Daves Redistricting 2.0 is now ready.
There are many changes from 1.0. It uses a Bing map, so you can see roads and aerial view, and pan and zoom normally. You can load and save files normally, too. You can save a view directly to a JPEG. And there are more features to help do the job of assigning districts to CDs.
I am very excited to be releasing this. You are the first to know! I hope you like it.
Fire it up and check the “How To” for a brief idea of what’s different. And the help file explains it all. You can load 1.0 files, too.
Please let me know of any bugs. I’m sure there are some in there. I’ve only tested on Windows, so Mac users, please let me know if it’s ok on the Mac.
Update: Here’s some more info and explanation of the big changes:
1) The background is a bing map instead of a canvas. The advantages are you can see the roads and you get pan/zoom in a way you are use to (using the pan and zoom controls or the hold-mouse-and-drag that are common to bing and google maps). The disadvantages are that rendering is slower necessitating showing only a subset of the voting districts at a time, and that hold-mouse-and-drag no longer colors (because it pans) so you have to double-click to change the mode to coloring and back. I’ve tried to mitigate the performance disadvantage by giving you control over showing those districts (All, None, Auto with control over Auto). Another disadvantage is that the colors are paler in order to show the roads thru. I plan to give you a little more control over that.
2) File Save/Load is improved. I hope you all find this to be a big win. I always disliked the necessity of saving your work in the obfuscated files.
3) Area views. Saving the 1.0 area maps in some XML that required another tool was a real hack. And I had really broken the look of those, too, with all of the crossing lines. All of that is gone and now you can save directly to JPEG. The only issue is that Bing does not allow its road map or aerial map backgrounds to be saved — proprietary. (I’m prevented from rendering the background into the bitmap that is translated into the JPEG.)
4) Labels: This may be harder to notice, but all of the labels (CDs, Counties, etc.) can be moved and resized. Hover over them to get the tool tip. Hold mouse and drag to move; Hold mouse and hit ‘s’ to make it smaller or ‘l’ to make it larger. You can even delete some of the labels.
5) The Cur CD check box is new. It lets you focus on the currently selected new CD, hiding all the others. If you switch CDs when this is checked, it will pan and zoom to the newly selected CD.
5) Find CD Parts is a new feature that helps find little pieces of a CD that you may have left behind when changing CDs around. It uses only the bounding rectangle, so it won’t catch non-contiguous pieces that are really close to the main CD or in especially snake-like situations, but it can help. I may try to implement a real contiguity check someday, but that is much harder.
6) There still is Auto Assign according to Old CDs. I’ve also added Auto Assign by quadrants — something I came up with. It does not balance the CDs, but starts you out with rectangular districts that you can then modify to balance properly. I’ve made a map for Texas using this and it’s reasonably compact. In the future, I hope to add additional algorithms that others have developed or will develop.
7) I didn’t include city shapes this time, because the road map helps you see where the cities are. However, the road map doesn’t show the actual boundaries, which can of course, be useful. I will look into adding those back. But remember that adding more shapes slows down Bing’s rendering, so I need to think about how to limit the city shapes to the ones that are really useful.
And keep sending feedback. I will try to make improvements over the next couple of months and then work on all the new data when it comes out, so the app is ready for really helping you and others next year.
[Update 2]
From the feedback it seems you all are facing two major issues:
1) It’s too slow, even with the “only show some districts” mitigation. And that mitigation is a pain because you can’t see as much as you need.
2) The Bing pan control seems to go wild.
For (1) I am trying a change that looks promising and, I hope, will get the speed to be close to 1.0 speed. I thought about this all day (while doing other stuff), tried a couple of things. I need to work on it more and it will be at least a few days, possibly after T-day before I would have this ready. So stay tuned.
On (2), I was finally able to sort of duplicate the behavior. I can see that if I hold the mouse in the pan control and then quickly (really fast) move it out of the control, the map does speed away in that direction. My guess is that on the Mac at least, the pan control is not calibrated to the mouse as well and is too sensitive, so you all hardly have to move the mouse to get the map winging away. Since I don’t do anything for that control (the Bing object does) I don’t have a good solution, other than using the drag on the map method of panning.
