Following the UX patterns we explained in the last blog post, you will notice that creating a Choropleth map –a map where you change the color of your geospatial features depending on a value– is just as easy as with the old Editor. You just need to have a numeric column in your data, so you can use the values contained in it to change the color of your features. To do so,
Click on the Layer name
Click on the Style tab
Click on the Polygon color
Click on BY VALUE
Select your desired column
If you want to customize your map further, change the quantification method for your ramp in the same component.
To learn more about how this works behind the scenes check out the CartoCSS panel and TurboCarto repo.
Keep an eye on our blog to stay up-to-date on the coolest features of the new Builder, and let us know what you think about CARTO Builder.
We recently welcomed new members to our US team, and now we want to take a moment to welcome our newest team members in Europe!
Miguel Romero
Front End Engineer
Buti joins our Product team as a Front End Engineer. Last year Buti worked at Be Mate in a similar role, and before that he worked freelance and with companies such as BeBanjo and Socialbro.
Why are you excited about CARTO? “The product is great, and CARTO’s mission is ambitious, but to be able to work side by side with people I admire, it’s amazing.”
Fernando Carrasco
Partners Manager, APAC
Fernando is focused on leading CARTO partner relationships in the Asia Pacific region. He will be in our Madrid office, but has previously worked in locations such as Hong Kong and Dubai.
“The most exciting aspects of working at CARTO are the diversity of people and backgrounds, the tech-design mix in all CARTO departments, and the energy in all CARTO Talks, a sign of passion for multidisciplinary knowledge.”
Aare Undo
Mobile Developer
Aare is the newest member of our Mobile Development team in Tartu.
“This is an amazing opportunity to work with a company that is extremely international, yet manages to keep all of its employees connected so that it feels like a small local company.”
Tony Fell
Sales Development Representative
Tony joins us from MicroStrategy, where he was a Business Development representative for nearly 3 years. He has over 18 years experience in the business intelligence/information space and we are excited to have him join our brand new London team!
“Coming from an analytical background having worked as a BDR at MicroStrategy, I am very excited to be joining an exciting dynamic company and am eager to shape my footprint with CARTO in the UK.”
Welcome Buti, Aare, Fernando, and Tony! We’re looking forward to seeing how your experience pushes CARTO to the next level. VAMOS!
Analyzing data on important measures like electrical indicators can seem like a daunting task, especially when that information needs to be timely and made available by law. When faced with the challenge of visualizing and analyzing over 2,000 indicators Red Eléctrica de España (REE) turned to CARTO.
REE is the sole transmission agent and operator of the Spanish electrical system, with over 2,000 indicators related to the Spanish electrical grid. Using CARTO’s location and data analysis platform, REE and Vizzuality created a network of maps and graphs that spatially represents thousands of crucial information to clients and customers in an accessible way.
Geographic analysis and customized foreign data wrappers were used to discover strategic information in a format that made processing information easy and understandable for clients and customers.
Not only can a seasoned electrical engineer harness the power of open, data-driven visualizations but a novice purveyor, curious about electrical output in the region, can gain access to valuable information in a clear visualization. CARTO connects via foreign data wrappers (FDW) to their data warehouse so there’s always instant synchronization of geospatial data. Additionally, CARTO helped REE and its clients understand the geographical distribution of electricity metrics, including generation and consumption.
Discover how REE used CARTO to visualize and analyze crucial public information, while adding transparency to their network offerings
CARTO is an open, powerful, and intuitive platform for discovering and predicting the key insights underlying the massive location data in our world. To learn more about how CARTO helped REE visualize and analyze their electrical indicators for better customer services through the power of location intelligence and data analysis, read our case study today.
We really hope to continue to see more successful user experiences in this and other industries!
For a long time, most GIS tools focused on creating maps with very small datasets. Now that we have more and more data we need better tools to visualize datasets that are way bigger, or that represent a high density amount of features for some particular places. For example, if you try to visualize a dataset containing 3 million points in San Francisco, it is very likely that you will end up having more points than pixels on the screen. Therefore, showing points without aggregating them makes absolutely no sense.
Because of this, we’ve decided to rebuild the way you style your maps by separating the style properties from the aggregation properties. In CARTO Builder you can aggregate your data by squares, hexbins, administrative regions (we will be adding more in the future), and pixels –which will end up as a heatmap– or time units with a single click. For those who have used the old Editor, this will remind you of the good ol’ density maps.
On the other hand, those aggregations are calculated on the fly, so if you filter the data in your layer, the aggregation will be recalculated automatically, which turns out to be very useful when analyzing different distributions of points depending on a value (analyzing tree coverage by species or by caretaker).
Of course, we also support more custom aggregations (using census tracts for example), which require using the intersection analysis and your own polygon data (or our boundary data coming from the Data Observatory.
At CARTO, we have a deep passion for sharing knowledge and discovering new insights through spatial analysis and visualization. With the release of our CARTO Builder and the ever deepening work of our team, we’re excited to share with the world some of the game-changing innovations we’re bringing to the table.
September is no exception, and has become our most active month for events and conferences since our big announcements earlier this year. From Brussels Belgium, to New York City and beyond, don’t miss the chance to grab us for a demo or to talk data analysis over a beer – We’re positive you’ll be as excited as we are!
Boston Data Festival
We love Boston. We love it so much it’s hard for us to stay away! This year, ODSC’s Boston Data Festival, taking place September 22-24th, is set to be an epic ride of innovations in data science and analysis. Our very own Tyler Bird will be headed to Beantown to talk data visualization, give a presentation on spatial analysis, and partake in an epic 3 days of data-goodness. Keep an eye out for the talk schedule and come visit our booth!
