I'm compiling a list of tools that can be used to build maps depicting movement — for example, migration, or the movement of objects from one point to another.
I have:
D3 (specifically DataMaps)
ggplot2
KML with time data
jFlowMap
Visual Eyes
What am I missing? I'm particularly interested in tools with GUIs and tools that allow you to animate movement.
Thanks!
Some suggestions from the Twittersphere:
Neatline (which doesn't quite do what I want, but is close-ish)
Processing
I guess you can also do this without using a map at all.
For those following along at home, this paper proposes that maps are not actually the best tools for depicting movement over space, and suggests circular diagrams instead.
TOOLS! I demand TOOLS! Useless history.
(Thank you, Ted!)
A couple of years ago, I used Scribble Maps to create music analysis related to a migration history. I blogged about it here
Now that there's Neatline, I would use that in a heartbeat.
Story Map JS might work for showing change over time, and it's definitely good for including annotations of maps.
A couple of years ago, the fabulous Diana Sinton hosted a workshop at Redlands called "Visualizing Flow & Movement in the Humanities." It was funded by the NEH, so there must be a whitepaper. Diana was one of the faculty for our own NEH Advanced Topics institute on Spatial Humanities at the Scholars' Lab. It might be worth taking a peek at the Zotero library associated with #geoinst: http://spatial.scholarslab.org/resources/
Replying to @Bethany Nowviskie's post:
Thanks, Bethany! Super helpful. Googling yielded Barbara Hui's notes from that workshop, which look very promising. And the white paper is here. One outcome of the workshop was this very useful taxonomy of flow maps.
Back on Twitter, Jason Heppler suggested Palladio, which I'd neglected. That seems very promising for this kind of thing.
Lincoln Mullen suggests Odyssey.js.
Zoe Borovsky points out that you can do temporal analysis maps with GeoCommons. I'm not immediately seeing a way it can draw arcs to show movement, but I will keep digging.
CartoDB can also animate movement with its Torque library.
angela.zoss@gmail.com
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Other, more powerful mapping tools like ArcGIS and QGIS might be good options for publication quality graphics. For a tool that includes web hosting and interactivity and doesn't require programming, perhaps Tableau.
If you have an interest in non-map flow diagrams, I've seen people use chord diagrams to show movement between locations (US State migration example); those can be created manually with JavaScript in d3 or perhaps automatically with Circos.
I'd second the idea that a map is not always the best for showing flows, even for geographic data. Ben Schmidt has an interesting post on how to order the US states in charts to show regional connections. Though not showing flows, his visualizations in that post might offer an interesting alternative.
Replying to @lmullen's post:
Yes, I've been thinking along similar lines. I linked above to an article on the subject. Still, I have in mind not necessarily large-scale migration patterns, but the movements of, say, a group of writers. In this case, it does seem as though a map would be helpful, since you'd be able to see where these people might have intersected.
Replying to @ted.underwood.3@gmail.com's post:
Yeah, I was prompted to finally roll that layout out by this thread…
It would be pretty easy to roll that into a version that does Indiana Jones–style animations of a single or a group of points onto a map. I can send anyone a link to my D3-based shipping animations if they want a more involved version.
The problem is that writers (unlike armies or ships) don't spend most of their time in motion. So if I were going to do this in D3, I wouldn't want lines at all: I'd do something more like this, a quick adaptation of a project from years ago about homes of German emigree writers. You can click around in time and get the animations to see when someone shifts locations, but you don't worry about lines overlapping which doesn't mean anything for individuals.
Replying to @bmschmidt@gmail.com's post: Thanks, Ben. That's really helpful. What about this, though: You just wanted to get a sense of where an art object has traveled over time, and want to keep those trajectory lines in your mind. Do you think lines make sense in that case? I guess the problem you're pointing out is sort of a problem with discrete vs. continuous data — the objects, or the writers, stop moving at some point, but the lines seem to imply that they continuously move.
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