Do you know which local candidate or provincial party you plan to vote for?

If so, do you know that you can vote today, tomorrow, and for the next week and a half?

To make it even easier to vote, here’s a map of all the advance polls in the Hamilton area.

What’s the catch? You have to vote within your riding -that’s it. No need to go to the nearest advance polling station, you can vote at any of the advance polls in your riding.

You’ll probably pick the closest, but maybe you live in Flamborough and work at McMaster. If so, you can vote during a break at CIBC Hall today and tomorrow.

Some polls are open every day until advance polling ends on September 30, 2011.

Many are only open a select few days during the period. The yellow dots are the polling locations, click on the dot to see what days and hours that poll is open. The largest white map markers are the returning offices – they are open every day from 10:00am until 8:00pm.

The map is licensed under the Open Database License 1.0.

You can download the listing of poll locations in the Hamilton Area from the Fusion Table here.

You may embed the map on your website using the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var PollMapConfig = { height: 600, width: 650 };
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='http://www.joeycoleman.ca/files/maps/pollmap.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

[audio:http://blog.joeycoleman.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/lovehate196.mp3|titles=Anthony Marco's lovehate podcast 196: Of Wiki Bibles and Burning Beiber Books]

The Ontario Liberal Party is demanding the NDP dump their candidate in Niagara West-Glanbrook for comments had made on his podcast claiming that Marco failed to condemn Nazism.

Mr. Marco was discussing the Dove World Quran-burning controversy in the podcast.

The NDP is standing by their candidate and released the following transcript of the section of the podcast in question.

For the most part, I would never advocate burning books. When I read a book, as bad as the book is, I’m the type of person that wouldn’t throw books away, I’ve got books all over the place, maybe I should throw books away, but I don’t throw them away.

But there are a couple that I would suggest burning, and it’s not even from an ideological perspective. Like “oh, burn stuff by Adolph Hitler…” Whatever.  If you want to read that stuff, read that stuff. For some people the old politics of Nazi Germany might be their religion. And just as I can’t condemn other people’s religion, I can’t, I don’t agree with them, but you can’t stop somebody from believing in something. And to bash your head against the wall trying, is not their fault, it’s your fault.  You’re the one who is pretty messed up if you’re going to devote your entire life to trying to convince somebody not to believe what they believe.

So, If you’re going to be burning books over the next little while, here’s what I suggest you do: Just sit back, don’t burn any books for a while.  Get a real book hate-on. Just envision, nothing on the cover, just a book, generic book, no title, no picture, and think of the fire burning.

And now what I want you to do is as you see that fire burning, I want an image to come to your mind on the cover of that book.  And not just that book but a stack of them, a hundred books, a thousand books, all stacked up in a pile, all burning a la Fahrenheit 451, and every single copy is burning in the flames and pieces of charred paper are flying off into the atmosphere, endangering other people’s households, I want you to look at the cover of that book, and all of those books, with exactly the same cover and I want you to see… Justin Bieber’s autobiography.

If you want something to burn, and feel good about it, burn Bieber’s book.

You’ve been listening to lovehatethings.com, the love/hate podcast.

Here is the full podcast to allow you to listen to the comments in their full context:

[audio:http://blog.joeycoleman.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/lovehate196.mp3|titles=Anthony Marco's lovehate podcast 196: Of Wiki Bibles and Burning Beiber Books]

This posting of the complete audio file is done due to a public interest in knowing the full context of a audio broadcast which is the subject of a political election campaign. To solely pick out sections of the recording is to not serve the public interest in deciding for themselves of the merits of the candidate’s statements.

This is my first attempt at offering a step-by-step guide to creating data journalism products. The product is a rough map of polling locations in the Hamilton, Ontario provincial riding of Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale.

You’ll likely suggest better methods of cleaning data. I look forward to your comments sharing them.

In this tutorial, we’ll take raw polling place data from Elections Ontario and make it a dataset that can be merged with mapping data to create a map of Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale election day poll locations.

<iframe src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col2+from+1541638+&h=false&lat=43.27163209782118&lng=-79.9451984360352&z=10&t=1&l=col2" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="500px">

There are more tutorials to make more advance versions of this data map. In step two, we’ll create a map that includes the polling district boundaries. In step three, we’ll use javascript to create to add real interactivity.

Elections Ontario sent the McMaster Students Union a list of the polling locations for Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale. The list is designed for printing and sorted by polling place name with poll numbers group into one field.

The data was not in a format that could be used for mapping polling locations.

It needs cleaning up and unfortunately, my Excel scripting skills could use some work. I did a manual clean-up of the data.

Setting up the spreadsheet for geocoding

We need to geocode the poll locations.

Before taking the addresses from Excel, We add a column beside them with the text “Ontario” on each line to prevent the geocoder from guessing locations outside of Ontario. We’ll also add three more blank columns beside this temporary column.

Name these columns Lat, Long, Extra1, and Extra2.

For better clarity, we’ll rename Name to PollLocation and Address to PollStreetAddress.

The document sent by Elections Ontario is designed for printing and included column headers throughout, remove them. Also remove the top two rows of the spreadsheet with title information. It is not needed.

The Excel data is now ready for extraction for geocoding and the rows should look like this row:

Geocoding the data using GPS Visualizer

We’ll use my favourite geocoder is GPS Visualizer’s Address Locator: http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/

The advantage of using GPS Visualizer is that it maps the results enabling visual confirmation and easy sighting of major geocoding errors.

