.

Anybody read this or know about it?

A new book: The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History by Arthur Klinghoffer at Rutgers (Camden) University?

The Amazon page doesn't have much info, but the description looks interesting. Klinghoffr is apparently a prof. of political scince.

New Method for Dating Maps

Cool. Perhaps this will allow dating of all those controversial maps!

A new and relatively simple method for discovering the date when centuries-old art prints and books were produced has been developed at Penn State. The method could reveal long-sought information about thousands of undated works printed on hand-operated presses prior to the development of modern printing methods in the mid-19th century, including works by Rembrandt and Shakespeare.

Hedges, a world-renowned biologist whose hobby involves Renaissance prints and maps, developed his "print clock" method by first measuring time-related changes in 2,674 Renaissance works. He found that the number of breaks in the lines of images printed from woodblock carvings increased over time, while the image intensity became more pale in copperplate prints...

Hedges' woodblock studies involved four editions of Bordone's Isolario, an atlas containing maps of islands. The print date was known for three of the editions, published in 1528, 1534, and 1547, but the age of the undated book has been debated for nearly 200 years, with estimates ranging from 1537 to 1570...

In addition, Hedges used his print-clock technique to calculate the day on which there were no cracks in the wood, revealing the date when the artist finished carving the woodblock. "This estimate of the date the woodblock was carved seemed odd because it was ten years before the date of the first print, but it turned out that the carving date agreed with the historical records, which place the cartography in that earlier decade," Hedges says.

Red State, Blue State

Digby has an important post about political values and the red state-blue state divide. While at first sight it appears to have nothing to do with maps, it's actually really about the thing that maps are about themselves: namely the political scene itself.

The immediate context is Josh Marshall's post about the New Yorker piece decrying the fact that Democrats are liberals and keep nominating obviously unwinnable candidates:

I think I've read this article one hundred times -- both in its pre-2006 versions and the new-and-improved 2006 editions.

It goes something like this.

President Bush is very unpopular these days and Democrats think they may win back the Congress because of it. But is hating President Bush enough? Or do Democrats need a positive agenda as an alternative to the Republicans? It is thought by some that it might not be enough. Those somes are right to be worried because there aren't as many liberals in the US as conservatives. So trying to frame the election around torture and warrantless wiretaps may not be a good idea. Another reason to be worried is that the white working class, farmers, suburbanites and deeply religious are no longer all reliable Democratic constituencies. But there are some candidates trying to reach out to these ignored constituencies. But will those centrists be forced to cater to the party base and its philosophy of pessimism? It is feared by some that they may be forced to cater.

That's Josh's parody/summary of the New Yorker. Don't nominate a candidate who caters to the progressive base, avoid those values, move to the center, there aren't enough supporters ("liberals") to win.

Both Josh and Digby reject this approach on the following grounds:

1. Digby says that this approach has been tried and it doesn't work: conservatives still hate the southern/centrist/religious Democratic candidates (their names were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). One was impeached and the other is being attacked with censure, 25 years after leaving office.

2. Here's where the geography/maps come in: the point is that there's no such thing as red state/blue state. Maps sometimes make it look like that, but what is really out there is a bunch of people with varying views and we can draw lines around them in any number of ways. Also not to mention that elections take place at all levels of geography (federal, state, local, urban, suburban, exurban, rural...). So the key is not to see a red state and say it's unwinnable, but to see it as diverse and without stereotyped values. In this regard the argument by Ruy Teixeira on whether the suburbas "are" really Republican or a mix of values is very exciting and one of the pieces that got me thinking about mapping and politics. If you could map that diversity more closely and less stereotypically, perhaps at precision mapping levels, you would I think see the diversity. But how to reveal the diversity--that's my interest.

3. Finally, it's still the case that holding to your values is a good thing. Conservative values are on the wrong side of history, especially socially. As for the mood of the country being conservative:

The "mood of the country" is an extremely complex, ephemeral thing with many permutations, not all of them political. But if the the elite press and its GOP string pullers have decided that the political mood is conservative, the last thing I want to do is accomodate it. I want to change it.

Dem's fighting words!

Art:Maps

Jasper Johns "Map" 1963

The history of the relationship between mapping and art is a long and interesting one. While people like Jasper Johns are well known in this regard (see his painting "Map" above) there are literally hundreds of other artists working in this vein in one way or another.



