Comments on: Map design

By: Polly Morgan

Polly Morgan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:59:59 +0000

Ben, this is a great idea. I agree with others who say that the Canberra map is clearest. If it’s possible (and not too much work), it would be useful to be able to click on a booth number, and have a pop-up or mouse-over that shows the street address of the booth. It’d make it in useful in cross-referencing the booth location with census information.

By: kme

kme — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:59:04 +0000

I like the Canberra electorate style too.

It’d be nice if you could do something similar by putting a little pie at each booth location, with the proportions of the pie showing the vote and the overall area the number of votes cast. That way you could even show primaries…

By: Meg Clement

Meg Clement — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:46:14 +0000

If you could find a colour that showed up well enough on the maps, I think a lighter and darker shade of one colour would be much less confusing when you want to show the strength of a vote in an area dominated by one party – on the other hand the numbers do this anyway so i question whether it’s worth it?

By: ChrisW

ChrisW — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:03:22 +0000

Hi Ben

I favour the approached used for Canberra

By: Hamish Coffee

Hamish Coffee — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:46:38 +0000

Again, good work Ben. Could I suggest that you put suburb names in small letters, for those of us who don’t know our Canberra aerial geography?

By: deconst

deconst — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:44:55 +0000

Hi Ben, these are really interesting. Can you vary the intensity of the font colour to illustrate a booth’s deviation from the seat-wide vote % total? The stronger the font color, the deeper the vote. That way you can likely wrap style 2 into style 1 or 3.

Can you give two values for each booth: the ALP % and the Lib %? Perhaps a nice red blue. That way the percentage to others can be estimated..

In any case, these are great!

By: Hamish Coffee

Hamish Coffee — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:16:12 +0000

Nice work Ben, Canberra is dry!

By: Nick C

Nick C — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:43:07 +0000

Jeffery
What’s the aim of your project? I see your current site (minus the .au) just provides an address search feature which brings up lists of federal and state MPs for that area. What are you aiming to end up with?

Does Ben know you’re using his data at the moment?

By: Jeffery Candiloro

Jeffery Candiloro — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:30:26 +0000

G’Day Ben,

I’m actually processing all this data at the moment as part of version 2 of myrepresentatives.org.au.

I will shortly (within the next week or so) have all the polling places geocoded and have the straight count and 2PP results for each polling place for all divisions in a DB. Once done, you’re welcome to it.

What you’re doing looks really good and a great use of the data I’m producing!

By: Nick C

Nick C — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:13:59 +0000

I guess I’d favour the Canberra version. The Fraser version is obviously only suited for looking at one seat at a time, but I can see how I might use it occasionally as I do sometimes like to compare individual booths to the average across the electorate.

Nathan’s maps don’t have all booths on them. It looks like he left out all booths with under 400 votes, and New England has been completely left out. Amongst other things, for instance, leaving out these small booths has meant that the booths with the biggest % of Green votes in Richmond are missing. This is a difficult question you’ll have to work out, as including all the smaller booths means there’ll be several hundred, if not into the thousands, of booths to add, but if you leave them out it’s not really the complete picture.