Vote 2012 Map Center

Posted at 2:12 p.m., Feb. 21, 2012

Tags: 2012 election and pbs newshour

One of the projects I've been working on since my first month at the PBS NewsHour is maps of demographic data and results for the 2012 presidential election, including all of the Republican nominating contests. The overall idea is to make the same information and graphics available to our viewers and users at home at the exact same time we're using them on air.

The Vote 2012 Map Center is built on the Dojo toolkit's graphics library, which lets the graphics work on any device that can render images using SVG, VML or the HTML5 canvas element. That means there's no Flash involved anywhere—which also means it works on Apple iOS devices. That's a nice goal anyway, given their market penetration, but it's a bigger deal for us because our on-air editors and correspondents can use an iPad to control the graphics they're using in real time. (Everyone's still getting used to that, but we're getting better.)

For example, check out this segment we ran during the Republican National Convention:

Watch Zooming in on Wisconsin, a 'Forgotten' Swing State on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Some of the functionality in the Map Center includes: live results via the Associated Press, static maps of demographic data and an Electoral College calculator (which one Reader's Digest writer described as "fun" and "the best"). It's a big project for us, and it's been a crazy ride.

Now that the election's over, I've got a writeup on the gory technical details here.