The August DC geo meetup is tonight, August 3 at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s Bar and Grill and will feature three short presentations on topics like 3D maps, building maps in Ruby, and a case study of map and data visualization.

Dave will be giving a talk on the latter, walking through a map we released last week showing violence against journalists in Afghanistan. Using data on incidents of threats, intimidation, and physical violence over the past ten years, the map shows what areas are the most dangerous for journalists and how that has changed over time.

Dave will talk about how this map, which we built with Internews, is part of a larger effort to improve media freedom in Afghanistan and the region as a whole, and the specific question we aimed to answer with it. He’ll also quickly talk about how we built the map, designing it in the open source map design studio TileMill, adding interactive charts and graphs to the points on the map, and ensuring performance was great so it would stay fast in low bandwidth environments like Afghanistan. For more information on the project, check out Eric’s blog post from last week and Paul’s summary on PBS’ Idea Lab

We’re looking forward to talking with people about this work, learning more 3D maps and other mapping technologies, and catching up folks on what they’re working on these days. Hope to see you there tonight! For updated on future Geo meetups, join the meetup group.