When I learned that the court had made a list of Madoff’s victims available, I immediately wanted to graph it. I first forwarded the PDF one of my best friends. Within a couple hours he had converted it to text, which he streamed through Yahoo Pipes to generate KML suitable for viewing with Google Maps. The pipes filtered out duplicates, did address discovery and geolocation. Unfortunately, Google Maps can’t display more than 80 markers at once, which is far less than the thousands of people whom Madoff ripped off. He eventually did pull off a single view visualization, but it ran like a dog.
So last night I took a different approach. I extracted out all of the zip codes from the list. (Ignoring all of the international investors robbed by Madoff.) Then I used http://geocoder.us to map each zip code to a latitude and longitude. Next I wrote a short script in NodeBox to draw a projection of the zip codes on a canvas. Each point is color coded to indicate the number of times that zip code occurs in the court document. I was helped a lot by code and ideas in Ben Fry’s Visualizing Data book, which I have access to via Safari Bookshelf. In particular, I stole his function for projecting out the latitude and longitude numbers.
Here are the resulting images. The perfectionist in me would love to tinker with this for hours.
scatter map of Madoff's victims in the NYC Metro area
scatter map of Madoff's victims in NYC Metro area
scatter map of Madoff's victims in New England
scatter map of Madoff's victims in Florida
