Mapping

The GovTrack site has a map of congressional districts and you can even add the layer to your existing Google Maps mashup.

This is an old link, but I just saw it.

Counter Cartographies Collective UNC 2006 Disorientation Guide

Google Maps now has a Geocoding API for street addresses. Haven't tried it yet. I'm guessing it works off the Tiger database. Will be interesting to compare its accuracy with geocoder.us (an open-source geocoder). Though I'm not really into street-level geocoding (zip-level is adequate for my aims)

Someone created a mashup that lets you see the

Impact of global warming using Google Maps.

You can see the land that will be covered by water, based on different predictions of sealevel rise.

He's using a 50 GB NASA data set for altitude data.

Activists need to embrace the use of maps in our campaigns.

Maps allow you to make information more appealing to the reader, without dumbing down the content (for instance, you don't have to turn your argument into a short slogan). Complex statistical arguments about the correlation between one factor and another are much easier to grasp if they are presented in a nice chart, or better yet, a map.

Currently I'm guessing that we're on the threshold of a coming wave of activist maps. Here are several factors that will start the wave:

1) Google Maps API - has created a renaissance in maps on the internet by making it very easy to create a map, and by provoking a number of competitors (notably Yahoo and ESRI) to provide free APIs.

I created an international geocoder using the GNS data. It converts a city, state (optional), and country into a longitude and latitude.

It has about a 90% success rate.

Geocodes and Maps the Result

Geocodes

Google Maps API thread

Someone made a map that shows US Military Casualties from the Iraq war.

Hopefully someone will be inspired to create a map of Iraqi civilian casualties. You could use data from Iraq Body Count, and the Geonames database to convert Iraqi cities into longitudes and latitudes.

I did a map of the Schools that belong to the Workers Rights Consortium - an anti-sweatshop monitoring/accountability organization that was created by anti-sweatshop activists, the majority of whom were students.

I used the data from the WRC Affiliate Schools page, which I combined with my existing data for school locations.

Hope to come up with more activist uses of mapping. Days of Action for instance.

The geographical distribution is typical of privileged white middle to upper-middle class student activism.