VISUALIZING AMERICA

A year ago, on a whim, I decided to start this Tumblr. It was around election season, and maps of the US were everywhere, all red and blue. It got me thinking about maps, all the ways each state differs, and how you can show those differences in a map.

I'm still not entirely sure how I managed to do it, but I've been going for over a year, posting a map every other day. I've got 4.5 gigabytes of Illustrator documents on my computer now, making up a total of 186 different maps. The folder for this project clocks in at just under 7 gigabytes when all the other files are included.

I think that this one-year mark is a good transition date for the blog. I'm running out of subjects to map, and there are other projects out there I want to pursue. I might still make maps occasionally, but they won't follow the every-other-day-format that I've been following thus far. I've been playing around with new and different ways to work with the dataset that I've amassed, and that's exciting me a lot more than making more maps. I'll post updates on those to this Tumblr into the future, so keep tuned for those.

(I've also updated the site slightly: I've added a small index to the left side of the site, to make it easier to browse the maps that have been posted. For now, you can just look through them by state, but I might add categories or something else in the future.)

So thanks, everyone. Thanks for finding this blog and taking the time to check out what I've been doing. It's been an intense year, and I hope this next one is just as interesting and  fruitful as I explore the possibilities before me.

Based on Google Analytics, here is where most people who visited http://www.statemaps.tumblr.com/ were from.

Not surprisingly, the map pretty closely resembles a population map of the US, save for a few states that are darker than they should be otherwise. I'm guessing this is because of the state-dedicated Tumblrs that reblogged maps. (You guys know who you are. Shout out!)

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary for this blog, so I decided I'd look back at how many times I mentioned each state in the captions.

Along with prescription pain killers, the most meth busts that happened in 2010 were in the Southern states. Missouri in particular saw 2800 methamphetamine seizures by law enforcement.

The cocaine usage map for 2010 closely mirrors that of illegal drug usage in general. Rhode Island's still druggie heaven, for instance.

For the first time in history, in 2012, more female athletes represented the US than male US athletes.