This past week many of us have spent a little too much time staring at maps. An electoral map shows division by default. I want to show you a map that shows quite the opposite.

On my previous post, I concluded that positivity and optimism was a major commonality in the sprint’s community. Knowing that so many people from all over the world are collaborating and sharing ideas, made me want to know a little more about the cohort.

I have to admit that I’m a sucker for maps. They give me a feeling of endless possibilities. I also love traveling, but that’s something that I haven’t been able to do this year. Strangely enough, working on this map gave me a feeling of discovery. I’ve spent a bit too long playing around with it. I’m picturing each one of us, peeking out the window and looking at something completely different. My imagination flies! But enough said, here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Click here for a fullscreen experience

The process

Nerd talk ahead:

I took the location data from the Sprint Directory and formatted so that each entry would look like this:

Austin, TX / London, UK / Sydney, Australia

I ran these locations through the Google Maps API to get coordinates. Finally, the anonymized data was plotted on the map using a Python library called folium.

It’s been a challenging year but being part of Prof G’s sprint has been one of the most pleasant surprises of 2020. I know you’re all busy working on our final projects, it’s a lot of work! But I hope this map gives you a nice feeling of closeness as it did to me. We’re all in this together!

-Alejandro

PS I want to thank my colleague Javier Vazquez for helping me plot the data on the map. He’s an awesome data scientist!