JSTOR Daily Usage Map

Every day, users from around the world view articles in fifty fields of study on the JSTOR web site. As with many web sites, JSTOR collects this usage data for a variety of reasons. We take this usage data and build an animated map of that activity, daily. 

We generalize the activity data in two ways. First, in order to have sufficiently distinct symbols on the map, the fifty different fields get combined in to six groups (plus one 'other' for activity that doesn't include a field) that provide broad categories of study. Second, the scale of the map requires combining 'close' locations—a small map of the world does not have enough space to distinguish activity from multiple institutions in Manhattan, for example, without one symbol completely hiding others. Both types of generalization yield a simplified, but none the less interesting, overview of a days activity in JSTOR.

Each circle on the map represents one or more views of an article in JSTOR, with the size of the circle increasing with more activity at a given location. In addition, each circle may also be divided into pie wedges based on the percentage of activity that a given field group has of the total activity at a location.

Each 'day' is in the U. S. Eastern Standard/Daylight timezone.

Map Production

For the map itself, a custom Python script uses the Generic Mapping Tools to plot locations mapped from DNS entries via MaxMind's GeoLite City data, onto a Robinson projection of the world, with GNU Ghostscript converting the GMT output into raster images that ImageMagick converts into an animated GIF. The python script also uses GMT for plotting the legends.