The journal Cartographic Perspectives has featured a wide variety of map-art on its covers (either maps done artistically or art done cartographically) as seen here in this composite cover. A recent special issue had several articles on map-art.

I'm hoping to cover this topic a lot more on this blog. Suggestions would be welcome--I'm no expert!

Canadian Satellite: New Orleans is Sinking

First day of the new hurricane season today and a new RADARSAT map of New Orleans shows it is sinking faster than previously thought. On average it is sinking at 6mm a year, though in some areas as much as 29mm a year.

Apparently these data are gathered by a Canadian satellite because the US doesn't have an equivalent satellite for research purposes. Nature reports (via New Scientist) that this map may be influential in influencing policy in the area for rebuilding (the Mayor is sworn in today as well).

Of course New Orleans is on a delta and deltas are supposed to acquire silt, but the Mississippi is so channelized that all the deposits are washed out to sea.

GOV-USA: Leip Vs. Kos

(Updated)

Gubernatorial Predictions, 2006.

Kos (9 pickups):













NY, MA, OH, AR, MD, CO, NV, RI, MN


Leip (5 pickups, note reversed color scheme):



MN, AR, OH, NY, MA

Update. Alaska was one other state Kos identified as a potential pickup, given that the GOP incumbent has a favorability rating of minus fifty. And it looks like there will indeed be an opportunity there.

Why are Counties Difficult to Predict?

A couple of weeks ago Chris Bowers of myDD posted his map of political power by county:


This map is an attempt to show (using the typical red-Republican and blue-Democratic colors) how the country now looks in terms of approval ratings. Using it, Bowers can reasonably claim that the country has gone quite "blue" and he cites the latest SurveyUSA poll to show that in only 3 states does the President have favorable ratings (Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, see map).

Looks encouraging for liberals, right? In fact this map points up some interesting issues to do with politics at levels more detailed than the state. First, the map above is speculation, or perhaps at best extrapolation. As most people know, there are over 3,100 counties in the USA and it's difficult to say how they would look. As comments to Bowers' own post pointed out, his method is unclear (and not likely to be accurate).

Why is this? And why are counties so difficult to predict, politically?

1. There is a lack of data collected at that geographic scale

2. Inferring county-level data from available state data runs into the well-known ecological fallacy.

3. Even if every county was polled, there are many sparsely populated counties in America, which renders the result susceptible to sampling error. We'd also need to know the applicable "sampling frame" or the subset of the population the sample was drawn from (eg., registered voters, random telephone calls, etc.) which also shapes the result.

Perhaps we should forget about this level of data then? No: counties (and geographies at even finer levels of detail) are important:

1. Although many races occur statewide (notably Presidential and Senators) the House of Representatives and of course races for state office are based on districts within the state.

2. Getting an idea of support at the detailed level is important for voter registration and GOTV. You'll want to target areas perhaps even as detailed as the local precinct in GOTV or voter registration.

While I don't know the method used in producing the map above, it wouldn't be impossible to produce a map that estimated political support at the county level, if you could combine good local data/knowledge, previous county-level data (eg., percentage voting Kerry-Bush in '04) and some stratified sampling. I'm thinking of the Census Bureau ACS here.

Important resources:

1. David Leip's Electoral Atlas (purchase data at county level)

2. Anthony Robinson has free voting data he created himself

2. Fairdata2000

Cool New Map App

Following my post about the county level political data Morten Neilsen of "SharpGIS" has created a cool new mapping application to display the whole dataset (available from Anthony Robinson at Penn State).



Morten uses a double-ended color ramp which I'm not sure would pass muster in design textbooks, but that aside, it's a good example of what can be done when raw data are shared. Using his web app you can pull down and instantly display any of the data sets that Penn State makes available. I wasn't previously aware of the application SharpMap he uses but I was impressed by how quickly something can be created with it. Thanks!

Another correspondent also left a note about the FairData site which takes a slightly different approach. They have tons of data and provide an interactive map interface to it (ie they handle the mapping and the data rather than distributing the data for people to play with). This has the advantage of providing users with maps without having to learn map software. They appear to use Maptitude for the Web, which I found a bit clunky. Specifically the Info button doesn't work in Firefox (which they acknowledge).

