#map assignment

One of my goals with my community, African-Americans suffering from depression, is to not only build a safe forum for discussing mental health, but to also provide resources for seeking treatment. After a couple of hours (and yes, I do mean hours) I finally found some useful, relevant, mappable data.

While on the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration’s  (SAMHSA’s) website, probing for a useful dataset file, I discovered a treatment facility locator. The locator is updated weekly and lists, with several exceptions, most public, private for-profit, and non-profit State-licensed or nationally accredited mental health facilities around the nation. Another plus? The locator allows you to download a real-time .csv file of the records. And even better, you’re able to filter the facility locator data, which is perfect when searching for specific types of facilities (e.g. a Public/government sponsored facility that accepts Medicaid) or services for a specific demographic (e.g. treatment for adolescents or LGBTQ patients). A useful resource for my community? You bet.

I will use the data to generate a map of shapes and will then merge it with the US State shapefile in CardoBD, listing facilities per state. I'll most likely be using the common field “state.” If time permits, I'd like to also try generating a NY-based map using a NYS zip code shapefile.

Using the limited data that's available on same-sex couples in the U.S. I'd love to map out where the highest number of same-sex couples live. I believe I'll have to use a similar tactic to how we broke out the fatalities in workplaces so it won't necessarily show the most in the most populous areas.

In the ACS Data on Same Sex Couples, there is data in tab 3 that shows the percentage of same-sex couples who consider their partner to be their spouse. There's even data within tab 1 that shows female-female households in which, if I can map this I would absolutely go back and find this out since I'm work mainly with queer women for my community.

Unfortunately I'm not able to find the raw data for me to play around with. What do you think would be the best way to view this data on a map (used from CartoDB like we had done in class). Would it be to transfer the data from tab 3 (numbers instead of percentages), and then use the formula as we did in class (total pop/same sex pop*1000)? 

http://cdb.io/1wgZD7E

Update** After moving around the data in an excel, I found the best solution were to take the state column, number of same sex households and narrow the percentage to households that have same sex spouses vs just those that have same-sex persons living in that household. I was able to take the geometric portion from the map we used last week (US State Shapefile) and merge it with the CSV I formatted. The results showed a map that presented the percentages of same-sex spouses of the United States. This is according to data compiled in 2013.

I'm going to map one of the data points from our community profile pitch. I will look at the number of undocumented immigrants eligible for deportation relief under the Obama administration's executive action, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. (A federal judge temporarily blocked the newer policies this week, but the Justice Department is appealing the decision.)

I will use the Migration Policy Institute's data on number of eligible undocumented immigrants by state, which has estimates for 41 states and the District of Columbia. This will be a map of state outlines, so I will merge a U.S. State shapefile with the data on eligible immigrants. I will merge the state shapefile with "state" as the common field.

Here's the map.

Here are a few questions I had at the end of this:

I selected quantile, because for this data set, it helped illustrate differences better than the equal interval option. Is this ok, and can we occasionally use quantile?

Is there a way to format the hover text so that the number shown has commas in it (such as 320,000 instead of 320000)?

Is there a way to format the hover text so that you can change the title of the column name from something like number_eligible to Number of eligible undocumented immigrants?

In a case where the data set doesn't include every state, would it be better to type the missing states by hand in the spreadsheet and leave the number blank, so that you have something like "Data not available" appear when you scroll over them in the map?

We could potentially use this map for the project, so it'd be great to find this out so I can tweak it.

DUE DATE IS TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2nd! 

Another due date update post!  First, and easier, is our binders! Each student needs a 2 inch, white binder with pockets for this class.  They should have a pack of dividers and loose leaf paper as well.  Students need to create these FIVE sections in their binders to be ready for class on TUESDAY.

Native Americans/Explorers 

Colonies/Revolution

New Government 

Growing Nation

The Civil War 

Students should be prepared with that for class on TUESDAY.  

Additionally, we are working on maps in which we create our own countries.  These can be as creative as someone wants it to be!  If you love baseball? Awesome! Make the United States of Baseball! If you love Ice Cream?  The Democratic Republic of Ice Cream!  The world is literally yours to make!  

The rubric for this assignment is: 

Ms G and I made our own example maps, as well as a sample key for students to see while creating their maps.  I am including them here as well for reference.  

Good luck! 

You know, being all productive and shiz while I'm actually AT school.

This is kind of hard when I didn't bring any markers or Crayons with me today to color the dang thing. 

I DO have these really nice, fairly expensive felt-tip pens with me that I use to label everything. 

But, oh wait. Last week, some "Playmate of the Year" wannabe asked to borrow a pen from me because hers dried out halfway through class. 

And the one I gave her is the one I use to write down all the city names on the maps.

And she never gave it back.