How to microblog in high heels

Recently over on the Guardian Cardiff blog I’ve been experimenting with using Google maps to display certain bits of local government data, as well as creating collaborative maps with readers for local events.

Often council reports are stocked full of data broken down by ward which should be easily mappable – and which would allow readers to quickly digest the data in an accessible way.

When such reports are issued the council rarely includes a map to display the data – and if it does, it’s a pdf file which can take hours to translate into a Google map.

One problem which constantly presents itself is the lack of local government ward maps which would provide a template to map certain bits of data onto.

The fantastic team at Openly Local helpfully mapped some local government ward data on Google maps and explained how here – but unfortunately Cardiff didn’t seem to be covered in this.  Reason is – ward data wasn’t really available until April this year, according to this post by Michael Grimes – so no wonder it’s not really accessible.

Mapping recycling rates for Cardiff

Recently the council released the recycling rates for each ward in Cardiff – a fantastic data set which allows readers to find out the average amount of recycling their local district achieves – and how far off government targets they are. But the data was given to me as a list, and as a bar chart – with only one paper copy and one pdf graph.

In a quest to plot this data on a Google map, I soon found city regions at ward level are not produced by the council – they do have a pretty user-unfriendly mapping portal which looks like it uses ONS data. Instead, I turned to My Society programmer Matt Somerville (@dracos) – who showed me some boundary data which is under the OS OpenData licence,  and available from Mapit here. Once you have the KML files for each ward – you can import them to Google maps and get something which shows each ward for Cardiff.

This will undoubtedly prove useful as I can use it as a template to produce a number of maps over time – but it wasn’t obvious how Google would let me keep one original map – and duplicate it for modification. What took time was adding each percentage to each ward separately and changing the gradient of the fill colour to match the percentage. Google maps worked quite slowly with so many files – and there was no spreadsheet with the data in it for me to upload.

After this I exported the KML code for the map (click view in Google Earth) and uploaded it to Zeemaps which allowed me to see all the wards on one map – see the result here.

Thus, we have a ward map showing local government data broken down to the minutest boundary level. It’s not quite there yet – using the same colour perhaps not as visually effective as Open Heat Map – but it’s a start.

I would be interested to know how other have got on with plotting government data by ward level. Leave your comments below.