These kinds of web-distributed political efforts have a real potential to help precision-mapping of get out the vote (GOTV) and voter registration efforts. They may even help people become more interested in politics since these tools (previously only available to precinct captains and activists) are now available to all.

The Internet: Net Neutrality or Pay to Play?

Updated below

As a long-time user of the Internet, I'm naturally very concerned when something threatens access to it or threatens to balkanize it into little segments. Unfortunately there is such a threat at the moment. Telecom companies want to regulate content on the web and internet by differentially charging users to see content. Obviously, if access to web content varies by where you live or by how much you're willing to pay, that is, pay to play, this is not good. It will especially affect the little guy, most of us.

The concept of "net neutrality" is that the web should be open to all--as it is now. Major content providers such as Yahoo and Google are in favor of it. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is in favor of it.

Today a bipartisan bill, HR 5417 is being marked up. It's stated goal is to offer protections to net neutrality. Here's more info.

Update. The Judiciary Committee Dems seemed to have voted the right way in favor of the bill. Some commentators are warning of telcos obfuscation of the issue, so watch out.

Money Map

Follow the money:



USA Political donations


Atlanta political donations

I think the ATL map is interesting because everything I've seen about Atlanta suggests it is a tale of two cities ( north and south) rather than just urban/suburban ring. We see that again here. It really is amazing how consistent the pattern is. Mind you, DeKalb county to the East is not really on this map, so check out liberal Decatur:



Source: Fundrace, Matthew Kane

County level map, 2004

Usually for voting results you see statewide maps. These are useful in a presidential election because of the electoral college. they are less useful for getting a more detailed view of voters' preferences. Unfortunately data at the county level are not usually free.

However, I recently found some great county level data from Anthony Robinson which has voting data like the following:
















I think it makes a very interesting map. You could do the same for a Bush strength map as well.

Prediction map of governors

Kos has a new prediction map of state governors:

Now

Jan. 2007

He's predicting Dem pickups in 9 states and no GOP pickups. As he points out, the deep South remains a problem for Dems.

David Leips's polling data are available here (note reversed color scheme).

How mappy are we? Very.

It's a common meme that mapping is dead. Cartography has been killed off by digital maps and GIS. Yet the fact is we live in a world populated by more maps than ever. More maps are produced today than at any other time in human history. MapQuest may very well be the world's biggest map publisher with 60 million maps published every day.

How mappy are we? Consider this story* from South Texas, where a small town you've never heard of has implemented an online GIS for their residents. There's nothing particularly different about this system, the point is that places like McAllen Texas are implementing them. It's the sheer everydayness of mapping that is the point here.



*Please excuse the link to a newspaper owned by the yucky Freedom Communications, who enegage in so-called "astroturf" editorials.

Columbus Officially Buried in Spain

A new DNA analysis of remains have confirmed that at least part of Columbus' body is buried in Spain:

MADRID, Spain - Scientists said Friday they have confirmed that at least some of Christopher Columbus' remains were buried inside a Spanish cathedral, a discovery that could help end a century-old debate over the explorer's final resting place.

I suppose this still leaves open the possibility that there are some remains in the Dominican Republic as well but they don't appear to want them to be tested.

Live satellite tracking!

That was quick.

Last October I complained that there were no mashups of live satellite tracking.

Now there is and it's extremely cool:

The end of paper maps

The Times predicts the end of paper maps:

[GPS is] gradually killing off maps, the charts that have revealed the changing contours of our world and minds since the birth of culture. English mapmakers once placed the phrase Hic sunt dracones, “Here be dragons”, on maps to mark the edges of the known world. Charlene [the GPS] has slain what few dragons remained. With a GPS embedded in dashboard, wristwatch or mobile telephone, we will never be lost again.

Apart from the fact that cartographers never actually did put "here be dragons" on maps, I don't think our London correspondent is right. There's no way that paper maps will disappear. Did the horse disappear with the invention of the automobile? No, it exists alongside the car, although certainly its purpose changed.

The paper map is just too darned useful; it's light, needs no electricity, and is interoperable across systems and cultures. How many times have you printed out a digital map? I rest my case.

A Perfect combo

A perfect combo of map and politics is achieved in the following map. Only 3 states in America give the President a positive job approval rating:















Source: Billmon, data here

The Politics of Geography

The latest (5/15/06) opinion polls for President Bush in Georgia show an interesting geographical split between the Atlanta metro area and rural Georgia. But even outside the metro area his unfavorable ratings are high. Georgia as a whole is 43% approve, 55% disapprove.