State of the Map 2016
This year’s State of the Map, taking place September 23-25 in Brussels Belgium, is set to be the biggest OpenStreetMap (OSM) community event to date.
Jaak Laineste, our Head of Mobile will also be around, making it a great opporutnity to learn about our Mobile SDK, services, and offline mapping. Also, don’t forget to ask him about his cool CARTO SDK map on a watch.
Transportation Camp NYC
Our favorite un-conference for transportation innovation comes to CARTO’s home-base in New York City September 24th! Don’t miss the chance to talk location intelligence with our NYC and transportation guru Jeff Ferzoco. We’ve been quite busy tapping into the power of the CARTO Builder to create fast insight like never before. Not to be missed!
Strata + Hadoop World
Being the largest conference for data science and analysis in the world, Strata + Hadoop World in New York City is sure to be an enriching experience into the leading edge of technology and data. Stuart Lynn’s talk, Designing a location intelligence platform for everyone by integrating data, analysis, and cartography, on geospatial statistical methods and machine learning in building location intelligence tools, is not to be missed! In addition, you can check out yours truly’s presentation in the Solutions Theatre, where we’ll dive deep into understanding how CARTO’s ecosystem works to put powerful analysis at the fingertips of interdisciplinary professionals. Come visit us at booth #655 to get the scoop as we shake things up with analysis-focused demos, conversations, and possibly a special surprise ;)
Other opportunities to connect
As always, CARTO is committed to many other events around our local and international communities. If you miss us at the conferences above, we’ll also be sponsoring and attending the Rider’s Alliance Gala event to futher support and grow our transportation communities. In addition, stay tuned for events at our office space, or to plan an event or visit with the CARTO team, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at marketing@carto.com
On July 7 we announced the rebranding of our company and simultaneously introduced a leap in our product’s evolution, CARTO Builder. This is the story of the process behind the new name that embodies this transformation.
We are no longer CartoDB, but CARTO: in capitals and without the “DB,” as it was clear that to have more exciting and engaging conversations with our users we needed to drop the acronymn for database and become simplified, bold, and more aligned with their voices.
CARTO has matured tremendously over the past few years. We have evolved from a spatial database to a geo-visualization tool to a location-based business intelligence platform. Our users have changed, too, from specialized developers to business users with little to no programming knowledge—and for whom geospatial analysis is not only a skill, but an enormous strategic advantage.
For some time we had been faced with the opportunity to develop our brand into something more effective at communicating our product’s new values. But we also knew that any rebranding would require going far beyond a mere logo swap or name change; it had to be a process that transformed us on the inside as well as the outside. Because we wanted everyone to feel personally involved with the transition, we didn’t outsource the brand design, but started it on it quiety in house.
CARTO's rebranding "had to be a process that transformed us on the inside as well as the outside."
The first weeks after we decided to rebrand, we assembled a special internal team of designers, product strategists, and some of our best communicators. We started from a market analysis approach that, several months later, finally identified our starting point. We then began searching for new language to communicate our product and values.
We spent months rethinking brand positioning and the new language kit we needed to make our vision work. One of our most challenging goals was how to communicate what we do, the way we do it, and who we do it for. We aimed for simplicity over buzzwords.
Our thought process centered around several issues. First, the software we make is both simple and complex. On the one hand, it’s a tool for building analytical, location-based apps. On the other, it’s a platform packed with APIs, an SDK, and even a drag-and-drop web map editor. Because we like to speak directly to our users, the final outcome was changing our libset to “Engine,” and our self-service Editor to “Builder.”
Second, we knew we liked strong, objective messages about how we allow companies to grow; our new tagline, “Predict through location,” best reflects this preference. At the end of the day we work in units of “location” enhanced with analysis and data enrichment, smart features that lead to actual prediction, not just visualization and discovery. Because of the rebranding we also had the opportunity to talk about prediction in a different way—not only about predicting through time, but space. CARTO aims to predict in both dimensions, allowing you to understand what may happen somewhere before it actually happens.
At this point, roughly three months in, the rebranding team’s work had been under wraps and only select employees knew about the big project that was underway. In fact, the secrecy was so complete that several months before the announcement, when our team began to use carto.com as a brand prototyping sandbox and built a landing page from a fake competitor in the location intelligence market (Car To), many of our colleagues and some of our customers and stakeholders thought there was a new player with a very similar name in the industry. But it was just us, playfully using our new domain to fine-tune our future brand language.
Soon thereafter we raised the curtain for the entire team. First, we transmitted the idea of the brand as much more than a name. CARTO encompasses a set of values empowered by an exciting message. We shared the idea of a culture that permeates everything on both sides of the company’s doors. We shared that our new brand and positioning was a complex strategic exercise that should result in an extraordinarily simple system of ideas, forms, and messages. Finally, we disclosed that we had been working on a completely new visual toolkit, including the new logo, the last but not least important piece of the puzzle, to make everything complete.
Here I’d like to highlight some of the biggest visual changes:
The Marker
Our essence is location, and location is typically represented by a marker. For CARTO, however, location is more than sticking a point on a map. Location is understanding what happens around that point and looking deeply at everything that can impact this point. Using technology like the Data Observatory and Deep Insights, CARTO enables contextualization and analysis. Our marker is not a superficial icon merely pointing at something, but a spatial probe analyzing the profound, such as all the data columns it contains. CARTO is a tool to understand and predict these phenomena, and our brand therefore visually expands always from the marker.
