Mapping the #hackacad Contributors

I saw a tweet about a graph of Hacking the Academy contributors compiled by Adam Crymble. It was an interesting look at who submitted entries or papers or posts for the crowd-sourced book-in-a-week project. Hacking the Academy is a project out of the Center for History and New Media located at George Mason University. (tag: #hackacad) Tom Scheinfeld and Dan Cohen are heading it up. The graph that Adam assembled was heavily skewed towards GMU. I wanted to see if there was more geographic diversity amongst the contributors.

I asked Adam if he would share his data and, like any good open-source scholar, he did. I took his spreadsheet, added some more details to Adam's truly amazing detective work, found some addresses, added group blog entries and Profhacker posts by location of the writer. Then I used Batchgeocode to get latitude and longitude for each contributor which allowed me to create a map (in ArcGIS 9.2) showing where the contributions came from.

The map above shows small black dots for each essay or article. Most submissions are from North America and the northeast is heavily favored. With this approach you cannot tell that there are, for instance, 40 essays from GMU or that Canberra, Australia, has six entries since all of the points for one location align on top of each other. So I did a density map for the points.

Using a cluster analysis (shown above) on the points with density type: kernel; output cell size: 0.5; and search radius: 25 sq map units, I still get a similar view of the contributions, with some hint of action in the UK area.

I put together a Google Earth KMZ file for these data. Find it here (launches Google Earth).

What I want to do is make a map mashup so that all the points show up at once on a world map. I couldn't get it to work. If anyone knows how to add over 300 points (by latitude and longitude) to a web map, please help a mapper out!

I could make a mashup using BatchGeocode but 1) I couldn't get all the 314 points onto one single map, and 2) multiple entries for a single location show up as ONE entry. Here they are:

Link to larger map shown below (US Contributors)

Link to the larger map shown below (Non-US Contributors)

 

Thanks Adam! This was fun.