South and East Georgia



Metro Atlanta



All Georgia

Crashing the Gate, Atlanta!

Crashing the Gate came to Atlanta on Tuesday. Markos of Daily Kos was there and talked a bit about the new political landscape of netroot activism before taking some Q&A. It's podcasted here by the Georgia podcast network. The turnout, in Atlanta's famous Manuel's Tavern, was fantastic! I've only got low-res cellphone pictures, but here they are:


Getting ready


Markos and founder of Air America(?)


My attempt at a crowd scene...

Beautiful block diagrams

Block diagrams are out of favor today, but at one time they were a useful and evocative way of representing terrain. One of the acknowledged experts in this field was Armin Lobeck (1886 - 1958). It's a shame that Lobeck's work is not better known (though his book things Maps Don't tell us is still in print and features a selection of his diagrams). As far as I know the only biographical work on him is a Masters thesis by Fred Grandinetti.

During WWI Lobeck was employed by the US government in their preparations for peace and he made a number of detailed studies of the areas likely to be discussed.

Here are some images of these maps (available at the National Archives, College Park, MD).

"The Internet is our Edgar R. Murrow. It's all we have."

That comment was made in response to a story on Eric Boehlert's new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush which documents the way the press is not doing it's job anymore: critically investigating the spin emanating from the White House. In fact, the book suggests (not for the first time) that the press's complicity in the "Swift Boat" attacks on Kerry lost him the election and all that that entails.

Colbert's amazing routine at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner last Saturday is another example, and if it has been under-reported by the "MSM" this week, it's probably because of zingers like this one:

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!

Journos = typists.

So it's no surprise that people turn to the internet to get other news. Things like google.news.com or the BBC Online and as I've said before investigative blogging (Juan Cole, Atrios, TPMuckraker, etc.).

In this context then the recent moves to threaten "net neutrality" are extremely dangerous. If content is to be differentially moved across the internet because telcos and cable companies want people to pay them based on that content [not format] then we're hosed. I know threats to the internet have been around almost as long as... well the internet itself, but read here and make up your own mind. It's worth noting that the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, is on record preferring content neutrality.

We should know by now that knowledge is not separate from power.

More Recent Sprawl Analyses

Since the NLCD data in the study cited below are a little old as Brian mentions below (not that that invalidates the data of course, particularly for time series analysis), here are some references to more recent studies:

Yang, Xiaojun "Satellite Monitoring of Urban Spatial Growth in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area" Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 2002, 68(7). Uses data from 1973-1999 (Thematic Mapper/Landsat).

Yang, X. and Lo, C.P. "Modelling Urban Growth and Landscape Changes in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area" Int. J. Geog. Inf. Sci. 17(5): 463-488.

Finally, newer NLCD data actually are becoming available here (2002). Comparison of NLCD and Landscan data:


NLCD 2001 on left, Landscan on right. Approx. same scale but not exactly (and on diff. projections I believe).

Detail of downtown Atlanta. Red indicates urban areas I believe. City of Atlanta boundary shown in black. Original resolution is 30m square.

Atlanta May 1 Rally

Pictures from the rally today in Atlanta.

Satellite Imagery of Sprawl

Coincidentally to my posts on population densities in the Southeast and in Atlanta, a new study has been announced using satellite imagery to measure urban sprawl:


Atlanta urban area, yellow = 1976, red = 1992)

The data are appreciably out of date unfortunately, especially for rapidly growing areas such as Atlanta, but still nevertheless provide an interesting perspective. The authors created a nationwide set of 30 square meter cells from the USGS National Land Cover data (mentioned below).

It should be easy enough to georeference this data even without the original files. There's also an interesting nationwide poster done on the Albers Equal Area projection with a nice shaded relief background.

Here is the actual paper.

(h/t to Cartography).

FBI Secretly Spied on 3,501 US Citizens in 2005

The AP reported today that the government secretly issued National Security Letters on 3,501 US citizens and legal residents to look at their bank, credit card, telephone and Internet companies in 2005.