Our colors
We do geospatial intelligence. More precisely we have a technology that helps people discover and predict insights that can change their companies, and we are forthright every time we explain this. And so we have the red, which we call “Location Red.” Red is the color of something important happening now or at a certain point in the future. Red comes next to blue on the color palette: a blue as deep as that insights that help you decide where to place your next shop. And green, a green that visualizes how you may grow. There are so many facts to be told that we even have purple.
Our typography
To further deliver our message in a clear and assertive way, we have chosen a fantastic font family that has a lot in common with us: the open source Montserrat, designed by Julieta Ulanovsky. Montserrat is geometric and rigorous, just like our spatial-data analysis. It is also readable and powerful, like the maps you can create in CARTO Builder. Montserrat works in tandem within our visual system with the fantastic Open Sans, which is also an open, versatile, and readable font that Steve Matteson designed a few years ago. We are an open company, so using fonts with open licenses was mandatory.
The marker and our new name written on red in capitals with Montserrat is our logo. But the fact is that we have changed everything else. We are now bold and direct when we speak our values, but also detailed when we explain how we do it. Our new brand best represents our product visually, but the most important thing is that it speaks about us symbolically in a much more genuine way. Because we built it. That is what our product needed.
Recently we’ve written about creating Data-Driven Maps with CARTO Builder and apart from creating maps dependent on ramps for numeric values, sometimes you need to create maps that show geospatial features grouped visually under different categories. For example, when analyzing different types of crimes, stores by branch, or tweets by term.
Now that you are familiarized with the possibilities of changing some visual parameters BY VALUE, try to color your points, polygons, or lines depending on a string column. We recommend coloring your spatial features only when most of the data fits within the top 10 categories. As you can see above, it’s as simple as:
Click on the layer name
Click on the Style tab
Click on the polygon color
Click on BY VALUE
Select your desired column
To create category maps with numeric columns, you will need to select ‘Category’ as the quantification method. You can also change some colors by clicking on each of the terms used for the different categories.
Check out the CartoCSS panel and the TurboCarto repo to learn more about how this works behind the scenes.
We all know that September is the “back to school” month, and for us at CARTO it’s also the time when we begin traveling around the world! So it’s with great excitement that we would like to share the details of Fernando Carrasco’s journey around Asia and Australia. Our newest hire on the Partners team will be visiting various countries around these continents for a month full of events and meetings to foster CARTO partner relationships in Asia-Pacific.
His mission is to engage with the international CARTO community and our partners network, as well as with new potential partners who wish to develop projects with location data and geospatial intelligence.
Here are some more details on the places and events Fernando will be visiting:
Taipei: From September 8 to September 10, when we’ll also be participating in a joint workshop with our partners RiChi tech
Bangkok: From September 11 to September 14. On September 13, alongside our partner GIT-AIT, we’ll be hosting a one-day event all about location intelligence and how CARTO can help optimize operational performance
Jakarta: From September 15 to September 18
Singapore: From September 19 to September 21
Kuala Lumpur: From September 22 to September 24 Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24
Sydney: From September 25 to September 28: Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
Brisbane: September 29 & 30
Melbourne: From October 3 to October 5
Perth: October 6 & 7
If you would like to talk to us and learn about CARTO, or participate at any of the events, please feel free to email Fernando to find a time to meet.
We are tremendously looking forward to expanding our APAC presence and really hope to see you all there, so don’t forget to set up your meeting today, and stay tuned for more upcoming trips to the region!
Open data is an important part of how we understand both local and global economies, how we discover new possibilities, and how we identify the key insights within data can reveal tremendous things about the world, continuing to transform it in the years and decades to come. Our friends at Enigma have embodied this idea fully, working tirelessly to maintain over 100,000 open datasets and develop insightful stories using technology including CARTO.
Recently, we sat down with the team at Enigma to talk about their recently released Boom or Bust microsite, which takes a deep dive into open data and compelling visual narrative with CARTO, to understand what’s next for North Dakota’s economy. Here’s what they had to say!
Tell us a bit about Enigma and the North Dakota Boom or Bust Project built using CARTO.
Enigma curates and maintains over 100,000 open datasets, available for non-commercial use to the general public. Within this trove of information are amazing stories across a wide range of topics. We enjoy creating microsites around data we find to be particularly rich with storytelling potential, not only to showcase the breadth and depth of our data, but to highlight the insight it provides and to make public data even more accessible to the public.
Our latest microsite, Boom or Bust, profiles the dramatic rise and fall of oil and gas production in North Dakota over the last decade. Using nearly one million rows of raw data from the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), along with CARTO’s Torque.js library, we can visualize the output of 15,000 individual wells over ten years in less than fifteen seconds.
It’s an amazing data story with incredible insight. Tell us a bit about your decision to use CARTO, and your experience with the platform in the development of this story.
Several people on our team have experience using CARTO so it was a natural choice for this project. The CARTO is great for fast prototyping, regardless of what platform you end up using in production – you can quickly discover and explore temporal relationships in the data using a Torque layer from the map layers wizard.
On the microsite we used the standalone Torque.js library since we needed a bespoke front-end. We created two custom slider controls and synced them with the Torque animation by listening to the change events exposed by the API. We also used the CARTO.js API to extract individual well data for display in Leaflet popups.
A great thing about Torque layers is that they can be updated even while an animation is playing, meaning that you can give the appearance of multiple layers without actually needing more than one. We used this approach to achieve distinct color schemes depending on the active basemap by simply updating the layer’s CartoCSS.
...with CARTO, we can visualize the output of 15,000 individual wells over ten years in less than fifteen seconds.
Were you able to discover something you did not already know from the data?
