RTFA: http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=51
The other day at work, I made this video showing the opening of Wal-mart retail locations over time. It’s pretty fun to watch how it starts very slowly with the first location in Arkansas in 1962 and then spreads into different regions over time.
(you can download a high-resolution AVI version here)
It actually is built entirely from data that’s in Freebase, including the map itself.
Here’s how it works:
Freebase has a topic for every zip code, along with it’s longitude and latitude. Here’s one example. One query pulls out all the ZIP codes along with their longitudes and latitudes. You can turn longitudes and latitudes into graphical coordinates with some simple transformations (which will vary based on the region you’re plotting and how big your image is) - here are the ones I used:x=(longitude+127)*16
y=(50-latitude)*20If you plot all the ZIP codes using a library like PIL, you get a nice map with dots that roughly match population density, which has the advantage of looking a little bit like a night-time satellite photo of the United States.
Cool video. Great method! This general algorithm can be applied in so many ways.
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