Last year 9,254 NSLs were issued against 3,501 people but we don't know how many were issued in previous years. We only know this number because of reporting requirements in the Patriot Act, although there are possibly thousands of other letters unreported. I wrote about this last December, when the Washington Post revealed the fact that these letters are highly secret (no legal oversight) and if you get one you can't mention it to anyone else and of course seek legal advice:

The FBI security letters have been the subject of legal battles in two federal courts because, until the Patriot Act changes, recipients were barred from telling anyone about them.
Ann Beeson, the associate legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the report to Congress "confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval."

So far only two organizations have challenged NSLs, both represented by the ACLU. Basically these are secret subpoenas sent to organizations for information about their clients or customers.

Landscan and urban areas

(Updated below)


Here is a comparison of Landscan (again just pop count, needs to be corrected for pop density) and official "urban areas."

Obviously it matches up quite well but we'd need to see next how these urban areas were defined. The City of Atlanta, by the way, would be an even smaller area in the middle (I didn't include it for clarity but will put on a later posting).

Update: here it is:

More on Landscan

I said yesterday that Landscan and CIESIN incorporate additional (ancillary) population estimates. In many cases census data are too coarse a resolution (blocks in the US) or out of date. What data does Landscan incorporate?

Their most recent data is for 2004. It includes some high-resolution land cover data from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), administrative boundaries, and some satellite imagery I'm not familiar with (anyone? what is NGA's VMAP-1 or CIB), plus some actual imagery from the space shuttle on topography (SRTM) which is pretty cool. For more see here.

Other data include roads (TIGER in the US); slope angle (the Digital Terrain elevation [DTED] from the NGA predecessor, NIMA); land cover imagery in this case USGS Global Land Cover Characteristics (GLCC)--again I'm not familiar with this, if anybody has any info please leave in comments--is it any good, are there any better ones for the SE USA?

Also populated places (the VMAP data); nighttime lights; and census data being allocated to cells by a so-called "smart" interpolation routine (if roads are in the cell, allocate more population?).

Resolution is apparently 30" by 30" or about 1 square kilometer, hence much better than CIESIN which is 2.5' at best.

Now I need to know how to apply the density grid. There's no documentation on the Landscan site and emails to their office go unanswered.

Characterizing Places with GIS

I plan to start a series of posts that attempt to characterize the US southeast and Atlanta in particular using GIS.

There are a number of reasons to do this, partly because I want to see how easy or difficult it is to do with GIS and what insights it affords.

Obviously Census Bureau data will be very important, either from 2000 or updates via ACS. I've never used ACS so that is another reason to become more familiar with it. First up though, two non-census sources for population: Landscan (bottom right) and CIESIN (top left).













Both use supplemental data (lights at night etc.) to provide estimates of population. CIESIN data are at 2.5' (minutes) resolution.

Here is a close up, both maps on the same scale (1:1,600,000):

Landscan on left and CIESIN on right. It would appear that Landscan is far superior, but the advantage of CIESIN is that it is downloadable as population density. I don't believe the Landscan is, rather it is population totals per unit area. Since unit area varies with latititude (though perhaps not much in the detailed view) this can throw things off. So, there is a correction factor you have to use, a density grid:



Update: If anyone can tell me how to apply this correcting grid, please let me know.

What is a norg?

I've posted before about the apparent decline in news reporting standards--particularly the susceptibility of leading newspapers to become mere mouthpieces for the White House--below.

Rather than turn this into a fruitless "blogs vs. newspapers" however, a group of people from both sides of the aisle got together recently at the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia (here and here). One of their ideas which bears further discussion is that both bloggers and newspapers should move beyond differences to see that they are both engaged in, if not news papers, then "news organizations" (norgs):

"I say this is the day that the war ends. This isn’t journalism against bloggers anymore. It never was, really. This is journalists and bloggers together in favor of news." (Jeff Jarvis)

and...

"Karl Martino comes up with the wiser metaphor for media’s world change. We always say that TV didn’t kill radio; ergo, newspapers must be safe. Karl, instead, sees this as LPs moving to CDs to MP3s. One m medium — paper — may, indeed, go away. “The music remains. The music doesn’t go away.”"

If you believe this, then you may see an analogy with mapping and cartography. When digital cartography became available to people in the 1980s there were two similar camps--the "new mappers" call them who thought that paper maps would either fade away or become less preferable, and the old school who rejected this technology.

