Dataset of the Day: Tracking the Barefoot Bandit

I have found the recent story about the “Barefoot Bandit” to be quite fascinating. It is incredible how someone could elude authorities for so long in this day and age.

I came across an interesting graphic about the story created by Matthew Bambach of the Seattle Times. It is a map of criminal incidents that have been tied together to Colton Harris-Moore aka The Barefoot Bandit. I decided to make a similar map of the incidents, but decided to incorporate the temporal animation feature that GeoCommons provides. Below is the map I created in Maker!:

#maker_map_19633 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

View full map

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_19633″, “19633″);

By clicking the green clock in the layers box in the upper right hand side of the page you can open up a temporal timeline. This timeline allows you to see a temporal animation of the crimes as they took place across the country. You are also able to see the periods when criminal activity was slow or very active. Overall, the temporal animation is able to give you a better understanding of the Barefoot Bandit’s activity compared to a map with static points.