So I noticed a few things happened while I was dancing in the streets of San Francisco. First, Naaman posted to our humble blog without mentioning me in the post. Second, my friend the Practicalist posted several maps of “New York Times Election Results: County by County“. The maps are indeed beautiful. But I thought to myself to see the change. This leads my mind down a wonderful path where I envisioned a beautiful movie done up in Processing and leaves you, the reader, with a very rough difference map I forced Photoshop to spit out.
A few things to note. I’ll point out that I’m a Photoshop expert. It takes all kinds of mad skills to make it produce something quite ugly. Next, notice the bright pinkish spot growing around Arkansas: that’s a Blue to Red shift that’s been happening in the past 16 years. Brown colors are a shift to Blue from Red.
Maybe I’ll make something more pretty next time with more granularity. Meanwhile, if you’re headed to CSCW, stop me or naaman and say hi!
Ben Clemens | 07-Nov-08 at 12:02 am | Permalink
Wow, great idea. There are in fact blend modes in processing you could use, hmmmm. Maybe show the counties with the most change toward blue and most toward red… you could get the data, but there is something really appealing about trying to do it through procedural color stuff. Nice!
naaman | 07-Nov-08 at 5:37 am | Permalink
Yes, how do we read this map, Ayman? What’s the ugly-colored legend?
And, to compensate for my Ayman-less post, Ayman:
Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman Ayman.
Ayman, See you in CSCW.
ayman | 08-Nov-08 at 10:03 am | Permalink
The more Pink the greater change from Blue to Red.
The more Brown the greater change from Red to Blue.