But there's a third way, which is to grab hold of the opportunities of new technology, while understanding that digital interactive maps are just a new way of doing what cultures have been doing for thousands of years, namely understanding their world(s) spatially.

There's a big invested interest in (paper) newspapers. For the moment I don't see innovation coming out of the newspapers, instead I see defensiveness and ignorance about blogging (with exceptions of course). To many newspapers, blogging is a screaming morass of shrill rude people; perhaps a particualrly attractive meme to newspapers, but not one that will help them in the long run.

I'd be interested to see if this third option of "norgs" can get beyond the divide.

Blogs and investigative journalism, Part 2

So the Washington Post hiring of a RedState blogger, Ben Domenech has played itself out as of 1:17pm today. As was becoming obvious as soon as the plagiarism charges came out, Domenech has had to resign.

In case you've been under a rock this week, here is a brief timeline:

Tuesday March 21, 4:01pm: WaPo hires Domenech
Friday March 24, 1:17pm, WaPo announces Domenech resignation

What happened in between? I'd call it investigative journalism which turned up the fact that Domenech repeatedly committed plagiarism (passing someone else's work off as your own) in college and afterwards. This was a serious embarrassment because Domenech, beside gaining the imprimatur of the Washington Post, was a well-connected Republican, who had edited Michelle Malkin's book (she issued a pre-resignation distancing post), was an editor at Regnery Publishing, and had founded RedState, . The investigation was carried out by the blogosphere however, not by the paper, whose credibility is now somewhat tarnished, especially considering the Deborah Howell flap not too long ago.

As someone put it, why couldn't the Post have done the checking that half a dozen bloggers in their pajamas could do with Google?

The Post's credibility is also damaged because they issued mixed messages about why they hired Domenech; with the Washingtonpost.com's Opinions Editor saying he wasn't hired because of his political beliefs, and then Jim Brady Executive Editor saying he was hired to overcome an underrepresentation of conservative voices (sort of a political quota?).

What can we learn from this?

1. The blogosphere is more capable and more willing to use investigative tools such as Google and Lexis-Nexis, not just to find articles but to compare them. I mentioned this factor in my earlier post when I talked about comparing how people's statements change over time and holding people accountable for what they said earlier when they want to rewrite history.

2. The old media still hasn't grasped what blogs are and can be

3. One example of IJ does not mean it's all over for the MSM or that all bloggers do good investigative journalism. What it shows to me, coupled with the decline in readership of hard-copy newspapers (WaPo down 4% from last year), is that a shift may be going on. Chomsky pointed out ages ago in his book Manufacturing Consent that it was dangerous for news media to be owned by so few companies because it narrows the range of political speech, and I think certainly today we see that the USA's major newspapers have abrogated their role as independent voices (the WaPo and NYT in particular are basically conservative small-c establishment voices).

4. Papers are still capable of the week-long series of stories into an issue, usually aimed at garnering the Pulitzer (the traditional meaning of IJ), but I'm talking about the day-in and day-out critical attitiude that doesn't just swallow talking points and White House spin (whoever's in there). Whether it's due to inside the Beltway received wisdom, laziness, lack of resources (WaPo just reduced its newsroom by 80 staff) I don't know. But newspapers are no longer "critical" whereas political blogs are increasingly so.

Two fantastic web 2.0 like resources

I found two fantastic resources that perhaps leverage a bit of the style of web 2.0 today.

The first is ArchiveGrid, an integrated location to search across historical archives. The archives it searches are in the thousands, including major ones like the American Philosophical Society, Johns Hopkins university, Yale University and so on. I did a few test searches of archives I'm familiar with using people's names and it found them just fine (also a new series of papers I wasn't previously familiar with!). This is invalubale.

The second is CiteULike, a web-based service to organise your papers and citations. I already use EndNote, the well-known citation library software and have the library on a jump drive so it travels with me. What's interesting about CiteULike though is that it is a web-based service that integrates with the major online providers of journals (JSTOR, Ingenta, etc.). I still have to see if this service will be useful enough (currently you can export to EndNote but not import from it). You can share your articles with others, or see what others are reading.

Both are free, though ArchiveGrid may go pay if they don't get funding after May.

One of the most powerful blog entries I've ever read

.... from georgia10.

I can't write as well as that and maybe it's a bit long, but for a 23 year old to be feeling this is just intense.

