Data in practice: how to map location data

In a previous post, which you can read here, I discussed the relationship between data in journalism and the use of infographics. I used an example of mapping location data. This post shows you how to map location data.

I’m going to show you the destinations of people who graduated from a City University journalism MA course in 2010.

The data has come from the listings pages of XCity magazine.

As the data is already collated in a list, I’m going to put it straight into a Googlemap. You will need a Google email account to create your own map.

As I start to look through the data, I realise that more than one ex-City student will be in any given location. Thus, I need to record how many people are in one place. One of the simplest ways to do this is by making a good old-fashion tally chart. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. If you have a better suggestion, then do let me know.

Once you log into Googlemaps, you will come to this page where you create the name and description of your map:

Now you can start adding locations to the map.

It’s very simple to input the data into a map. I’ve made a screencast showing you how below:

The look of the pins can change and the colour. You can see I’ve colour-coded my pins depending on how many people are in that country. For example, purple represents one person.

You can see the final map below:

Whilst it’s not the most sophisticated or detailed map, it does demonstrate that data presented visually is much more comprehensible than in its raw form. It is the role of the journalist to make data understandable to the reader.

This map shows the spread of the graduates, however it doesn’t help to show the concentration of graduates in one area, for example that most graduates stayed in the UK once they graduated in 2010 from City. To show this I would either need to place a pin representing each person, or colour code the countries.

UPDATE: read this interesting article posted on the Guardian about the very same thing.

Make sure you check out Binary Barbara’s map of Darts pubs in London as well!

Posted in: Data, how to, Infographics