It’s now a few weeks since we published the Carbon Map and we’ve been thrilled with the response. So far we’ve had around 100,000 views, 5,000 shares (including the Guardian version), dozens of suggestions and offers of data, and write-ups in locations as diverse as Brazil, France and US. We’ve heard from teachers who want to use the site in classrooms from Scotland to India, academics who want to reproduce some of the maps in a journal article, and an organisation that may want to commission a whole new site.

Best of all, though, have been all the lovely tweets and comments, including a few from members of the public encouraging us to do more to make data easy to understand. Here’s my favourite:

As someone who never grips with graphs or lists of numbers, I wanted to drop into your bit of the ether to say thank you for creating your wonderful carbon map [and] for making important information more inclusive.

It’s also been nice to see tweets from cartography and infographic experts who have grudgingly liked our approach:

Normally don’t like this kind of #cartogram but something about watching it change is cool. (William McNulty‏, Director of Maps at National Geographic Magazine)

So, all in all a really pleasing response. Thanks to everyone who’s been in touch.

Originally posted at MinorMass.com

Today sees a mini trio of launches. Robin Houston and I have just published our Carbon Map, a website that explores climate change responsibility and vulnerability using a newly developed type of interactive moving map. That site is the launch project of our new partnership, Kiln, which will explore the middle-ground between journalism, web development, data and graphic design. And the Guardian Datablog team have used the site to launch their own new project – a Google-sponsored data visualisation series called Show And Tell.

I’ll write more about Kiln and the Carbon Map later when I have more time, but for now here’s a brief summary of some of the things we were trying to do with the map:

1. Create a new way of visualising national-level data that’s both more legible and more pleasing to interact with than boring old choropleths (shaded maps).

2. Create an intuitive way to view two layers of data simultaneously – one using country sizes and one using shading – to see how they relate.

3. Pull together the most comprehensive collection of data on national contributions to climate change, including past emissions; current emissions, measured at the points of extraction, combustion and consumption; and possible future emissions. This required quite a lot of manual gap filling and estimation for smaller countries, but I hope the resulting data is interesting and useful. I’ll make the spreadsheet available once I’ve tidied it up with explanations and so on.

4. Showcase some climate vulnerability data, which as a rule doesn’t get as much of a look-in as emissions data.

The original impetus for creating the Carbon Map was the World Bank’s Apps for Climate competition. We’ve entered and there’s a Popular Choice Award as well as a judging process, so if you like the site we’d be hugely grateful if you could vote for us. Voting opens on April 1 and I’ll post the link here then.

Originally posted at MinorMass.com