GeoCommons provides journalists with the great opportunity to map all sorts of statistics and associate them with any place in the world. It is fantastic for showing the relation of different data in relation to one another. For data-journalism, rather than writing an article with a myriad numbers, this enables journalists tomake vast amounts of data comprehensive and visibly accessible to the viewer/ news consumer. Meanwhile, it also allows people to use different kinds of symbols to show their data. They can be in different shapes and sizes and be chosen appropriately, depending on what it is, the user wants to portray.
The interface is confusing at the beginning and not particularly intuitive. However, once you understand how to use the piece of tech, it comes relatively naturally nonetheless and it is designed in a relatively uncomplicated way considering that the piece of tech is capable of dealing with lots of data. As Excel allows users to save their spreadsheets as cvs-files, it is possible for anyone in possession of Microsoft Office software to file their data in the GeoCommons system, which makes it almost universally accessible.
The piece of tech enables you to organize the data in several ways and lets you choose freely which data you would like to sort your graphic by and which one is the one you want to illustrate visually. Meanwhile, it also gives you different versions of maps, so you can choose between some highlighting natural, geographic features or more basic views, highlighting roads for example. In addition, the piece of tech enables you to create graphs to illustrate your data as well.
There are error messages that I have yet to understand how to avoid. The data you upload seems to need to go through the “fix this error message” process in order to function within the piece of tech. Once this is resolved, GeoCommons will be able to take in your data though and luckily, this process is easy to get through.
Addresses outside the United States of America are still not working/ not entirely supported. Certain countries, such as Australia, seem to work better than others, such as Germany. Thus, the concept of universally dropping pins and data-points all across the world-map is still limited in practice (at least when I tried my German home address), but will probably work in the future.
GeoCommons allows every ordinary citizen and every professional to map tremendous amounts of data and illustrate it in a meaningful, easily understandable way. This makes it a very useful tool for data journalists.
A few technical problems and glitches will hopefully be addressed and sorted out. Most importantly, international addresses need to be applicable through this piece of tech smoothly. Then the possibilities seem limitless.
It is a lot of fun and a very fulfilling feeling to see your huge data sets in a way that makes sense and can realisitcally help to explain complex issues effectively