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Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy

Tactical Tech's "Mapping for Advocacy" freebook

The cool folks over at Tactical Technology Collective recently revised their fantastic guide to using mapping and GIS for advocacy functions.  In addition to an overview of GIS, the guide also includes interesting case studies of GIS advocacy projects from around the world.  Definitely a must-read for those in advocacy and related practices in the nonprofit sector!

 

URL: 
http://www.tacticaltech.org/mapsforadvocacy

Africa Map: Browse and Explore African Datasets

picture layer in Africa MapThe Africa Map project, currently in beta, is an online map and data viewer created by Harvard University.  The map combines data sets of numerous categories from a wide variety of sources, allowing thematic maps to be viewed and explored.  The purposes of the project, according to the project web site:

  1. Interact with the best available public data for Africa
  2. See the whole of Africa yet also zoom in to particular places
  3. Accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and make it permanently accessible online
  4. Work collaboratively across disciplines and organizations with spatial information about Africa in an online environment

URL: 
http://africamap.harvard.edu/

Who Needs Satellites? Grassroots Mapping Provides DIY Aerial Mapping for Peruvians!

Submitted by jim on Mon, 2010-01-25 09:00

Just read a great article from Grassroots Mapping about a public participation GIS project recently conducted for the Cantagallos community in Lima, Peru.  To help the community bolster their land claims to the territory they've settled, Grassroots Mapping led an aerial photography gathering mission using helium balloons and a camera.  Since the Google Maps / Earth imagery for the region was a few years old and didn't show recent changes to the environment, the detailed up-to-date aerial photography provided a more accurate base map for future public participation mapping efforts!

Incredible Interactive Map of Affordable Housing Statistics in NYC

Submitted by jim on Tue, 2009-12-08 09:00

"Envisioning Development: What is Affordable Housing?" is an interactive Flash-based map of housing and income statistics on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis throughout the New York City area.  Although I've seen similar statistical/analytical interactive maps with similar data plenty of times, the aesthetic design and information visualization "impact" of this map is almost breathtaking.  This map is part of an online resource toolkit for urban planning and land use education based around NYC, offered by the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

screenshot of envisioning-development map application

 

Maps Show Low-Income Neighborhoods Especially Vulnerable to Heat Waves

Submitted by jim on Fri, 2009-09-25 06:26

When people refer to "heat maps," they can be referring to spectrum-colored maps of values (e.g., maps that show red, yellow, green, etc., based on a range of values), or actual maps of the weather (such as on the back page of USA Today :).  In this post, we'll be examining both: heat maps of heat, so to speak.

heat map of phoenix

Using Maps to Promote Health Equity

"The Opportunity Agenda, with support from the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, commissioned a series of papers examining the effectiveness of web based mapping, and the role it can play in promoting health equity."

URL: 
http://opportunityagenda.org/mapping