CartoDB: map visualisations are easy!
By Steve Bennett
It’s pretty easy to drop “pins on a map” using Google Maps, but that doesn’t give you anything you’d want to print. And it doesn’t let you visualise a dataset. What’s the next step up?
CartoDB. It’s an impressively easy to use map visualisation platform. Upload your data in a spreadsheet, georeference it if needed, then start cranking out all kinds of different map based visualisations. You can manage your data directly online, and there’s an API to build powerful web applications if you want to go even further. If you sign up with the hard-to-find academic plans, you may find the free version meets all your needs.
Best of all, you can embed your visualisations anywhere - like right here. Here’s a visualisation I made in less than two hours with a research fellow in comparative constitutional law, Anna Dziedzic. We chose to represent the number of constitutions each country has had as the size of a bubble, while the colour shows when its first constitution was written. A small, dark red bubble indicates a country with a long, but very stable constitutional history, while a big yellow bubble hints at a brief, but turbulent history.
(Disclaimer: This is only preliminary data that has not been peer reviewed or published.)
We’ll be running CartoDB workshops for humanities and social science researchers during the course of the year, so stay tuned.