Sac. Bee: "The entire country should take note of this cartography"

The Sacramento Bee writes that FEMA is about to release new flood zone maps for New Orleans:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which the Bush administration has turned into a bureaucratic albatross, possesses enormous leverage in this process. Next month, FEMA is expected to finally release new flood maps that will determine where and at what elevation New Orleans homeowners can rebuild. The entire country should take note of this cartography. Billions of dollars in federal relief dollars hinge on FEMA's decision.

FEMA needs to release these maps without delay.

Where did the journalism go? To blogs

I will confess that I don't subscribe to a hard-copy newspaper, nor do I watch tv. I do listen to the radio, but I don't donate to NPR. How do I get news?

Mostly, I read political blogs. I guess starting around last year I started a new phase of relationship with blogs. I've read them on and off since 2002 and my work has involved some study of them, and I've even written about them in a 2003 book. But last year marked for me the emergence of political blogs as active, investigative journalism--not just repeating or linking to stories in the mainstream media, but digging up information and discussing topics the MSM wouldn't touch. In short, they report and investigate. Blogs even combat the MSM (eg., the Washington Post, NYT) over their inherently lazy and establishment stance, as for example this typical post does.

Where did investigative journalism go? Into blogs. Sure, occasionally the MSM will pull out a major investigative piece such as this NYT piece revealing persistent torture by a secretive US task force (h/t Daily Kos). But the day-in, day-out performance of the MSM reveals that they are no longer the go-to source for news in this country.

I'm excited by blogs. They're a major presence. Some get a million visits per day. Most entries get hundreds of responses and follow-up discussion among readers. One thing confused me when I first started reading them: the "open thread" link. This is an automated post (by a "threadbot") containing no content to which you can post comments. Why on earth, I thought? Answer: simply because readers are so participatory that they need openings in which to post discussion. Can you imagine a situation in your own workplace where people need special automatically created openings because they are begging to participate? Can you imagine a college classroom like this?

There are several mistakes you can make about blogs. The first is to ignore their importance. Recently, members of my professional organization sent out a listserv message advertising a meeting in which people would talk about the relevance of our work and its involvement with the public. This group is very interested in connecting and working with the "people." No bloggers or even discussion of blogging was included, and I got no response to my suggestion for this. Let's see, technorati currently indexes 30.8 million blogs. This political blog has had 26.3 million visitors since April 2004. This blog has 3.7 million unique visitors this week and is one of the most-read websites in the world. Etc. Relevance? Try 39,763 links from 8,345 sites for this blog.

A second mistake is to imagine blogging as some kind of raucous, boiling mass of shouting. On the contrary, the best blogs provide new information, often reading documents, proposed bills, laws, small print of regulations, looking back at what people said in 2003 and what they say now (ie., research and investigation), even muckraking sites with full-time staffs, that is not done anywhere else. And it's not just opinion, but professional insight. Glenn Greenwald's amazing site for example, focuses on First Amendment issues, the FISA and NSA controversy and related issues. Why? He has over ten years experience in First Amendment litigation.

A third mistake is to characterize bloggers as people from the political extremes. Yes you can always find that (you can find anything in 30.8 million blogs) but the top blogs, the ones that make an impact are not extremist (well, apart from Michelle Malkin!).

Looking over the blogging landscape then we see a tremendous uptake in citizen participation of the political process. We're also seeing a marked decline in newspaper subscriptions and a shift to newspaper websites (some even have blogs that allow comments).

The point of all this? There's a couple of bills before Congress that seek to equate blogging with campaign finance, rather than the evolution of the press. MyDD explains here. Sure it's seemingly boring but the last thing we need right now is to squelch this political participation (of any stripe). As I understand it, one bill, supported by bloggers, would leave things as they are for the moment (HR 1606). Another bill, fronted by so-called campaign finance reformers like Nancy Pelosi, who are working on a pre-internet mentality, would say political blogs are political campaigns because they link to candidates and often endorse them (never mind that newspapers do that too).

We need to clearly state here at the transition of journalism from MSM to the internet that low-barrier citizen entry into politics is a good thing that shouldn't be regulated as campaigning.

Should we Collect Race Data?

