Atlas of Rural and Small Town America

Saw this great web map showing GIS data by counties in the U.S. It's called Atlas of Rural and Small Town America, but it shows the whole country by population, employment, agriculture, and "county classifications." The map above shows the percent of farmland in the U.S. by county (using 2007 data).

And this one above shows the counties by farms involved with Community Supported Agriculture from 2007. An added plus is you can download the U.S. Dept of Agriculture data. 

Seeing this site came on the heels of a New York Times article on mapping broadband access in rural America. Broadband in the Heartland is lacking.  Though the Atlas of Rural America does not show these data (internet access across the country) the article shows a couple of interesting maps.

Poster Session Video - GSA Penrose #GEPenrose

This is a wee bit passed its prime, but I'm posting it anyway. This is a video of the final poster session from the Geological Society of America Penrose conference last month. I'm wandering through the posters and interactive demos of Google Earth projects that focus on geoscience education. I can't believe the conference was already a month ago.

Click here to see who was presenting (from 3 to 5pm).

Historical Photos and Place - WhatWasThere

I don't believe this is the only mapping web site of its kind, a space or archive to geo-locate older photographs, but What Was There looks great and seems easy to use. How they describe themselves:

WhatWasThere ties historical photos to their modern physical context, allowing you to tour familiar streets to see how they appeared in the past.

There is a limitation...lack of photos. I searched Poughkeepsie, NY. Nothing. I searched Delaware, Ohio. Again, nothing. So I searched around Los Angeles and found some interesting shots like the ones above. Isn't it neat when someone takes a cute little 1930s restaurant, knocks it down and builds something ugly? This is a common occurrence, of course, especially in Los Angeles, but now we might be able to see some of these old art deco gems. So upload!

I hope this or another platform like this takes off. I remember working on a project with a faculty member who was creating a "digital tour" of a place. The local county historical society wanted the professor to pay big bucks to merely scan some of their archival images. And then to present the data to other people outside of campus walls presented even more layers of 'no.'  Needless to say this faculty member's project never made it to the web. Now, perhaps, we can move forward with images that should be freed from shoe boxes and historical society's accordion files.

Follow WhatWasThere on Twitter.

See the full gallery on Posterous

GIS at a Small Liberal Arts College - DePauw

This is a great essay in the Academic Commons on DePauw University's GIS work - "From Project to Program: The DePauw University GIS Center Engaging the Campus With GIS."

Taken together, this modest list outlines the initial components that ultimately led to the creation of a thriving and sustainable Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program at DePauw University.

GIS software and other geospatial technologies are such useful and discipline-spanning utilities yet challenging to use. This article goes into nice depth on how DePauw's GIS program works to bridge the campus community with mapping. As Diana Stuart Sinton puts it "the investment that DePauw has made in its curriculum, personnel, and other resources is clearly paying off!"