![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Terri Senft - On maps.
Nov. 4th, 2004
11:27 am - On maps.
Three things that remain with me from television coverage of the election (I flipped between CNN, NBC, ABC and the Comedy Channel):
1. The omnipresent electoral college map
2. Tim Russert wielding that tablet thing on which he mapped out state-winning strategies like John Madden on trucker speed
3. The "too close to call" dancers (guess which show that was from?)
Before TV coverage moves to more signifcant elections (yes, I watched America's Next Top Model last night) I wanted to talk with people a bit #1 above, and maps during election night in general.
A colleague of mine routinely begins his classes with the assignment to "make a map that lies." Once they finish this, their next assignment is to "make a map that tells the truth." He's building off the wisdom in this book, which argues that even the best-intentioned map must yield its information selectively. The upshot of this is that maps are both necessary and necessarily suspect. Although it purportsto merely show information, an effective map has a pedagogical function as well, prescribing a specific way of thinking about the world through its display.
With this in mind, let's think about the (unintended?) teaching function of a map we all know very well from Tuesday's television. From the New York Times, this map has been constructed with geography in mind.
Again from the Times, this map breaks things into individual electoral votes. This is because some states allow splitting of electoral votes, though it didn't happen in this election.
The upshot of these maps is that by the end of the evening I was left believing that this was an accurate way to think the people within the United States:
Now, it makes intutitive sense to fight the ideological force of one sort of map by demonstrating how other maps display the same data set differently. Although all television stations showed raw numbers of how the popular (rather than the electoral) vote was breaking down, I'm surprised that none of the stations I watched thought to display a map like this one from the folks at Boing Boing
To look at a map like the one above, you'd think geography plays less of a role in voting patterns than the television would like us to believe. But then take a look at this red and blue breakdown by county from a blog at Being and Nothingness.
What other sorts of maps could help us understand what happened on Tuesday? monslucis made some comments about voting in Missippi have me thinking what I might from a map that broke down voter choices both by income level and by geographical distribution. What could we learn by doing this with other sorts of available data on voter identifications? What what about the urban/rural/in-between split?
Any other ideas? Any other sorts of maps you've found that interest you?
The Jesusland joke was taken slightly futher here. I especially like the cherry-picking of the nice coastal cities in CA, but am concerned that the Salinas Valley, which I'd always want in my Canada, may have been abandoned.
Tim Russert freaked me the fuck out too. Not so much that I don't want a national TV audience and a crazy light pen/tablet setup myself, of course.
one of the main factors however, is something that maps cannot show, which
In other words, one can easily assume that with the presence of a leadership that fights for gay marriage (and other causes) with a strong social movement, there need not be a strong fight to win the majority of the workers and oppressed (among which support for the amendment was overall weak, despite the lack of a fight against it!).
"Jesusland" will come from a bipartisan shell game, a game of slightly-better [not good] cop and bad cop. Sound like dogma or cliche? Then somebody call me when the Democrats start fighting for gay marriage and stop passing bills like DOMA (which was a far, far more significant defeat than these amendments, which banned something already banned--by DOMA!--and can easily be overrun by federal law). But there is no strong mandate for Jesusland yet. In fact, the strongest support for it comes not form the number of voters Bush got, but more from the Democratic consensus of lesser evilism and refusing to fight on issues that lessen the electoral chances of "our" guy.
If the left would remove itself from the Democratic swamp that hasn't ever brought anything but betrayals, it would find itself much more powerful than it is. There is no need for despair, though there is hard work to be done.
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/map
People forget how huge this country is. They also forget that there are wide swaths of it that aren't that heavily populated.
I'm annoyed at the idea that the middle of the country is full of one kind of people and the coasts, another. I've lived in the middle of the country for most of my life, and I'm definitely not "red". And I'm not the only one, by far.
I LOVE MAPS.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/inne/2
Your Friendly Neighborhood (Ex-)Epidemiologist
We are indeed a divided country, a mixture of two things that don't mix -- like oil and fucking water.
I find the purple map to be especially educational; the Red State/Blue State media model seems more and more like a myth.
I'll be adding you to my list because, well, you made me think once and I'd love to have the chance to do it again in response to something you wrote.
Thanks.
The last map here in your post inspired me to actually make the graph that I'd been thinking about. It's not a map, but it does speak to the urban/rural split. It's in my journal.
The purely red and purely blue stretches into the 85% votes for each candidate, and then the gradation of colour starts.
The map isn't lying, it's just changing the colour schemes in order to have an easier time at showing the minute differences between states.
There must be a better way of doing the colour coding... The necessity for red and blue which the public has become accustomed to as marking the different parties is somewhat limiting, I think.