The carving and paring of the land
The quarter square, the graph divides
Beneath the rule a country hides

Today you find yourself in the steady hands of Sean Connelley, Thomas Suh Lauder and Ben Welsh, journalists at The Los Angeles Times. Our mission: make you a cartographer.

Sean is a photographer and Flash developer noted for his work on groundbreaking new media projects, including the award-winning Not Just a Number series mapping the stories of homicides in Oakland, California, and Mexico Under Siege, The Los Angeles Times international effort to cover the burgeoning drug war in our backyard.

Thomas is an editor and artist in The Times’ graphics department, where he partners across departments to translate the craft to a new online era. He worked with Sean on the award-winning Mexico Under Siege project and has been a leader at The Times in developing online maps. Recent examples include maps of Marijuana dispensaries and Metrolink train fatalities.

Ben is responsible for most of the lame humor and bad music found on this blog — and will probably be the cause of any needless distractions or fruitless tangents during class. He gets paid to work with databases all day, which is about as exciting as it sounds.

Thanks to Google’s “My Maps” tools, it’s easy to plot out on points on a map with markers, polygons and routes. Above, you can see Ben’s hometown, Swisher, IA, with a marker indicating the new stop sign by the post office.

Examples

The 2009 Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara, by Ron Lin

Illegal dumping plagues South L.A., by Robert Lopez

Assignment

Create a Google account and use My Maps to plot five landmarks in your hometown, including your home and workplace. Then draw a line between the two mapping your route to work.

Resources

Sean’s patented “How to Google Map” guide.

Hand dropping points through My Maps is great, but what do you do when you need to plot a lot of points, and really quick? Convert your data to the Google-friendly KML format and drop em all at once! That’s what!

Assignment:

Use KML data to create a mashup of data about the University Park neighborhood of L.A. Start with the neighborhoods boundaries. And then layer on crime incidents and school locations.

Resources

KML files for all of the L.A. Times city neighborhoods, including the one you’re current sitting in, University Park.

A spreadsheet of University Park violent crime incidents between 5/1/2009 and 8/1/2009, extracted from the L.A. Times database of LAPD crime reports.

A spreadsheet of University Park schools, drawn from the California Department of Education’s database.

Earthpoint’s online application for converting a spreadsheet to KML format. You will need to use this to prepare the crime and school data for Google maps.

batchgeocode.com, a site where you can automatically plot a spreadsheet of addresses as longitude and latitude points. This will be necessary to convert the school addresses into something Google can work with.