Hocodata

Looking at median household income in Howard County, Maryland, over time compared to other local jurisdictions. [UPDATED]

Looking at median household income in Maryland over time compared to DC and Virginia.

Everyone can now work with data and visualize it. Should you?

tl;dr: Howard County government ups its game in providing data with a new web site opendata.howardcountymd.gov. Next stop, HoCoStat? I’ve previously written about Howard County’s initial foray into publishing government data, the data.howardcountymd.gov web site created by the Howard County GIS division. As announced by the county and reported by Amanda Yeager at the Baltimore Sun, Howard County has launched a new site opendata.howardcountymd.gov to provide access to government data. This new site, also known as the OpenHoward portal,1 can be considered as a concrete implementation of open data practices mandated by the Howard County Council (see Council Bill 32-2014) and as a down payment on County Executive Allan Kittleman’s campaign promise to create an automated system (“HoCoStat”) to “help government increase responsiveness, improve efficiency and heighten accountability.” ...

Howard County, Maryland precinct cartogram. Precinct area is proportional to the number of registered voters as of the 2014 general election. Click for higher-resolution version. tl;dr: The map of Howard County looks very different if you’re looking for votes. Cartograms help you see like a politician. There are 118 election precincts in Howard County, Maryland, varying both in geographic area and in the number of voters they contain. Precincts in western Howard County tend to be larger, because the population density in western Howard is lower. Precincts in more densely populated areas of the county (including Columbia) tend to be smaller. If we’re interested in how voters behave across the county a conventional map can be misleading because the larger area of western Howard precincts causes us to overrate the importance and impact of those precincts. (This is similar to the US electoral map being visually dominated by large states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas that have fewer voters than small states like Connecticut and Rhode Island.) ...