Early on we noticed that the wells appeared to be located along very straight lines. Initially this was assumed to be an artifact from spatial aggregation, since using Torque with certain parameters results in a grid-like plot. We were quite shocked to discover that this was not an artifact at all, but the consequence of so many wells drilled along North Dakota’s rectilinear network of roads.
Another interesting spatial aspect of the data is the way in which oil fields are extremely segregated by operating companies. We chose not to make this a focus of the microsite, but North Dakota is basically carved up into drilling fiefdoms. And though there are more than two hundred different well operators in the region, most wells are operated by several of the largest companies.
With this deep body of research, where do you see the future of North Dakota’s economy, and how can this project inform decisions being made?
The biggest discovery we made was that production is actually still on the rise in North Dakota, but it isn’t an economic boon to the area. Operators are profiting less than in the past, not only per barrel, but overall. This has resulted in North Dakota’s unemployment rate creeping back toward the U.S. average, in contrast to the real boom years during which the rate in oil-producing counties was historically low.
We hope you enjoyed this project and the insight created by Enigma. Stay tuned for more great insightful projects, and as always…
Over the past few months, we have shared some introductory tidbits about our CartoCSS preprocessor Turbo Carto. Turbo Carto enables you to make thematic maps with a single line of code.
If you are familiar with CartoCSS, you know how intricate your stylesheet can get when building something like a choropleth map. With Turbo Carto, you remove the complexity of writing lines and lines of CartoCSS, and most importantly, with Turbo Carto, your styling is connected to your data. This is an exciting new way to think about thematic mapping for the web.
In this blog, I’ll walk through the basics of Turbo Carto, outlining its syntax followed by some example maps.
Syntax
Turbo Carto is built around the idea of ramps. You can apply a ramp to any traditional CartoCSS property used to define a map symbol’s size (-width), color (-fill), and even opacity (-opacity) based off an attribute in your data.
No matter which CartoCSS property you are ramping, Turbo Carto has a standard syntax you can follow:
property: the CartoCSS property you want to ramp with Turbo Carto
attribute: the attribute in your data you want to symbolize
values: how the attribute values will be styled (by color, by size, etc.)
filters: defines which values are assigned to which attribute values
mapping: defines how filters are applied (=,>=,<=,>,<)
To see this in action, let’s look at how we would build a choropleth map using traditional CartoCSS and then with Turbo Carto.
In the map below, we are symbolizing each block group by the percent of population 25 and older that holds a master’s degree in San Francisco and surrounding areas.
The data are classified using the quantiles method with five class breaks. Each polygon is colored according to the class it falls using a sequential color ramp. Dark colors indicate high values, and light colors, low values.
The traditional CartoCSS for this map looks like this:
With Turbo Carto, we no longer have to hard code our class breaks. Of course this means fewer lines of CartoCSS to manage, but what’s even cooler is that if the values in our data change, our map will automatically update.
For example, if the values for masters_degree were updated, we no longer need to recalculate each class break and update the CartoCSS – Turbo Carto takes care of that!
To illustrate, take a look at the same map styled with Turbo Carto:
Let’s take a closer look at how we are ramping polygon-fill:
polygon-fill: is the CartoCSS property we want to ramp using Turbo Carto
masters_degree: is the attribute we want to map
#f3cbd3,#e498b4,...: is the sequential ramp used to color the polygons defined from lightest color (low) to darkest color (high)
quantiles(5): the classification method and number of bins
Turbo Carto also supports Color Brewer palettes as well as a set of custom palettes we’ve designed for Builder(more coming about those palettes soon!).
To use a Color Brewer sequential palette, we could easily modify the values property to define that:
You may notice in our choropleth example, we aren’t using mapping. Turbo Carto has some defaults built in. Visit the Turbo Carto Repo to learn more about defaults related to mapping.
Ramping a Category
Using the same syntax, let’s take a look at how to make a category map with Turbo Carto.
The map below shows the locations of 311 complaints for neighborhoods in Brooklyn, NY:
The next map symbolizes each point by complaint type. The top 5 complaint types are symbolized with unique colors and the remaining complaint types with a neutral gray.
To create this map, we are ramping the marker-fill property:
Using the category() filter, Turbo Carto reads the first 5 colors in the list for the top 5 categories in the complaint attribute and then assigns the last color in the list (#888) as the default for all other values.
Ramping Multiple Properties
Turbo Carto also makes bivariate mapping easier than ever before. On a bivariate map, two visual variables are used to symbolize two different properties in the data.
Using the same 311 example, the map below uses color to show the type of complaint (as seen above) and symbol size to show the number of each complaint type that occured at the same location:
To make this map, we are ramping marker-fill with the categorical attribute complaint, and ramping marker-width using quantiles (with 5 classes), and varying the symbol size between 6-40 pixels depending on the number of a complaint type at a given location:
We are very happy to share with you the news that we have added several experienced individuals to the CARTO family, to fuel our growth as the leading location intelligence platform.
Andy and Ben will join our Executive Team, adding high caliber business acumen and enterprise sales expertise to guide our commercial efforts. Joe, Bryan and Danny will beef up our North American team bringing in a wealth of experience in working with F500 corporations, government and academia.
Joe and Bryan will work out of our newly opened DC office, while Danny will work out of our New York headquarters. Chris establishes our presence in France as Senior Account Executive, with the goal of increasing client references in France, where we already have some key logos but a strong path to grow.
