Recently, I’ve been interested in using computers to generate maps for political purposes. Folks from CCAG helped train me in using ArcView. ArcView is a very impressive mapping program. It is very powerful, and hence very complicated. I’ve used it to produce turf maps like this.. I still feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface. I am hoping to see some integration between mapping software and projects such as CivicSpace or Advokit

The problem is that ArcView is expensive. A single seat costs somewhere around $1500. Other people have suggested using Microsoft’s Mappoint. It only costs around $300. I haven’t used Mappoint, so I can’t comment on that. I’ve been hoping that some sort of good open source, free software for mapping would be out there.

Yesterday, I started on another project. I’ve been interested in getting clickable maps for various websites that I’ve been working on. I downloaded MapEdit. You can download a free evaluation copy of MapEdit, which you can use to create any sort of clickable map. The registered version is only $10, and well worth it in my opinion. If you register, they have a clickable map of the United States you can download. I’ve put this map in my website, Local Pols for Dean.

However, I want to go further. I also want to create clickable maps for congressional, state senate and state rep districts. I found that I could download shapefiles, a standard format for map objects from the U.S. Census. I could use ArcView to take these maps and then save them as images. However, I didn’t have a copy of ArcView available, and I imagine that most people wanting to do the same thing are unlikely to have ArcView available.

A colleague in the CivicSpace IRC chat mentioned Quantum GIS Quantum GIS is an open source software project. They have a Windows beta which works fairly nicely. Having worked a little in ArcView, I found QGIS very easy to start using, even though it appeared to lack a lot of the functions I depend upon in ArcView. I do hope that newer versions of QGIS will be more feature rich.

Using the data from the U.S. Census, and QGIS, I created a map of the assembly districts in Connecticut. I then loaded that image into MapEdit and created my first Assembly level clickable map for Local Pols.

I imagine that if I knew QGIS a little better, or created the image using ArcView, I could have created a much better map.

The process is a little slow and cumbersome, but it works. There were some discussions about finding ways of automating this process. For example, a tool that would take a shapefile and then generate a PNG image and an html imagemap would be very nice. However, in the shapefiles, the polygons are very complicated, and you would need some sort of algorithm to simplify the polygons if we wanted to get a useable imagemap.

The other issue to be resolved, at least for this mapping exercise, is to determine the best way of integrating the data. For example, should I create three different maps, one for the congressional level, one for the state senate level, and one for the state rep level? I am ignoring for the time being voting districts and school districts, which further complicate the issue. Then how do people get to the right map? Is there a way of combining maps and forms?

Or should I create one map, so that if you click on a single district, you get all the relevant campaigns for that district? I am currently using Drupal for the various entries that I have. I also want to think about the best way to find the entries using Drupal. Right now, I’m just using hardcoded URLs.

My colleague on the CivicSpace IRC chat channel also pointed me to IndyMapper. IndyMapper looks like a very interesting project, which will enable people to use the web to create maps. As far as I can tell it is still in early development stages.

He also pointed me to the UMN Mapserver. This looks like another exciting project that needs to be explored.