I just received a heads-up about this event taking place on the Gulf Coast this week-end. The Coast Recovery Expo will be held this Saturday, January 28th from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. at Edgewater Mall in Biloxi, MS. The Enterprise for Innovative Geospatial Solutions is participating as a supporting sponsor as well as an exhibitor. There will be a number of notable guests including mayors from coastal cities, Attorney General Jim Hood, MDOT Commissioner Wayne Brown, FEMA Director Eric Gentry, and representatives from the Governor’s Commission on Recovery. There will also be over 70 booths including: SBA, FEMA, Gulf Coast Chamber, Hancock Chamber of Commerce, MS Contract Procurement Center, Coast Transit Authority, the sheriff departments from Hancock, Harrison and Jackson Counties as well as numerous private businesses, contractors, and service organizations. For more information, visit: http://www.1640wtni.com/.
Archives for January 25, 2006
Canadian Cartographic Association responds to challenge and maps the results of the 2006 Federal Election
Congrats to a “CCAer” for coming up to the plate in my challenge for someone to develop a map of the 2006 Canada federal election results. The maps provided show the results of each riding (color themed), shows the % of the winning vote and also includes a map of the results from the 2004 election… nice stuff! See http://ccablog.blogspot.com/
2006 Canada Election Results… Where Are the Maps???
I found a 2 year-old dataset useful as a base, however, there’s no maps to be found anywhere. Are you searching for maps that show the results of the recent Federal election in Canada? We all know these maps and data were easily found when the US held their last election (See http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/3769/). Amazing as it seems, this is no simple task in Canada. Tabular results are available from many sources including SFU – http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/results.html, elections Canada http://enr.elections.ca/National_e.aspx, the CBC http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/ – see also this CBC results tool at http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/electionnight/ for some cool results… however, I have to ask.. where are the maps??? I have to admit, I’m a bit blown away that there’s no decent mapping… I want to see the results based on geography.. what ridings are held by who?? Not a tabular list, I need to see a map so I can get an idea of the whole picture. Even the Globe & Mail (Canada’s National Newspaper) has fallen short. A search on Google yields a hit to their site for an election results map (See Globe & Mail election map), however, it’s merely a map of the Provinces and when you mouse-over a tabular list of the results are provided… nice but hardly useful to me. Perhaps ESRI Canada could market the Mapstudio for Media or ArcWeb services to some of the major publishers. What’s really interesting is that back in 2004 when the last election was held, the same thing happened. I found this interesting blog (HERE) where there’s actually a map that was developed by a person sharing the same sentiments as me… his solution… “I created my own damned map”… I love it! So you media folks… listen up.. what people want is the familiar Red & Blue map (o.k. throw in some Green and Orange too) so people can see which party was elected in which riding. After all, there are less than 300 electoral ridings, surely it can’t be that difficult to get a base map to map the results.. can it? Actually, now that I think of it, in Canada obtaining “sensitive” data like electoral boundaries can be as difficult as pulling teeth – although I did track down these 2004 data from Geoconnections – available via FTP (http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/download/electoral/2004/). Commercial providers like DMTI Spatial can also provide data. Have you seen a map of the results? Care to make one? Let me know…