Awesome online map (with no Flash)

Three Washington Post reporters did a big investigative story about U.S. farm subsidies, and a fascinating interactive map accompanied the July 2 story, Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don’t Farm. I got curious about how the map was generated and put online (especially when I realized no Flash had been used!), so I asked Sarah Cohen, one of the reporting team.

To my surprise, she told me the online graphic doesn’t have a database behind it. “There are thousands of teeny little HTML files,” Cohen wrote in an e-mail. “The way it works is this: I do a query in SQL Server to get the data to color in the map.” That query generates the dollar total of subsidies for each county in every state in the nation. (SQL Server is a database, of course, but it’s not connected “live” to the graphic.)

“Then, using ArcView, I create the map exactly the way I want it to appear online,” Cohen wrote. With an ArcView plug-in called HTML Imagemapper, she exports the image map and HTML files.

She wrote a Perl script to change the HTML pages to show what she wanted. The program had to run overnight to extract the top-10 lists for each county. (Click on any county in the map, and you’ll see what this means. The pop-up data windows are really nice.)

Cohen concluded: “So it’s a little involved, but doable.”

Another option, she said, is “a very expensive piece of software that goes with ArcView, called ArcIMS, which is an actual map server.”

I wondered how an investigative and database reporter got this giant collection of “teeny little HTML files” online at her newspaper, so I asked that too. Cohen talked to the online folks, and they told her that “if I gave it to them and it met their standards, they would post it.” So she got advice from an online designer about what colors to put in for the counties and how the borders should look … and then she created her files.

I thought this was a cool example of a reporter taking the initiative to add value to the online version of her story.

Technorati tags: maps | journalism | online media | interactivity

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