Want to get a feel for how GIS mapping is being used effectively as a tool in the progressive community? Then read this: The Revolution Will Be Mapped, a recent article published by Miller-McCune Online Magazine. The article highlights the well regarded work of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities. And here’s a plug for the home team: The article also quotes Eric Schultheis, former GIS honcho at LSNC’s Race Equity Project, the gravitational center of LSNC’s ongoing GIS mapping projects.

This is a cross post from a LSNC sister site, but a well worthy share at this site: Mapping Out Success, an article from the current issue of California Lawyer, features Legal Services of Northern California as an example how California lawyers are increasingly relying on mapping to better analyze data, to get the job done. “One example is when LSNC in 2007 began using maps to show how a proposed gas-storage area in Sacramento would place a ‘disproportionate environmental burden’ on a densely populated minority neighborhood. … Similarly, LSNC has targeted its foreclosure-outreach program by mapping foreclosure data.”

The examples cited in the article are both products of LSNC’s Race Equity Project. For more information about mapping, visit the LSNC GIS Mapping Resources page.

This is a cross-post from the LSNC Advocate Feed but it is worth noting here as well: Today’s New York Times features Immigration Explorer, an interactive GIS map based on census data revealing settlement patterns for 20+ foreign-born groups between 1880 and 2000. The Immigration Explorer map is simply a companion piece to the NYT’s “Remade in America,” with today’s feature article about Diversity in the Classroom, which itself has a separate interactive statistical graph illustrating how student demographics break out by state and county and school district. For example, the Grant Joint Union High school district in Sacramento County, California.

You know GIS is at the heart of poverty law advocacy when it makes the cover of Clearinghouse Review, which it did in the current issue. The feature article is: The Use of Geographic Information Systems in Poverty Advocacy, by Jason Reece, a senior researcher at the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and my two-doors-down compadre Eric Schultheis, who oversees all the great GIS work published at the Race Equity Project. Great stuff, all.

Here at Webdogs 2.0, there have been periodic postings on GIS. But there is vastly more GIS information available at LSNC’s GIS Mapping Resources page.

This morning LSNC — with considerable help from Eric Schultheis at the Race Equity Project, reigning GIS guru at LSNC — completed a major update, minor reorganization and full-on link refresh of that page.

Among new additions are links to GISTools Freeware, an especially effective tool for extracting census data; Websites for Digital GIS Data, a comprehensive listing of GIS resources available on the web, courtesy of Stanford University; the Free Geocoding, Address Processing and GIS Data Capture web-based application created by the GIS geekmeisters over at the University of Southern California; and a handy dandy compilation of links to the growing collection of Race Equity Project GIS Tutorials.

Worth a revist, if you haven’t been over there for a while.

The day of the presidential election, the New York Times created yet another of its superb dynamic national GIS maps, visualizing the results by state with the usual red and blue breakouts. Among the many virtues of this map is a slider on the left that redisplays the national map to show how the red and blue states broke down during the four prior presidential elections, back to 1992.

But getting back to the 2008 election, to see an even more dramatic national map, click on the “Voting shifts” button on the left, mapped at the county level and revealing how broadly across the country voting shifted in one direction rather than the other. Stunning.

A quick heads-up to readers interested in all things GIS: Eric Schultheis has posted a new, detailed GIS tutorial for identifying where low-income homeowners reside, to better target foreclosure related services. The tutorial uses the well regarded DataPlace web-based GIS platform, in combo with instructions on using the GISTools freeware to extract the data for use with DataPlace. Just the latest in a long series of posts at the LSNC’s Race Equity Project site to help advocates take advantage of GIS and other resources to better understand race issues. Good stuff.

This is yet another cross post of an item from the LSNC main site, but it is a doozie, given what is happening in Southern California. And of likely interest to the GIS crowd out there:

Want a timely illustration of the effective use of GIS mapping? Take a look at the simple but effective wild fire maps created by the Los Angeles Times using the custom Google map features. They illustrate dramatically the areas affected. The first map was posted yesterday. A second, updated map illustrates conditions today. With either map click on the “flames” icon and you will get a (distressing) description of the area affected and the damage done.

This is one of those occasional cross-posts I make to draw due attention to LSNC’s Race Equity Project (REP), where our colleague ElektroMoose (aka Eric Schultheis) and resident GIS czar at REP reports on mapping HUD subsidized housing, an interesting innovation at the HUD User – Data Sets site. The REP post provides a snapshot of how it all works and how well. If you take a second to view and scroll down the HUD’s Picture of Subsidized Households – 2000 article discussed by Eric, you find all the datasets you need and ArcGIS-specific instructions on creating maps with those datasets.

And Eric’s latest post is another reminder that the REP is available to help other legal services folks get in the swim with GIS mapping. The ElectraMoose is at your service, people. As the ‘Mooser himself says, “Feel free to contact us if you need some help.”

The big demographic story of the day is the Census Bureau’s news release reporting that more than 300 counties are now “majority-minority”. Predictably, my beloved New York Times ran the story in a very readable analysis of this latest data. Out of character, the NYT didn’t provide a GIS map to match the story.

But USA Today did, and then some, as part of its story in its Nation section entitled Hispanic growth extends eastward. The story includes an interactive flash-based map of the Impact of USA’s diversity that visually extrapolates the newly released demographic data from the Census. The maps offers three views: one mapping the patterns of the new “majority-minorities”; another illustrating migration patterns of Hispanics, with the fastest rates of growth of Hispanics occuring in the Midwest and the East Coast; and a third showing a trend among Blacks of moving toward the South. Plus, you get an interesting audio commentary from the demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Back to the Census Bureau for a second. Here’s a tip for all you demographic data geeks out there, something you may overlook in Census news releases: The Census usually embeds links to the underlying data on major stories like this, making it a breeze to find the source data. If you take a look at the Census news release linked above, you’ll notice links to both a detailed explanation of the underlying methodologies used, as well as a link to a page where you can download the entire data sets used. Your tax dollars at work, people.