Screaming for a Map: The New "Littles"

When I saw the NYC ancestry data, I immediately thought, "That screams MAP!"

Brian Lehrer Show producer Jody Avrigan had been working on a great project looking for the new "Littles" in New York City -- neighborhoods where people of a certain ancestry or ethnicity live. He had a spreadsheet; I wanted to visualize it.

The result may be my favorite map project so far:

Mostly, I built on what I'd learned making WNYC's Census Maps, adding a few of things:

• An on-map drop-down menu (here's the CSS code for that).

• Code that selects different data from a single Google Fusion Table

• Panning and zooming to the neighborhood I want to highlight.

• A better "Share or Embed" pop-up box using jquery.alerts.js

I also tried to clean up and refactor my original code to make it easier to read (and reuse).

You can see that code on GitHub. I tried to document it clearly, but post a note below if you have any questions or would like clarification.

UPDATE: In making this map, I used a new (to me) trick to remove the water areas from census tract shapes on the coastline.  Here's how I did it, if you're interested.

2 responses
Thanks again for the walkthrough John... The panning and zooming idea is something I spent much of the day working on for a map of failed banks.

PS - I love that I can laugh out loud when I see a Fusion Table that has "no water" as part of its title.

I so appreciate the "no water" appreciation! In fact, it reminds me that's something I learned that could be useful to others ... so I've written a blog post about it.