Ben Mathew
SVP Sales North America
Ben Mathew will be heading our North American Direct and Channel Sales team as SVP Sales NA. Ben will be based in DC which will help us have more access to the Federal Location Intelligence projects, where we already have great partners and relevant customers such as NPS, FCC etc. Ben comes to CARTO with more than 14 years of experience building sales teams and closing over 100 million in Sales as VP Sales NA at Logi Analytics. Ben has implemented lead generation and qualification strategies even before “predictable revenue” became a mainstream concept.
Andy Menzies
SVP International Sales
Andy Menzies joins us as SVP International Sales, to lead the Direct and Channel Sales team outside of the US and Canada. Andy will be located in the UK and will manage the opening of our UK office over the next weeks, where we have significant business opportunities across all industries. Andy comes to CARTO with more than 30 years of experience in software enterprise sales, most recently as Regional VP at Tibco Software, where he had overall responsibility for the UK & Ireland Enterprise Business. He has also been CRO at Rapidminer helping to define go-to-market strategies and a member of the executive team at two ‘Complex Event Processing’ vendors, Apama & StreamBase, both of which had successful exits. We are hiring in the UK facility, both for pre & post sales positions.
Joe Pringle
Partner Manager for North America
Joe Pringle joins us as Partner Manager for North America, to strengthen our network of trusted partners, ready to deliver custom geospatial applications to our corporate customers. Joe has very relevant experience working with Government Agencies and high profile organizations such as CMS, CDC, NIH and others as Director, Public Sector Health at Socrata. Joe will be based out of the DC office.
Bryan Spyro
Senior Account Executive
Bryan Spyro joins us as Senior Account Executive to work with our strategic accounts in North America. He was previously a successful leader in the IBM Advanced Analytics division helping customers to understand trends and behaviors in their data to accurately predict and optimize outcomes for their customers and stakeholders. Bryan will be based out of the DC office.
Danny Sheehan
Customer Success Manager
Danny Sheehan joins us as Customer Success Manager, to ensure a positive experience for our customers and users, leveraging his deep knowledge of CARTO’s product set with his prior extensive education and professional work in the GIS field. Most recently, he was a senior GIS Analyst at Columbia University.
Together with the talented and motivated new hires we have added on board in our NYC, DC, London, and Madrid offices over the past months, our sales team is ready to tackle the challenges facing us at the end of 2016, a time during which we will be focused on our clearly-defined “go to market” strategy.
It is a very exciting time to disrupt an entire industry, where GIS meets Data Analytics, creating a new space making geo and location accessible for data and business analysts, empowering individuals to predict key insights through location.
Welcome!
Miguel Arias,
COO
BTW, we’re hiring! find all our open job positions at carto.com/jobs.
Working with universities has been a very important part of CARTO’s development as a force for democratizing the mapping and analysis of data. We have been fortunate enough to work closely with many educators, librarians, and researchers who push us in exciting new directions.
Our relationship with the faculty and staff at NYU goes back to CARTO’s beginnings. It has been thrilling to watch the tool we built be used in courses there, and to see how their graduates continue to innovate.
This guest post is written by Andrew Battista, Librarian for Geospatial Information Systems, New York University.
The Data Services team at NYU Libraries provides GIS instructional support for the community of learning at New York University. Each year we meet with hundreds of students and researchers who are implementing GIS methods, and we work with faculty to support GIS learning across the disciplines, including the social sciences, urban studies, and digital humanities. While we have distributed and supported ESRI ArcGIS desktop software for at least seven years, we continue to see an increased demand for simpler, web-ready GIS platforms that have a reasonable barrier to entry. And as multimodal learning expands, students and faculty alike seek out platforms that are public facing and compatible with other dynamic online publishing environments.
Enter CARTO, one of the most robust and accessible cloud-based GIS platforms available. One of the reasons we like CARTO is because it presents an opportunity to extend the possibilities of spatial learning and reach a broader segment of students at NYU, especially undergraduates who are not familiar with GIS methods. During the 2015-16 academic year we were able to collaborate with CARTO and administer a university-wide organizational account. Currently, we have 314 users, which is on par with the number of unique ESRI Student Licenses for ArcMap given out during the year. Data Services’ incorporation of CARTO has also included the development of a tutorial, which we teach regularly, and the facilitation of a successful CARTOCamp Edu event, which drew GIS educators from the greater NYC region to Bobst Library for a day-long symposium on designing syllabi and promoting geospatial learning.
A Closer Look at CARTO and Geospatial Learning
As an educator evaluating CARTO’s role in NYU’s holistic GIS services, I begin with a few basic questions. Does CARTO extend the process of learning or the possibilities for intellectual inquiry? That is, does CARTO allow those studying art, history, sociology, literature, or communication to focus on the ideas intrinsic to the context at hand without becoming overwhelmed with complex GIS software? Finally, does CARTO allow students to frame spatial questions without losing sight of higher-order learning outcomes?
After one year, the answer seems to be a resounding “yes.” CARTO has been implemented successfully across the curriculum at NYU in classes like Media and Cultural Analysis, Art and Politics in the City, Introduction to Data Visualization, and more. What each of these courses have in common is that they fold CARTO into class projects in order to improve existing learning objectives without letting the technical aspects GIS analysis overtake the course goals.
One of the best examples of this learning paradigm is the NYU Gallatin class, Art and Politics in the City. This three-semester (January 2015-May 2016) urban research project, co-taught by Alejandro Velasco and Florencia Malbran, brings together students in New York and Buenos Aires to examine how urban arts and politics intersect in the Americas. In the class, students ask:
How are art and politics understood and expressed differently and similarly in these two American metropolises and why?
How do shared aesthetic features of public art in the city reflect the global circulation of urban creative modes?
What do we learn about local politics from looking at the art and writing on a city’s public spaces?
