The 435 Congressional Districts of the United States in one giant poster

In his last State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama called for an end to gerrymandering - the process of drawing political boundaries in a way that favours one party over another. I knew a bit about the topic from my time in the US, but I wanted to see what all 435 Congressional Districts looked like, so I ran off a set of maps. This was later picked up by WIRED* and shared quite widely. This week, I saw US elections guru Stephen Wolf had published a new shapefile of Congressional Districts which included the revised Florida, North Carolina and Virginia boundaries. I had a few extra moments due to something being cancelled at the last minute, so I ran off a set of maps and turned them into a gif and a poster. I shared the gif on twitter but am posting more material here in case anyone is interested. First of all, here's the massive poster with all 435 Congressional Districts, arranged alphabetically by state and District number.

Not to scale - it's about comparing shapes - bigger version

You should be able to click on the above image to see the labels more clearly. If you want to download a really gigantic version, have a look here for the 13MB, 16,527x16,841 pixel monstrosity. Shapes alone can't necessarily tell us whether an area is clearly 'gerrymandered' or not but it's fair to say that in some cases it's a pretty good sign!

I also created two gifs which animate through all 435 Districts at different speeds. The first one below is the one I previously shared on Twitter and the other one is a slightly slower version. The intention of the first was to leave just enough dwell time on each frame so that you can perceive the variety of shapes but also see all 435 in under a minute. In the second, I'm trying to allow more cognitive processing time.

It's supposed to be somewhat hypnotic

The first one is pretty fast, with only a tenth of a second for each Congressional District. The version below shows each District for half a second, so might be a little bit more useful but then again it takes longer to run through.

The definitive gerrymandering gif? Maybe not, but it's a quick summary

Here I have been experimenting with display techniques partly as a way of educating myself on an important subject but also partly to figure out what the best way of representing the data in an easily digestible way is. I also posted each of the individual frames from the gifs to a Google Drive folder in case anyone wants to use them.

I like the small multiple approach of the poster better in many ways because you don't have to wait to scroll through the images and also you can make visual comparisons between, say, frame 2 and frame 200 without having to wait for the gif to loop through to it. Also, you don't have to interact with it in the same way so I find it more accessible and actually made it this way so that it could be printed out as a large poster and used as a focal point for discussion and debate - which I think is one of the things maps can be very useful for.

Finally, here's the poster in two different colours. There's also a folder with all three versions in different sizes.

Does it look better or worse in green? Bigger version

A classier colour, I feel - bigger version

Here's the Obama 'gerrymandering' part - source

*The person who wrote that WIRED piece has since been 'moved on' owing to some sub-optimal journalistic practices but the piece remains online under an editorial note.

International collaboration, without leaving the house (or, why social media can be a good thing)

The idea behind today's post is in some ways blindingly obvious, but also often overlooked. Basically, it's that sharing ideas online can lead to all sorts of interesting, unexpected international collaborations of various types. I'm talking here specifically about research and academic-related collaboration, but it could apply to just about anything. I thought I'd share a short maps/viz story about this, just to demonstrate that 'internationalisation' (a common feature of University policy) doesn't mean having to cram yourself into a plane for 10 hours to some far flung paradise. But of course I should start with a map.

It's a bit of an eyesore in some ways, but that's not the point. Here's the story, and the point...

I'd been doing some work on mapping travel to work flows, since the data were released for England and Wales in the summer of 2014. Some time after that, another University of Sheffield department were contacted by a scholar from Turkey (Ebru Sener) asking about the possibility of visiting on a short Erasmus-funded trip. The other department didn't follow up so I looked into it, Skyped with Ebru and quickly discovered we had a lot of common interests and a good amount of overlap in our skills - but also, crucially, areas where we could learn from each other.

This led to a research visit in 2015, during which time we wrote a paper on housing market search (now published in Cities). Ebru also taught a class for me that week, which was great. We then kept in touch via e-mail and social media and it was Ebru that suggested I make the commuter dots go back to where they came from, which I thought was a nice touch and I then wrote this stuff up into a short piece for the Huffington Post after they got in touch (I have a paper on that coming out in future as well).

That summer, I experimented further on this area of research by looking at US commuting flows at the small area level. I published a short working paper on it, as well as a couple of blog pieces, plus the data I created from it. This then led to a brilliant US scholar (Garrett Nelson) taking a sub-set of the data and using a community partitioning algorithm to derive communities for one state (Massachusetts - see below). He blogged this, told me about it on Twitter and then I had a new idea so contact him again to see if he wanted to collaborate on a project to do this for the whole United States. Once again, we Skyped, made a plan and then got to work (side note: we used cloud computing because the data had outgrown the desktop environment).

Now we've almost finished our paper and - we hope - this will lead to further collaboration on the topic.

Following this, the brilliant Mark Evans (from Michigan) got in touch to say he was planning something which built on some of the ideas I'd had in order to build an interactive US version of the animated dot map you see above. He built it, shared with me and then it went kind of viral - with many news sites and local and regional outlets picking it up (Daily Mail, CityLab, WIRED, Boston.com etc.). I don't claim that I could have done this but it's nice to know I was, in part, a source of inspiration. Mark has also shared his method, which is great for further collaboration and other users. In the gif below you can see that Mark has coloured the dots based on where people come from, which is a nice innovation.

And the point? International collaboration and internationalisation seem to be talked about a lot in terms of travel, short and medium-term study visits and can be a logistical nightmare. Often, it's necessary though. The kind of thing I've discussed above can be an additional means of 'internationalisation' that is both cost effective and time efficient. I haven't seen that much about the possibilities for formal international collaboration through social media. This might be because I don't pay attention. 

Having said that you can do international collaboration without leaving the house, I am of course off to the US this week for a conference...