A data blog from reporters at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Ideas? Drop us a line.
Here’s a map of the Legislature elected by South Dakota voters on Nov. 6, 2012. Toggle back and forth between the House and Senate results. The map is color-coded by party control in each legislative district. Click on a district to see the winners, their political parties and what percentage of the vote they received.
This Fusion Tables map of schools in Sioux Falls uses some education data from reporter Josh Verges and developer Derek Eder’s fantastic template for making searchable maps. It’s one of my favorites because it’s so easy to add criteria filters — radio buttons, sliders, check boxes, etc. Would use again!
This map shows, in megawatts, the wind resource potential of 1,009 counties in 12 Great Plains states that were the subject of a recent federal study.
To make it, I followed a FlowingData tutorial that uses the BeautifulSoup Python library to parse an SVG file and shade the counties based on an external data source — in this case, a three-column spreadsheet I got from the researchers. I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I finally got it to work after a developer at PBS Newshour helpfully informed me that, with Python scripts, indentation matters. Who knew?
How many Republicans, Democrats and independents are there in each legislative district? Here’s a map visualizing that data from the South Dakota Secretary of State’s website.
The districts are colored shades of red and blue depending on the partisan edge. Click a district to get a pie chart of the party registration of that district’s voters.