Here's a question: should we collect race data and use it in mapping and GIS? That is, should the government or the states have data categories in things like the census in which information on race is collected? Currently the Unites States does collect this kind of race-based data. The Census Bureau, for example, has categories in which respondents designate both their "ethnicity" (meaning whether they are Hispanic or not) and their "race" (see sample forms from 2000 Census).

So what would happen if we stopped collecting this data? We could look at France for an answer. Since 1978 they have barred the collection of race data without permission:

Unlike the United States, Britain, or even the Netherlands, France maintains a "color-blind" model of public policy. This means that it targets virtually no policies directly at racial or ethnic groups. Instead, it uses geographic or class criteria to address issues of social inequalities.

Race is a pervasive problem in this country and several professional organizations that deal with racial issues, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Association of Anthropologists, have issued statements on race data collection. Perhaps not surprisingly they come to different conclusions. Anthropologists, citing their research since WWII which indicates there is no biological reality to race, are generally quite sceptical about it, and careful to reject the notion of clear and natural categories of humans. Race was invented in the 18th century in order to put some people above others:

How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The "racial" worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth.

There's also a good discussion on this site called "Is race real?"

The sociology statement agonises over the issue before coming down squarely in favor of the need for race data collection. The sociology profession believes it is necessary in order to combat social inequalities, although they don't explain how a country like France can do so without using race data.

The issue is that racial categories have more variation within them than between them. We know from genetics that the vast majority of physical differences, about 94%, occurs within racial groups. That means that only about 6% of genetic differences occur between the typical races.

So the grouping has internal variation that is very meaningful. This is much like the ecological fallacy, or ecological inference problem which makes it a mistake to infer individual properties based on aggregate level data. The EIP is one of the most fundamental problems of the social sciences, given that our data is often at group level (eg., Census data tracts).

"Race" is another instance of this common problem. The internal and continuous nature of the variation is masked by the discrete category. Both professional associations are of course anti-racist and seeking to end racism. But it's worth remembering that in order to have racism you have to speak, deal with, and refer to... race. It is the very racial categories and their constant reproduction in our discourse and datasets that allows for racism.

ArcGIS 9.2 demo at NACIS

Update: ArcNews now has an article on all this by Paul Hardy online.

Original article (Oct. 14, 2005):
Reps from ESRI gave a demo of the new ArcGIS 9.2 cartography capabilities at NACIS. Apparently 9.2 will go beta this December and be in release in 2nd quarter 2006. The cartography design aspects are implemented in what they are currently calling "Representation."

To use, you "convert to representation" and start editing. An Illustrator-like task bar comes up which allow you to edit objects on the map. ESRI emphasized these as personal overrides though, and that you would normally set up rules or sets of attributes for feature classes. This will be core functionality not an extension. So these rules will initiate two extra columns in the geodatabase ("rule" and "overrides").

Representation will also be part of ArcToolbox.

Update: ESRI Q+A at another session with Paul Hardy (phardy@esri.com) and an ESRI person in the audience mentioned the issue of "dicing." Apparently if you export to Illustrator there is a 2,000 node limit, but this can be fixed via an undocumented registry hack. The fix for this and other issues will NOT be in 9.2.

From l'Etat, c'est moi, to l'etat, c'est George

An interesting paper in Cartographica, titled somewhat obscurely "From l'etat c'est moi to l'etat c'est l'etat: Mapping in early modern France" has been published by Christine Petto, professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University.

Her argument is that mapping assisted and shaped the way political government shifted from sovereignty (the king, the prince, or l'etat c'est moi) to the (more familiar to us) modern state of government (or l'etat c'est l'etat). Petto's analysis is quite in line with standard history. In the west we've changed from all-powerful sovereigns to elected government in one form or another. In the USA, you could even say the Revolution was all about throwing off the dictatorship of the (foreign) ruler George III, and asserting this self-governance of the people. Goodbye to the sovereign!

I wonder then, what we are to make of the John Yoo theory of government? In case you've never heard of him, Yoo was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Whitehouse and he wrote his memo in the wake of 9/11. Basically it argues that all power in wartime rests in the Executive, that is, the office of the President:

"In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President's authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make."

As First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald points out, this arrogation of powers by the current administration is not a fringe academic theory, but rather its a defining characteristic. The Yoo memo has been used to justify the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, among other things.

It's rather strange that we are facing a situation where the country is swinging back to sovereignty again.