Friday, October 5, 2012

Fun Friday Map!

After hearing a news story this week on mapping Million Dollar Blocks, I decided to look more into the project.


At Columbia University, the Spatial Information Design Lab does some really interesting work with you guessed it, spatial information design.  The Million Dollar Block project maps out the amount of money spent on incarcerating people based on where they come from.  You end up being able to find individual city blocks where millions of dollars are being spent to keep area residents behind bars somewhere else.

The image below shows two city blocks in Brooklyn, New York with the previous residence location of inmates and the dollar amount spent to keep each person incarcerated.  In total $4.4 million was spent to incarcerate people from these two city blocks. 


Presenting uncommon data in a nontraditional manner can give people new perspectives.  From new perspectives might come new questions, and maybe new answers. 

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