ASCIItography

19. January 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Maps

ASCII art – art made using keyboard characters, especially those from the ASCII character set – has been around since 1966, making it just younger than ASCII itself. Cats, video game sprites, and custom logotypes have always been popular subjects, but I have never seen maps made with ASCII. So I decided to do it myself.

At first, I tried to create each of the conterminous 48 United States by using the first letter of the state’s name. The layout of the states makes that impractical, though, so I changed New Jersey to J and Illinois to L. Then I realized that N, M, and W looked too much alike, making large blocks like Wyoming-Montana and Minnesota-Wisconsin-Michigan impractical, so further substitutions had to be made. After a handful of character swaps (which could easily be decoded), Massachusetts was converted to % by hand, to keep it from interfering with Maine.

asciitography

Believe it or not, this was done in Adobe Illustrator using the Courier font. Setting a character-width grid made it easy to visualize the raster layout. Rather than make my own, I downloaded a colored map from the web and traced over it.

Data Sources: Google image search
Projection: unknown, but looks like a conic projection
Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Crude Infrastructure

16. November 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Maps · Tags: , ,

The western Gulf of Mexico is a central hub of the US oil and gas industry. Every major company has an office in Houston, and many cities along the coast of Louisiana are devoted to the refining and exploration sectors. Each node of the petroleum network is connected by a pipeline – and that includes the offshore drilling platforms. Not all of them have oil rushing through them – many have been capped off and abandoned. It’s unlikely that anyone will ever come into contact with one of these pipelines, even with a drag-net: most of them are buried in the soft sediments at the bottom of the sea. Even so, it’s amazing what kind of rat’s nest exists just out of reach from our beaches.

The eastern Gulf is relatively pipeline free – only two lonesome lines extend into that region.

Oil and Gas Pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico

Like a spider on drugs.

Data Sources: US Bureau of Energy Management, US National Atlas
Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic, customized to fit the mapping extent (WGS-84)
Tools: QGIS

President of Texas

11. November 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Maps · Tags: , ,

Election seasons are always a great source of data, especially when the presidency is on the line. The following map of election results by county is not meant to show which candidate won Texas (that would be Mitt Romney). Nor is this map meant to show which candidate won each county. Instead, this map shows the relative strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. Obama did well in urban counties, while Romney was more popular in exurban and rural counties. The majority of Texas’ population now resides in the outer suburbs – areas hotly contested by both candidates. Obama also heavily outgunned Romney in the low-income counties along the Mexican border. As the Latino population of Texas grows, and immigration continues to be an important issue, how will this shake out in future elections?

Texas Election Results 2012 by percent

It may seem cliched, but the red vs blue paradigm is high-contrast and color-blindness friendly.

Data Sources: Politico.com, US Census
Projection: UTM 14N (WGS-84)
Tools: QGIS, GIMP