Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 4,000 indicators of data and many features, we hope our weekly tips can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here.
Did you know you can overlay geographic boundaries like zip codes, census tracts, or block groups? Click “Map Options” on the bottom right of the map, which will open a panel with boundary choices. Your zoom level will determine which boundaries are available to overlay and some are only available in the Northeast US and Philadelphia.
Sincerely,
The PolicyMap Team
Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 4,000 indicators of data and many features, we hope our weekly tips can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here.
Did you know, you can see the exact value of a shaded area for any data layer you add. Simply click on the shaded area in the map, which you would like more detail. This identify bubble will display not only the value of the shaded area, but also compare it to its tract, county, city, etc (if applicable).
Sincerely,
The PolicyMap Team
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Visual Explanation
Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), directs attention to a new site that culls public government data to map neighborhoods, cities, and states by real-estate values, demographics, income and other indices:
PolicyMap was created by The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based organization that finances urban development. The group found that it needed mapping tools to help it choose neighborhoods for investment, and also to help investors track their projects in the context of neighborhood characteristics rather than through unenlightening pie charts. [my emphasis]
The result is a Google-Maps-like tool that easily maps geographicaly-based information using mostly public data (additional data sets and projections of public data are availble to subscribers). For example, the sample below shows household income in our home city of Providence, Rhode Island (USA) in some of the neighborhoods around Brown University.
Click here to read this article by Henry Woodbury on Dynamic Diagrams on August 6th, 2008.
Policymap offers a slick, map interface for viewing US census data. Use it to check out your own neighborhood, or those of neighborhoods you are interested in.
Here is a map of the middle swathe of the US mapped by percentage of post-graduate degrees:
Here, Carl Bialik mapped Obama’s Chicago neighborhood (his home is marked with an X. The darker shading indicates a higher percentage of residents graduated college. Dark purple means more than 22.94% of residents have bachelor’s degrees:
Click here to read this article on Voice of Iyov on August 4th, 2008.
By The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik
A new Web site allows home buyers, real-estate developers, nonprofit groups and any other interested parties to map neighborhoods for free using a wide range of data, such as per-capita income, education levels and unemployment. PolicyMap is a clever tool that makes government statistics more useful and accessible, though it also highlights some limitations in the U.S.’s numerical self-knowledge.
A part of a PolicyMap of percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees in 2000, in Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago neighborhood (his home is marked with an X). The darker shading indicates a higher percentage of residents graduated college. Dark purple means more than 22.94% of residents have bachelor’s degrees.
PolicyMap was created by The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based organization that finances urban development. The group found that it needed mapping tools to help it choose neighborhoods for investment, and also to help investors track their projects in the context of neighborhood characteristics rather than through unenlightening pie charts. “We want to be able to get good data into the hands of people who are making public-policy decisions,” Maggie McCullough, director of PolicyMap, told me.
The internal mapping project launched as a public tool in May, sharing for free all data PolicyMap gets for free, mostly from the federal government — roughly 80% of the 4,000 indicators PolicyMap says it provides. The rest of the indicators, including projections bringing older federal data up to date, are available only to subscribers, of which the site had fewer than 200 as of last week, according to Ms. McCullough.
[READ MORE]
Click Hereto read the full article.
This article by Carl Bialik on The Wall Street Journal on August 4th, 2008.