Let’s select all the rows under the columns PollStreetAddress and Lat.

We’ll copy this data from Excel into the webform on GPSvisualizer. The text should look like this:

329 PARKSIDE DR,  WATERDOWN    Ontario
211 PARKSIDE DR, WATERDOWN    Ontario
50 HATT ST, DUNDAS    Ontario
374 JERSEYVILLE RD W, ANCASTER    Ontario
93 KITTY MURRAY LANE, ANCASTER    Ontario
310 WILSON ST E, ANCASTER    Ontario
622 ALBERTON RD S, ALBERTON    Ontario

(Note there are 81 rows of addresses, above is only the first 7 rows)

We select the Yahoo! geocoder, click ‘Start geocoding’, and let it do it’s magic.

Screencap of geocoding result for ADFW polling locations map V1

As can been seen on the map, there is one poll with an geocoding error. (Click here to see the map without the addition of “Ontario” to the addresses.)

Correcting the lat/long geocoding error

The geocoding result needs to be formatted for insertion into the Excel spreadsheet. Use “Ctrl+A” to select all the results. Newer versions of Excel automatically format the data correctly into each row. If not, use the “Text to Columns” feature to split the data into columns. (An example of Text to Columns is available further down in this tutorial)

Sort the lat/long results to find the outliner. In this case, it’s “49.384258,-84.756271,”526 CARLUKE RD W, CARLUKE, Ontario”,-,”

The 49′ in the latitude is the giveaway.

A quick google search of the address reveals “526 CARLUKE RD W.” to be a church within Ancaster. Hamilton and its former municipalities have absorbed many towns over the decades. Most of them keep their old names in local use, but are not officially recognized. This causes many geocoding errors with local data.

Back to GPS Visualizer to get the coords for “526 CARLUKE RD W, ANCASTER, Ontario” The result: 43.144825 -79.986464.

Replace the incorrect geocode with the correct location.

Merging the geocoding into the dataset

Copy the lat/long into the datasheet the poll information by pasting it over the “Ontario column”. The column created beside “Ontario” will take the longitude data which is why we created it.

Use the Extra1 and Extra2 column to visually verify the geocodes are in the proper place. Once complete, delete the extra columns.

Your data should look like this:

Making the map – importing the data

Save the spreadsheet. I’ve used the name “ADFW_ElectionDay_Poll_Locations” and stored it in CSV format using the “Save as” command.

A screencap of MS Excel "save as" for CSV

Import the CSV or Excel file into Google Fusion Tables (http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home) by the following steps:

Click the "New table" button and choose "Import table"

Follow the Import table wizard to upload the spreadsheet file. The last step of the Import wizard is creating the table information. This information is available to anyone looking at your Google Fusion Table.

Screencap of the GoogleFT table information entry page

Table name: 2011 Ontario Provincial Election Day polling locations in Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale
Allow export: Yes, we want people to download our work and use it for other maps and projects.
Attribute data to: ADFW DRO – Elections Ontario
Attribution page link:http://wemakevotingeasy.ca/en/home.aspx (We’ll update this link if/when Elections Ontario publishes this data on the web)
Description: A list of all 2011 Ontario provincial election day polling locations in the riding of Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale.

Making the map – setting the options before visualization

We now have all our data in the Fusion Table, we need to confirm the import wizard properly recognizes our Lat and Long columns as location data and the PollStreetAddress as text.

From the menu above the table, select “Edit ===> Modify Columns”.

All columns except Lat and Long are of the type “Text”. The Lat column is “Location” and Long is “Number”. Click on “Lat” and the following should appear:

We need to share the map with the public. In the top right corner, there is the “Share” button. Click it.

Select “Public” under visibility options and close the popup.

With this, we’re ready to visualize our map.

Visualizing the map

Select “Visualize ===> Map”. We now have a map of all the poll locations with default settings. The red dots are the most visible option. We’ll change them first. Click “Configure styles”:

For this example, we’ll select “large_red”.

The default information bubble includes a listing of all the data in the spreadsheet.

We want to change this. Click “Configure info window” The following pops-up. Deselect “Lat”, “Long”, and “Mobile”.

We want to configure the info window labels that our readers will see. Now that we’ve removed unneeded information, we can select custom to change the labels. In custom, we can change our labels from the column name to words more familiar to our readers. I’ve chosen to change the order and use the following HTML code:

This is the new information bubble.

Resize and move your map into the position you wish people to see it

We’ll be using the Fusion Tables embed option to show our map. Viewers will see the same map as the creator does in Fusion Tables. It is for this reason that we must zoom and position our map exactly how we wish the viewer to see it.

Getting the embed code for your website.

With this, we have a very simple map that is ready for embedding on a website. Click “Get embeddable link” for the HTML code to copy and paste into your website.

When you paste the code, you may wish to change the width and height to best suit our suit. For this site, I set “width=”100%”" to take up the full size of my content column, and “height=”500px”" to get the full map height visible. The embed code becomes:

<iframe src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col2+from+1541638+&h=false&lat=43.27163209782118&lng=-79.9451984360352&z=10&t=1&l=col2" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="500px">

Here’s the map:

Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel

This is a very simple map and only the start of the process.

I hope you were able to learn from this tutorial.

Return to my blog in a day or two for the second tutorial when I add the polling boundaries to the map which will enable voters to know what poll they live in and where they will be voting.

EXTRA: Geocode errors without province to limit geocoder.

An example of geocoding errors resulting from lack of province in address