Map maker bot
Neil Freeman, 2016
Twitter bot in Python
daily tweets
Map Maker Bot posts maps generated from US Census data. The bot is currently working its way through the 2014 American Community Survey, which includes information on a wide range of topics, from age to income to education. The bot creates maps of county-level data, grouped by quintile. The bot functions as an educational tool, and as a critique of a facile approach to official statistics and map-making. The bot's functional but hardly insightful maps offer a veiled critique of the blind use of data to offer insight.
The bot downloads data from the Census API, determines quintiles with pysal, matches it to TIGER/Line geodata, then draws the map with SVGIS.