The University of
Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab is pleased to announce a collaboration
with Google as part of a project to share historical voting data for U.S.
presidential elections. Google is opening up this data to millions of
people around the world in a new format by layering historical election
results over Google Earth.
The data comes from Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008
(http://americanpast.richmond.edu/voting), one of the projects in the
Digital Scholarship Lab (http://digitalscholarship.richmond.edu), which
opened in 2007. Anyone can access the Google Earth layer by going to
Google's 2008 Election site, http://www.google.com/2008election.
This collaboration with Google will make digital maps of presidential
elections from 1980 to 2004 available in Google Earth. These maps detail
how people voted in every county in the United States, providing far more
detail and information than what is currently available in Electoral
College maps. The voting returns are also paired with population data -
including information on race, age, gender and income levels - in every
county, allowing people to examine the factors that affected voting in any
given election.
The Voting America maps will help voters deconstruct myths about the
American electorate, such as the popular notion that the U.S. is divided
into large regions of opposing "red" and "blue" sections of America. If you
know where someone lives, goes the common perception, you can probably
guess their politics. By looking at elections at the county level, however,
these maps show that the U.S. is not so clearly divided into red and blue
regions.
Rick Klau, a manager on Google's Elections team said, "We want to
empower organizations like the University of Richmond to use the Google
Earth platform as a way to share information and make a complex collection
of data structures more easily accessible."
"Google is transforming the presentation of information around the
world. It is exciting for the University of Richmond to ally with such an
innovative and far-sighted enterprise. We hope our joint effort will permit
a broad range of people to understand American politics in a deeper and
more subtle way, especially on the eve of this important moment in the
nation's history," said Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of
Richmond.
The Voting America site offers a wide spectrum of interactive and
cinematic visualizations of how Americans voted at the county level in
presidential elections from 1840 to 2004. Using the project's online
interface, for example, users can select any set of elections, zoom into
any region or state in the U. S., or click on any area of the map to bring
up all the political data for that county. Users can view the percentage of
votes cast by party and the margins of victory in presidential elections by
county. The project also includes commentary videos by experts in the
fields of history and politics, explaining important trends and
developments in American political history.
Andrew Torget, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab says, "These
maps allow you to dive deeply into how Americans have voted over the past
several decades by looking at voting in each county in the country. When
you examine the maps, you discover amazing patterns that Electoral College
maps tend to miss. The complex patterns make you question whether the
country is as deeply divided into red and blue regions as we often think."
In an election year that is all about change, the maps offer a way to
measure political change. For example, as returns come in during election
night 2008, analysts can use the maps to find and measure political
statistics (raw votes cast, percentages of votes cast for parties,
population by race, third-party voting) for any county in the U.S.
Similarly, the maps allow users to analyze how particular counties compare
to the rest of the state. If several counties in Virginia, for example,
appear to be shifting their voting patterns in the 2008 election from
previous elections, the maps allow users to compare these counties
(demographically, and otherwise). Voters will be able to visualize and
analyze how the 2008 voting returns stack up against previous elections.
The project also allows users to examine the evolution of voting from
the Reagan administration to the George W. Bush era. This is commonly
understood to be a period of rising political divisiveness and bitterness
among opposing political parties. The maps allow users to measure those
elections against one another, and to comment on trends that have emerged
during the last 28 years of political bickering.
Voting America is one of many ground-breaking projects at the Digital
Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. The DSL is a center for
innovation that brings together scholars, technologists, and the public in
order to explore how emerging technology can change the ways we understand
the human past, present and future.
Torget says, "Serving as an incubator for 21st century scholarship at
the University of Richmond, the DSL develops cutting-edge digital tools for
research and teaching, supports the work of UR faculty and students, and
cultivates strategic partnerships with allies like Google. Charged with
fostering new forms of scholarship, the DSL works to harness the promise of
the digital era for the next generation of research, teaching and learning.
This collaboration with Google will allow us to share cutting-edge research
with the world."
SOURCE University of Richmond
Digg
Reddit
Slashdot