Last week, I e-mailed Amanda Getchel, the online editor of the Ball State Daily News to ask if she’d write down something about their use of mapping tools to display the campus crime report (see Ball State gets the map on for details). She replied, and below are her comments, lightly edited:
I’ll start with why I wanted to do the map. Last semester, after attending a GIS presentation for one of my journalism classes, I got the idea. The presenter showed us how someone used a Google map to plot points of crime in New York. When we were doing applications for this semester, one thing I thought I wanted to try if I became editor was turning the arrest reports we put in the paper every Thursday into something more interactive.
The entire process didn’t take that long. The editor-in-chief of our newspaper sent me an e-mail about the College News Media Web site and the maps section. Before seeing that, I thought about just using Flash to create the interactive. Once I figured out how to plot the points (which only took about 10 minutes to get used to the program), I knew the Atlas map was exactly what I was wanting to do and would be better than a Flash program.
As I said earlier, because we put the arrest reports in our paper, that’s where I got the information. Our police beat reporter goes to our campus police station every Wednesday and gets the reports, then we just type them and then print them for the next day’s paper.
All I did once I got the information was put the address of where the arrest occurred and mapped it. A point plotted and I inserted the data in a screen that shows up so you can add
information. I put in all the points and data, clicked save, and then copied th embed code that the program provides into the publisher we use to upload the stories onto the Web. The map I created only took 5 minutes to do. Obviously, more points will take longer and fewer points will take less time.
Thanks to Amanda for responding. If anyone has other examples of maps - using Atlas or another format - e-mail me: scmurley -at- gmail.com.
on Jan 31st, 2007 at 11:27 pm
I love the mapping trend, and I am trying to incorporate maps into Vanderbilt’s media site, but I can’t quite figure out how to embed maps. (I know how to create them through Atlas and link to them, but it’s not as cool as Ball State’s crime log.) Any suggestions? Our site is powered by Drupal.