Thanks!
I just see 1.0
I’m playing around with it now on my Mac, and everything seems to be working as expected. I just have a couple of quick usability notes:
1. Because you can only see so little of your map at a time, it seems really difficult to visualize an overall scheme;
2. The “double click to color” function is great if you want to cover lots of ground at once, but it’s basically impossible to “hunt and grab” individual precincts. It would be good to have back a click to select mode (perhaps by toggling the click to pan function).
Looks like real progress, though!
not directly related to your app, but you’re the expert on this.
All major forecasters are worried about redistricting a LOT for the reason that all of us work with historical election data. But if redistricting makes the old districts obsolete our data is gone too.
Is there any way you know of to reconstruct how the new districts voted in statewide or national elections?
Precinct boundaries and Census Tracts are changing too, so it’s not as easy as just plugging the new districts into your app.
They come out like they look onscreen, with some of the precincts missing.
Before you’ve hinted at uploading current district lines for state legislatures. I understand its a massive undertaking, so I was curious if you had a timeframe for that.
It’s a great new look, I like the idea of being able to see a nationwide rendering of my mapping. But anyway, is there anyway to darken these colors? I’m sorry but particularly with the new graphics some of these are very faint.
Just one question – could you add an option to hide voting district lines so we can just see the districts without any clutter?
Also, what program do you use to edit the shapefiles? If it’s not anything ultra-sophisticated, I may want to do it for Maryland to get rid of all the rivers.
Let me first say thanks this application is amazing.
My question involves the Block/Voting district Breakdowns…Do you have any option to simplify the map with simple municipal (town and city) boundaries? In NJ, for example, our LDs must stay within the township/borough/city lines unless said area is too big (Newark, Jersey City). Towns that have 30-40 voting districts take a lot of time to “move” them all between districts, and it’s hard to tell what town they are in without hovering over every single one (and there are thousands!) Every square inch of NJ is within a municipality. It would be neat if the NJ map gave the option to switch to a “assign all of this town” mode or something. Just a suggestion. Again, this app is a lot of fun…thanks again!
This app has a whole lot of problems that need to be fixed.
– Why aren’t there any 2010 population estimates?
– Why no partisan breakdowns?
– Why is it so hard to just start drawing the districts?
– Why can’t I get the program to stop moving all over the place? (It won’t stand still now.)
Sorry if it seems like I’m whining. That’s not my intent. It just seems like there are some kinks that need to be fixed. And I think with the right fixes, this may actually be a good glimpse into how actual Congressional Districts are made.
I cannot get it to color in a district. If I select unassigned on the left, double click and swipe the mouse changes from assigned to unassigned. But, if I select and actual CD, the color on just has no effect at all.
I’m interested in Washington.
Windows 7 64bit and Vista 32bit
My little basis about do things like this and write algorithms is enough for understand what here is a lot of good work. Then I only can give you my congratulations.
Sure I will use your application for fine redistricting finding the limits. Since my point, the new maps are better than the olds and this will help me a lot in my way for use the application, what requires look to very little details, and is not fast (for the biggest states).
I’m sure you will continue working hard for include new data, and I will wait with all the patience (as example for Illinois data), of course, while you can include more data. You are doing more than enough.
As user I must appreciate the good way what your application gives for redistricting, and the lot of my time saved by your application:
– Because I need not to find all these data. To find the necessary data and work it until have a useful format is a lot of work what save a lot of my time.
– Because since now I will need not to compare different maps. Until now I was using maps like this for find the basis of many congressman in the biggest cities. The old maps was so hard for compare with real maps finding fine locations.
– Because the new way for save the maps makes easier it and I think this will help me very much. As you tell I use habitually in the majority of applications the way of “save as” cause of the security. You can not lose a previous good work saving by accident or without thing enough, something worse.
To move the maps requires some time, but I can assume it, if I wish do a decent work. Now all the people what work with the first version is more fluent with the old version, but I see good advantages in the new application.
And it seems to be working better. I like having the 2008 Presidential numbers right there. Perhaps a little later, I’ll have to show everyone my new SoCal CDs.