As you can see by reading the syllabus, the class is an interdisciplinary exploration of cultural critical and theoretical approaches to art, urban space, political resistance, and history. Students were expected to encounter Michel de Certeau, Henri, Lefebfvre, and other well-known writers about space and politics as they reflected upon their first-person exploration of graffiti and art across various New York and Buenos Aires neighborhoods.
With the help of Jenny Kijowski and others at Gallatin, students were able to use Fulcrum to gather images of graffiti locations and contribute to a class-wide dataset, which could then be visualized in CARTO. See the slides from our recent presentation at the NYU Digital Humanities Showcase, or watch a video of the talk to learn more about how we integrated CARTO with Fulcrum in this class. After three semesters, we were able to integrate the complete dataset into our Spatial Data Repository.
The upshot, though, is the students’ ability to overlay their findings with relevant socio-economic data as they developed research essays at the end of the course. Consider this map by Astrid Da Silva, a graduating Gallatin Senior.
Astrid explains that by incorporating data gathered by students in the class and juxtaposing it with NYC Open Data, she is able to “analyze the relationship between themes addressed in collected street art instances in our beat, Loisaida (delineated in orange), and the density of 311 graffiti complaint calls.” According to Astrid:
“Looking at a tag or mural, licit or illicit, explicit in message or playful in form on publicly
visible spaces, led me to wonder if what I saw was engaging in a conversation about the forces of legality and property. I also asked, what is allowed to be expressed and what gets reported, what themes are deemed acceptable and what themes are pointed to as vandalism, what kind of space can be claimed and who can claim it?”
The map would seem to suggest that in the area profiled, Loisaida, graffiti that has an overt political message is likely to occur in places that have a relatively higher rate of complaints to 311 about graffiti. Astrid was able to construct this map and integrate it into her larger course project, a comparative analytic essay that synthesizes the main themes of the course and asks students to proffer multiple forms of evidence, including socio-demographic data, as they understand the implications of art and political participation in urban space.
Next Steps
The relationship between NYU Data Services and CARTO exists within a larger institutional focus on developing technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning. CARTO is one among several platforms that has been recognized as a valuable tool for developing technology-enhanced education and has been the focus of discussions about the value of mapping and data visualization. See the most recent report of the Committee on the Future of Technology Enhanced Education (FTEE) for more information.
We are glad to see that CARTO is evolving as well, and we look forward to integrating CARTO’s new Builder platform into our instruction series and overall support model. CARTO also seamlessly integrates with our growing Spatial Data Infrastructure. For datasets that are open and freely available, users can discover, preview, and load directly into their CARTO account with one click.
Overall, we are very excited about the new developments at CARTO, and we expect it to become further incorporated into our teaching and learning at NYU. If anyone is interested in learning more about our work with CARTO, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Austere budget cuts have led to a reduction in original investigative journalism. CARTO’s holistic approach to location intelligence, however, enabled Le Télégramme to surmount budgetary limitations without compromising journalistic integrity, all the while spearheading a new genre of journalism.
CARTO’s location intelligence platform allowed Le Télégramme to begin recalibrating the field of investigative journalism through innovative data storytelling. Le Télégramme, a French language daily newspaper with a print circulation of over 220,000 in the regions of Brittany, Finistère, les Côtes-d’Armor, and whose digital traffic typically exceeds two million visits each month, navigated big data on a global scale with deep insights at the local level in a widely-celebrated April 2016 article, titled Immigration. Le Centre-Bretagne à contresens.
Le Télégramme translated national census data into interactive maps, charting immigration trends in each canton and region of France. “Interactive maps provide real value to our digital offerings,” explains Vincent Lastennet, the newspaper’s lead data journalist, “It allows different employees of Le Télégramme to work simultaneously on the same project, which allowed us to reach our tight deadlines while producing an impressive product”.
Discover how Le Télégramme used CARTO to integrate a collaborative business model saving both time and money
CARTO’s APIs can process big data to trace the migration not only of people, but of resources as well. In a June 2016 article, titled Baisse des dotations. Comment s’en sort votre commune?, Le Télégramme reported on the allocation of state resources that visually displayed the amount received by each canton’s with an interactive map. The newspaper’s dataset was processed within twenty-four hours using CARTO’s high-powered APIs.
Each of CARTO’s data-driven visualizations that Le Télégramme published garnered between 5,000 and 10,000 digital visits, and our map displaying state funding allocations, pictured above, attracted more than 30,000 visits.
We are excited to see more strategic innovations, such as data storytelling, from our users.
What innovations will 2017 have in store for Open Data? Join policymakers, data journalists, activists, NGOs, and both public and private sector stakeholders pioneering the future of Open Data in Madrid at the 2016 International Open Data Conference (6-7 October 2016).
The theme for IODC 2016, “Global goals, local impact,” could not be more fitting for us here at CARTO. It is with great excitement that we not only return to our hometown, but also have the opportunity to showcase Madrid’s local wonders to IODC 2016’s global attendees over the entire course of Open Data Week!
The hospitality of Spaniards is world-renowned, and we at CARTO would like to begin demonstrating it with a series of events, workshops, and seminars that will surely be some of the hottest tickets in town during Open Data Week. Come join us for CARTO and Vizzuality’s Open Data Week Happy Hour on October 5, 2016.
Sign up to participate in this amazing event on 27 September 2016 to learn about the latest innovations in visualization engines from CARTO’s CPO Sergio Álvarez Leiva and Vizzuality’s CEO Craig Mills.
