What's the fastest way to map a list of addresses? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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What's the fastest way to map a list of addresses?

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Asked 7 years ago by cnast
Latest answer from dianamaps

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cnast
Member
Via @janaremy I saw this post about closing Borders bookstores that lists alternative independent bookstores by state and includes street addresses and website links. What would be the quickest/easiest way to turn the list into a google map? Is this an appropriate use of Google Fusion Tables maybe?

http://www.edrants.com/list-of-independent-alternatives-to-closed-borders-bookstores/

A snippet from the post:

Alaska

Borders Bookstore #88
1100 E. Diamond Blvd., Anchorage, AK 99515
Alternatives:
University of Alaska Bookstore, 2905 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508 (5.7 miles)
Title Wave Books, 1360 West Northern Lights, Anchorage, AK 99503 (5.8 miles)

Arizona

Borders Bookstore #596
10100 W. McDowell Road, Avondale, AZ 85323
Alternatives:
Thrifty Joe’s, 6020 W Bell Road, #E104, Glendale, AZ 85308 (12.0 miles)
Bookmans Phoenix, 8034 N. 19th Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85021 (12.1 miles)
Bent Cover Books, 12428 N. 28th Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85029 (12.6 miles)

Borders Bookstore #282
870 N. 54th Street, Chandler, AZ 85226
Alternatives:
Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 South McClintock Drive, Tempe, AZ 85283 (6.3 miles)
Ecobooks, 227 E Baseline Road, Suite #J-5, Tempe, AZ 85283 (7.2 miles)

Borders Bookstore #69
1361 S. Alma School Road, Mesa, AZ 85210
Alternatives:
Bookmans Mesa, 1056 S. County Club Dr., Mesa, AZ 85210 (0.0 miles)
Those Were the Days, 628 N. Center Street, Mesa, AZ 85201 (2.9 miles)
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Posted 7 years ago Permalink
ZeeMaps
Member

If you can get the list in the form of a table, you can use ZeeMaps (http://www.zeemaps.com) for this purpose.

For example, in this case, you'll need a table with columns Name, Address and then upload it to a map on ZeeMaps using a CSV file or just copying-and-pasting the table.

Let us know at support at zeemaps dot com if we can help.

Posted 7 years ago Permalink
Peter Organisciak
Member

You can quickly get a map using a spreadsheet from Google Docs. Paste your data into a column, select that column, and go to Insert>Gadget then Map.

That will give you the map, you can then also embed it into other pages but choosing Publish Gadgets in the map's setting.

Here's a sample with your data: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgnmwOU2IhTjdDhpY1NNNWJuNWtVd1hFTmJwSUlCbnc&hl=en

Posted 7 years ago Permalink
Joe Wicentowski
Member

The basic approach I'd use is one of "web scraping" -- extracting the data you need from the HTML page, and transforming the data into a format that you can feed to your mapping application.

My web scraper of choice is eXist (http://www.exist-db.org), since it lets you crawl through pages using XQuery and XPath - super useful tools for dealing with the web or any XML data you might have. I wrote a script that outputs the addresses as a table. I chose a table format, naturally, since the above-linked Zeemaps accepts data in the form of a copied and pasted table. Pasting this table into Zeemaps, tada, here's your map:

http://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=212304&x=-96.8555&y=34.7416&z=13

Here is the script, followed by an excerpt of its output:

[*EDIT: I had originally pasted the code in here, but the DH forum stripped out the indenting, making it impossible to read, so I've pasted the code at http://pastebin.com/6kyDg7fR. You can see it there.]

I tried to add comments to the code to explain things a bit. It's a bit messy, because I tried my best to work around the fairly horrible and inconsistent HTML coding on the source page, but I didn't sink the time in to covering every possible case. Notice, for example, how some addresses have links, others don't; you'll see even worse inconsistencies when you view the source HTML. Then again, such workarounds are what's required when you approach screen scraping. Here's the page output, copied in here as text:

Borders and Alternatives
Extracted from http://www.edrants.com/list-of-independent-alternatives-to-closed-borders-bookstores/
Name Address
Borders Bookstore #88 1100 E. Diamond Blvd., Anchorage, AK 99515
University of Alaska Bookstore 2905 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508
Title Wave Books 1360 West Northern Lights, Anchorage, AK 99503
Borders Bookstore #596 10100 W. McDowell Road, Avondale, AZ 85323
...

Posted 7 years ago Permalink
dianamaps
Member

All of these work well for this:

GeoCommons, http://www.geocommons.com (geocoding points)
GPS Visualizer, http://gpsvisualizer.com (geocoding points)
Batch Geocoding, http://www.batchgeocode.com (geocoding points and joining polygons)
Zee Maps, http://www.zeemaps.com (geocoding points)

Posted 7 years ago Permalink

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