US Township-BAM

kodak

kodak

Back in 2008, Dave Leip made a map of the presidential election results in the northeast and parts of the midwest by township. His map was not very high-quality, and entire towns were left off because they were too small to fit, but here I have made a blank version that is 3x the original size, and I plan on tracing a much better map from this.

0uDbh9Z.png


My own map-making skills are admittedly not very good, so I will take any and all help I can get as I go.
 
Chicxulub

Chicxulub

Banned
kodak said:
Back in 2008, Dave Leip made a map of the presidential election results in the northeast and parts of the midwest by township. His map was not very high-quality, and entire towns were left off because they were too small to fit, but here I have made a blank version that is 3x the original size, and I plan on tracing a much better map from this.

0uDbh9Z.png


My own map-making skills are admittedly not very good, so I will take any and all help I can get as I go.
Click to expand...
A few months back I made a much larger map of the minor civil divisions in the Northeast and Midwest using a bunch of shapefiles. This might work a bit better.
213651_2012_election_results_by_town.png
 
Chicxulub

Chicxulub

Banned
One problem with that map though is that some towns are hidden because the surrounding townships happen to be in front of the towns in the svg file.
 
kodak

kodak

Chicxulub said:
One problem with that map though is that some towns are hidden because the surrounding townships happen to be in front of the towns in the svg file.
Click to expand...
The fact that some towns are still too small to be more than 1 pixel wide is crazy.

Edit: Yep, that map will do for what I was looking for.
 
Last edited:

Bjornhattan

Chicxulub said:
A few months back I made a much larger map of the minor civil divisions in the Northeast and Midwest using a bunch of shapefiles. This might work a bit better.
213651_2012_election_results_by_town.png
Click to expand...

That map is great, but my only fault with it is that it's not the most usable because it uses anti-aliasing, making it very hard to fill with colour.
 

Harlow

I've been hoping for maps like these. The only state town maps I've been able to find are New England's.
 
kodak

kodak

Bjornhattan said:
That map is great, but my only fault with it is that it's not the most usable because it uses anti-aliasing, making it very hard to fill with colour.
Click to expand...
I am slowly fixing this by using transparent selection to convert everything to black or white.
 

DPKdebator

Chicxulub said:
A few months back I made a much larger map of the minor civil divisions in the Northeast and Midwest using a bunch of shapefiles. This might work a bit better.
Click to expand...

As a New Englander, the way town borders work in places like the Midwest is frankly somewhat baffling. Most "townships" (why aren't they just called towns?) are just some form of square in shape, but the cities have these strange blotchy shapes that are filled with little holes.
 

Bjornhattan

kodak said:
This plan quickly backfired, as the borders are very light in some spots and disappeared entirely.
Click to expand...

Can I make a suggestion? See if you can find a version of the shapefile map with the townships in white, then do the following:

Adjust the Brightness down by around -70 points, then increase the Contrast to maximum.

You'll only get black and white. Areas darker than (198,198,198) become black as they shift first down into a dark grey, and the contrast increase makes all dark greys become black and all light greys become white.

The borders end up being thick, but it can work well. If you reduce the brightness by less, you'll get thinner borders, but you'll also get holes. -40 gives only a few holes but they are nearly impossible to find.
 

Codae

DPKdebator said:
As a New Englander, the way town borders work in places like the Midwest is frankly somewhat baffling. Most "townships" (why aren't they just called towns?) are just some form of square in shape, but the cities have these strange blotchy shapes that are filled with little holes.
Click to expand...
Towns and townships are completely different things out here. Townships are little more than divisions of the land, while towns and cities are self-governing entities that have coalesced through annexation of attractive nearby areas. I suppose the reason for such a system is an attempt at the model of "settlements are centers for divisions of territory", but, unlike in New England and most of the rest of the world, in the Midwest the division of the territory happened for land-granting purposes, before the economic and demographic establishment of the eventual society that yielded the settlements.
 
Frank

Frank

DPKdebator said:
As a New Englander, the way town borders work in places like the Midwest is frankly somewhat baffling. Most "townships" (why aren't they just called towns?) are just some form of square in shape, but the cities have these strange blotchy shapes that are filled with little holes.
Click to expand...
Guys I found this map from Wikipedia that could be useful, I'm not American so I don't know if this is what you are searching for:

New_England_Town_Lines_and_Borders_in_the_Six_New_England_States.png
 

VT45

Banned
I made some maps of New York and New Jersey that added onto that map. I'll have to go searching for it, but I might be able to help you there.
 
kodak

kodak

Bjornhattan said:
Can I make a suggestion? See if you can find a version of the shapefile map with the townships in white, then do the following:

Adjust the Brightness down by around -70 points, then increase the Contrast to maximum.

You'll only get black and white. Areas darker than (198,198,198) become black as they shift first down into a dark grey, and the contrast increase makes all dark greys become black and all light greys become white.

The borders end up being thick, but it can work well. If you reduce the brightness by less, you'll get thinner borders, but you'll also get holes. -40 gives only a few holes but they are nearly impossible to find.
Click to expand...

I did that with the map, and here is the lovely result (I lightened the borders afterward).
UIbSFH0.png
 
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