Ramiro Aznar Ballarín, from CARTO’s solutions team, will teach participants practical tips related to creating insightful visualizations using geospatial tools. Scheduled collaborators to include María Poveda and Ignasi Alcalde.
This summit will demonstrate the ways in which the lives of citizens around the world have been improved with the incorporation of open data into city management and planning initiatives. In addition, the summit will feature breakout sessions wherein groups will discuss and brainstorm best practices for confronting challenges open data implementation poses to city planning projects. Finally, the summit will conclude with an open-forum for participants to share further insights from their own experiences.
Immediately following the Open Cities Summit, CARTO and Vizzuality invite you to a convivial night of food, drink, and discussion graciously hosted by Medialab Prado that can serve as both your unofficial conclusion to Open Data Week and your unofficial commencement of IODC 2016. RSVP here!
Eight years after the housing market crisis, and the enusing Great Recession of 2008, the real estate market is only now showing signs of recovery. In July 2016, for example, 654,000 single-family homes were sold, according to the latest census report from the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which marks a 12.4% increase from June 2016 figures, and an incredible 31.3% increase from July 2015. These statistics are encouraging, but what deeper insights can be leveraged from the report’s tables of numerical statistics?
In CARTO’s Real Estate webinar you will learn that today’s real estate motto is no longer “Location, Location, Location,” but rather “Location Intelligence, Location Intelligence, Location Intelligence.” Over the course of 45 minutes our CARTO team will provide you with a strategic overview of the resources needed in today’s sharing economy to maintain a competitive edge in the real estate market.
Our webinar will introduce the latest developments in location intelligence to you and your business partners while demonstrating how data visualization can enhance strategic real estate investments. Learn how CARTO provides maps based on gravity models, for instance, that analyzes a prospective property investment. The deep insights that this type of data analysis offers extends far beyond traditional presentation styles of statistical information, which will allow strategic, long-term business planning founded upon precise location intelligence.
We’ve partnered with JLL to chart past and present market trends throughout the city of London for prospective businesses considering relocating their firms in the city. With CARTO’s platform you can also discern developmental impacts on a smaller scale as well. CARTO’s platform helped Illustreets, an application helping would-be renters or buyers locate the perfect location, for instance, navigate an extraordinarily large amount of open data from UK governmental organizations in order to produce data visuallizations attuned to street-by-street demographics.
Did you know that 80% of all data collected contains location elements, but that less than 25% of businesses today incorporate this information into long-term strategic planning?
In this session you will learn how to forecast real estate trends with Location Intelligence including:
Vector Basemaps
Geocoding & Routing
Data Observatory
Join us on Thursday, September 29th to learn more about how CARTO’s Location Intelligence can enhance business intelligence in the real estate sector. Register today!
For ESRI users in and around Versailles, CARTO has great news! We are attending Versailles ESRI UC next month, and would be happy to discuss with you how CARTO’s ArcGIS™ connector can help enhance your location data’s value. Transform ArcGIS™ services into stunning data visualizations at unprecedented speeds with CARTO’s connector functionality and add location intelligence to all of your analysis.
CARTO’s ArcGIS™ connector enhances data visualizations that can help guide strategic business planning through intuitive location intelligence. By connecting ArcGIS™ data with a CARTO account you will be able to make strategic decisions for long-term planning as CARTO’s location intelligence platform provides greater insights into a dataset’s full potential.
We’ll be hosting a happy hour on Wednesday, October 5th where you can learn more about our platform and connector. Join us to learn how to:
Add extra analytic and intelligence capabilities to your current ArcGIS™ stack
Enrich data analysis with deep insights with CARTO’s ArcGIS™ connector
Access and analyze data with our connector’s widget-driven dashboard whenever, wherever
Share your ArcGIS™ maps with an unlimited audience
Explore how ArcGIS™ connector can be used with data from our Data Observatory
RSVP for CARTO’s very first of many events in the French geospatial market, at “La Maison des Parfums”, 8 rue de la Chancellerie.
Unable to attend our soirée? Feel free to contact Christophe Caron, our new sales representative for France and BENELUX at ccaron@carto.com.
CARTO is proud to announce its involvement with the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), an international coalition empowering global resilency planning through the production of accessible platforms that can convey climate data as meaningful information to non-specialists.
“PREP will leverage open data and open-source computing to help planners build resilience in their communities by connecting those making decisions with the data they need, in a format they can use,” explains Janet Ranganathan, WRI’s Vice President for Science and Research.
PREP’s data revolution, with its democratic impulse to translate climate data into transparent, accessible information for non-specialist users, echoes our own founding principle here at CARTO. We believe that self-service location intelligence and data visualization of climate data are vital for preparedness strategies and resiliency planning, and the success of harnessing this data revolution’s insights relies upon the ability to convey a meaningful story articulating the local impacts of this imminent global crisis for a general public.
Learn more about CARTO’s commitment to democratizing data in the face of the storm.
To enable the data revolution to translate into collective action PREP launched an open-source, agnostic technological beta platform. This approach empowers users around the world to pull relevant information into their own data-driven apps - from PREP partners including NASA, NOAA, and DOI. Currently, the beta platform is servicing select domestic and international locations, such as Sonoma County, California and Porto Alegre, Brazil, and PREP plans to scale up over the next 12 months providing the beta platform and data-driven apps to partners worldwide.
PREP’s joint-venture is an important step forward in resilience planning, and CARTO will continue translating open data into meaningful information through data storytelling and analysis to engage the global community.
Recently, we teamed up with Alteryx to explore London bike trip data. The results of our collaboration were presented at the Alteryx Inspire Europe plenary.
