Less than a week after trying out some new data mapping concepts at Guardian Hack Day, a big pile of data appeared on the Internet begging to be mapped. Using some of their new skills and a convenient constituency data tool, a small team of innovators got to work to produce some really interesting data-driven journalism.
Mat Wall details what happened behind the scenes:
“[Simon Willison] wrote a piece of code to extract the 12,000 BNP member’s postcodes through the They Work For You constituency API. Now he had a voting constitency for each person on the list. He then injected this data back into his hack day project to plot this information onto the map obtained from Wikipedia. This took about an hour.”
Update: The project didn’t end there, it turns out. The infographics guys used the concept for the newspaper the next day. Here’s a picture of what was printed:
