Q: Tell us about yourself.
A: I was surprised that we were the only collaboration to submit an entry, we are a team of two strong here at Team Bright Rain:
David Puckett
Bright Rain Solutions’ owner, operator, geospatial developer, data wrangler and self professed Grand Poobah. I’ve been part of the Geo Community for over twenty years and still get fantastically excited about all things geo. I’ve been known to run a workshop or two and have taught a class on web mapping. I consider myself a ‘bridger’ between the proprietary and open source worlds. And some of my best friends are “proprietarians”.
Andrew Lindley
Bright Rain’s Dynamic Technologist with an earnest mission to change the way you put boots and hats on maps. Drew has been with Bright Rain for two years and earned a degree in Geography from the University of British Columbia. He was also the star student in my GIS programming class, from which I promptly drafted him.
Q: Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know).
A: When it hit me, I literally jumped out of my chair and hollered, “Hexes in Texas!,” with a rousing “Yes! Divorce Rates in Texas!” and All My Hexes Live in Texas was born. It could have been the boots… I happened to be wearing cowboy boots that day… It could have been the H3 hexagon project we had going. But it was definitely cosmic inspiration.
The map is honest to goodness tongue-in-cheek grit but it also brought several interests together for us and that’s why we were excited (and committed enough) to create and submit it. It’s funny yet not so silly that we couldn’t actually wrangle some real data and present it in, dare I say, a (geo)hip way. We love the slight clash between the slick, modern feel of the web map and the old timey western feel of the title text, hat and boot.
Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.
A: We are web (map) developers so our toolset in making this map definitely embodies that. The map was created as a web map and later exported and enhanced in Adobe Illustrator to create the final image output. Mapbox GL was used to display and extrude counties as hexagons based on the divorce rate within the county. The hexagons themselves were generated using Uber Engineering’s H3 Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (Javascript) library (at scale level 5).
DATA
Data was gathered from the state of Texas (population per county and divorces per county) and the US Census Bureau (us states: Tennessee).
Texas 2012 Population Estimates by County
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/popdat/ST2012e.shtm
Texas 2012 Marriage and Divorce by County
http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/chs/vstat/vs12/t39.shtm
Texas County Boundaries (shapefile, SHAPEFILE!)
http://gis-txdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/9b2eb7d232584572ad53bad41c76b04d_0
ANALYSIS
Analysis was conducted in QGIS where the divorce rate per thousand was calculated and the hexagons were assigned a value for extrusion (based on divorce rate calculation). The resulting hexagons with divorce rates assigned were exported as geojson for direct use in the web application.
AND
An interactive, web map version is here:
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