The maps below visualize different dimensions of our analysis and each one is equiped with a set of widgets to facilitate deeper exploration.
A Week of Bike Trips
The first map visualizes London bike trips connected from start station to end station over a one week time period. Using this map, you can isolate trips by station of origin (Start Station), destination station (End Station), follow the trip of a particular bike (Bike ID), and the length of the trip (Duration). You can also explore the bike trips for a certain time period using the Torque time-series slider.
Trips by Ward
The second map aggregates a year of bike trips to each London ward. The point symbols are scaled by the total number of bike trips to, from, or inside of each ward (click a point to see the breakdown). The lines connect wards that had either inbound or outbound trips between them scaling the line symbol by trips between any two wards. You can explore the connections between wards by filtering on either Trip Start Ward or Trip End Ward.
Trip Accidents and Weather
The third map shows a years worth of bike accident data augmented with weather data. Each accident is color coded according to severity. Using the widgets, you can filter by time period and/or various atmospheric conditions like wind speed, temperature, weather, and more. For additional context, we added in bike route data from OpenStreetMap. This map is a great example of how combining two datasets (in this case bike accidents and weather), with the ability to filter using widgets, really helps dig into the why and the how.
On the heels of Climate Week NYC 2016, we at CARTO would like to share with you a recent project from the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency (ORR) in support of their efforts to confront the anticipated impact of climate change on New York City over the next 100 years.
With CARTO’s location intelligence platform, ORR is charting a course to prevent history from repeating itself in the form of another Hurricane Sandy-type superstorm.
Hurricane Sandy, the worst natural disaster ever to strike New York City, began battering the city on October 29, 2012, and, in a span of nearly two days, charted a path of destruction that led to the deaths of 44 people, infrastructural damage to the city’s transit system, and related property damages totaling more than 19 billion dollars. Sandy’s devastation was facilitated by an alignment of idiosyncratic factors–such as its entry into New York’s low-lying coastal regions during high-tide in New York Harbor–but it nevertheless forecasted future risks posed to the city by climate change.
In 2013 the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), an independent body of scientists advising ORR’s risk and resiliency initiatives, identified among potential future risks heat waves, torrential downpours, and rising sea levels that would irrevocably change the city’s topography. NPCC predicts a 30 inch rise in sea levels by 2050, which means that twice as many New York City residents (nearly 800,000) will reside in “100-year floodplain.”
In collaboration with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), ORR’s OneNYC campaign relied upon CARTO’s platform to create an interactive map whose polygon layers visualize anticipated changes facing New York City. Leveraging various data sets within one data visualization allowed OneNYC not only to pinpoint which areas will be impacted the most in the coming years, but also current measures being taken to avoid a repeat of Sandy-level destruction.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, heeding NPCC’s dire warnings, has pledged 20 billion dollars to fund OneNYC’s recovery and resiliency campaign as it inaugurates structural transformations across the city. CARTO also developed an exploratory dashboard to help visibly promote these diffuse projects. One of the greatest impediments in rousing a public sense of urgency around climate change has been confronting a “seeing is believing” logic wherein actions are taken only when a threat, such as Hurricane Sandy, is both visible and thus unavoidable. OneNYC has devised a new strategy to bypass this problem with CARTO’s location intelligence platform as users can search their own addresses to view their neighborhood’s risk of potential flooding as well as the types of projects scheduled to prevent another natural disaster.
Learn how CARTO can help make your city more resilient.
OneNYC’s holistic approach to climate change dovetails with CARTO’s commitment to democratizing location data across sectors and industries.
CARTO continues fostering the development of smart cities with open data at the local level and global level. We are very excited to share with you another smart cities initiative from the City of San Diego - an interactive data visualization charting road repairs across the city.
San Diego’s Performance and Analytics Department unveiled StreetsSD, an interactive map allowing San Diego residents to track the progress of the Mayor’s infrastructural pledge to repair 1,000 miles of city streets by 2020. StreetsSD individually assesses city streets alongside the Overall Condition Index (OCI), whose 100-point based system classifies streets as “Good” (score between 70-100), “Fair” (40-69 score between 40-69), or “Poor” (0-39 score) to help prioritize repairs over the next five years. Municipal residents can use StreetsSD not only to find street rankings and the status of scheduled repairs, but also repair type for a designated street–asphalt paving/overlay/inlay, concrete, or slurry seal.
“This is one of the most innovative and capable online street maps of any major U.S. city because it makes detailed information about our roads and road repairs available with just a click or tap,” says Mayor Kevin L. Faulconer in a statement on the StreetsSD initiative. “[I]t updates automatically so residents have the most accurate data on streets in every neighborhood. We’ve got all this great information about streets and now we’re sharing it with the public through this really cool tool that makes it easy for everyone to access.”
Learn how CARTO Builder can provide transparency to your open data smart cities initiatives.
San Diego joins major cities around the world, such as New York and London, as it begins to incorporate deep insights from open data while implementing transparent, city-wide management projects. “StreetsSD is just another in a series of civic engagement tools the City has recently deployed that uses our data to improve San Diegans’ experience when they connect with City Hall,” stated Almis Udrys, Director of the Performance & Analytics Department. “With the support of Mayor Faulconer and the City Council, San Diego is really turning a corner on understanding its data and using it to enhance transparency, efficiency, and accountability.”
CARTO has always been committed to democratizing open-data knowledge, and we remain steadfast in supporting more smart city initiatives. If you are attending International Open Data Conference 2016 next week in Madrid, then make sure to attend our co-sponsored pre-event, the Open Cities Summit, to learn more about how CARTO’s location intelligence can help enhance your next smart cities initiative.