Thanks for your help, Dave. 🙂
It’s really cool to see how my neighborhood voted, or finding out how certain groups voted in California (turns out majority-Asian areas, for instance, have 70% Obama support in the Bay Area, 60% Obama support in Los Angeles County, and 45% Obama support in Orange County).
Some notes, concerns, and questions:
1) How up-to-date is the racial and population data when using partisan stuff? Is everything still using 2000 Census stuff? I know there’s the option of using new population estimates in California, but I don’t think you can do that with partisan data.
I think that stuff is important in following the VRA and district populations. I know that under the new estimates you probably would create another district in the Inland Empire in California.
2) As others have commented, it would be nice to have the boundaries of towns. In Los Angeles, for instance, the road map is pretty much useless in distinguishing one city from another. I resorted to looking at racial demographics for a clue.
3) Making the partisan and racial data darker would also be appreciated, as others have also stated.
4) Seeing districts without voting block lines would also be nice, as others have also mentioned. In California, for instance, at a certain point when you zoom out it’s impossible to see the metropolitan districts because they’re completely covered by lines.
Thanks for this amazing application!
After figuring out a few things earlier in the thread, I have to say that version 2.0 is a great application – and thank you for all your hard work.
Once I go back and resize the CD labels, I should be able to post a new 10 district Washington map.
Also when I load PA after loading the app, I only see Central PA precincts. Then I go way in, and I pan the state and only THEN can I see the precincts.
I also have to say that I am not happy that I can’t see the city boundaries. I’m looking at PA right now, and it will be redistricted by Corbett, but for example, in CA, they will be trying to keep cities compact. Pressing show cities/towns does nothing in this regard.
Otherwise, thanks, and good work!
Is the app down for maintenance? because I can’t access it. Also, when I go to 1.0 it won’t load any states.
I was experimenting with LD possiblities. I’m in Washington.
I set the count to 49 and let it assign by quad.
Then, I tried to use the renumber function to match closer to current reality. I swaped 9th and 49th for example. The problem is that the desc. msg. when you mouse over a precint still says 49th, not the new 9th. This will be confusing.
I know a guy who has shapefiles for WA LDs, how much trouble is it to load new shapes? Perhaps another copy of Washington, but with the 49 LDs?
I have 1,140 unassigned in PA, and there’s no quick scroll in to see the precincts I missed. It takes forever to load the maps (Why’d you change the maps?)
But I lost control of the app yet again. The whole screen went blue, and there was nothing I could do to reclaim where I was at. I saved and closed, and tried reopening. The whole thing then froze on me.
Did I do something wrong? Or did the program just crash?
My only concern so far is that there doesn’t seem to be an “easy way” to load previously saved maps. On 1.0, you could open up a state, and you would be able to select one of your saved maps of that state from the file menu. I can’t do that on 2.0, and I’ve never been able to locate the saved maps on my Mac (I don’t know if it’s a problem with my computer, but following the pathway of folders that has been successful for others leads me to empty folders with nonsensical names.) Is there any other way you can access old maps on 2.0?
Something that may be very useful in drawing/redrawing maps on DRA will be including 2010 midterm results, such as the state’s US Senate and Governor races, in addition to the 2008 Presidential numbers.
Is there a reason why Virginia doesn’t have this as an option? It’s grayed out but obviously the data exists at precinct level.
I can’t seem to see the voting blocks/districts in Virginia without selecting “population by color”. When I try to use “old/new CD” only the specific lines of the areas I’ve already colored in show, whereas the other areas just show county lines. If it’s supposed to be like this, it’s different from 1.0.
Will there ever be a point when you can use your app to make districts that would cross state borders? I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making new state borders and see what I can do to make a gerrymandered country (permanent Republican minority indeed!)
This request was probably made earlier and I just missed it but would it be possible to set it up the option to add entire counties, cities, towns or townships?
That was a fun map (I think I just gave Alaska back to the Russians, rural Texas to Mexico, and created two or three majority-black states in the south!)
The partisan by color function simply doesn’t work anymore; districts that gave 60% to Obama are colored light right, and only the 80% Obama ones are any shade of Blue. It makes it difficult in convoluted urban areas, to tell where the Democratic votes are.