map: Census Focus

There’s something magical about how a census boundary (or any boundary really) can make you stop in your tract and consider what it is that you’re actually seeing. Boundaries, when presented in ways you might not expect, can help focus your vision when looking at a map. A great example of this effect is the captivating Twitter bot @everytract.

I wanted to play with this idea a little bit in an interactive map and mask out everything except a particular area of focus. The idea is that by focusing on a small area and obscuring everything around it, you have a stronger curiousity to understand more about that area.

In some cases, this may even motivate you to map the area in OpenStreetMap, an action hopefully encouraged by providing links to the web-based iD editor, or its Facebook-driven counterpart, RapiD.

Hint: A simple page refresh of the map may show a new census tract.