The Southern Poverty Law Center has used mapping software in order to illustrate the location of different hate groups in the US. How to use in class: I think this demonstrates how good old descriptive data collection plays a valuable roll in law enforcement, social justice, etc. I think this demonstrates why well-visualized data may be a more compelling way of sharing information than data in tables. Another way to use this is for your students to create a methods section based upon the data collection information provided on the website: You can make the data more personalized for your class by digging down to state-wide data. In addition to the maps, the website includes various other descriptive data quantifying different hate groups in the US. I used this in class along with  other examples of how data can be mixed with maps in order to provide information on regions/states. This could also be used in a Social Psychology class in order to illustrat...

Here is a great example of several different topics, featuring an engaging, interactive m ap created by Time magazine AND using data from a Journal of Personality and Social Psycholog y article . Essentially, the authors of the original article gave the Big Five personality scale to folks all over the US. They broke down the results by state. Then Time created an interactive map of the US in order to display the data. http://time.com/7612/americas-mood-map-an-interactive-guide-to-the-united-states-of-attitude/ How to use in class:

Warning: This research and story include every paint-peeling obscenity in the book. Caution should be used when opening up these links on your work computer and you should really think long an hard before providing these links to your students. However, the research I'm about to describe 1) illustrates z-scores and 2) investigated regional usage of safe-for-the-classroom words like darn, damn, and gosh. So, a linguist, Dr. Jack Grieve  decided to use Twitter data to map out the use of different obscenities by county of the United States. Gawker picked up on this research and created a story about it . How can this be used in a statistics class? In order to quantify greater or lesser use of different obscenities, he created z-scores by county and illustrated the difference via a color-coding system. The more orange, the higher the z-score for a region (thus, greater usage) while blue indicates lesser usage. And, there are three such maps (damn, darn, and gosh) that are safe for us...