Hey you guys,

Long time MA visitor, first time forum user. I just finished school and as a way to keep my skills fresh and perhaps build a portfolio, I'm looking to try out some fun GIS (mapping) projects. Given my love for metal, I thought I'd try messing around with visualizing the MA data. I see that this thing has been done before on a worldwide scale (see: http://www.gislounge.com/map-of-heavy-metal-bands-by-country-per-capita/), so I thought I'd give it a shot on the US scale and throw a temporal twist on it.

http://imgur.com/33IjlFQ

This is a simple number of bands per state per year map I quickly threw together once I had the data properly formatted. Doing it per capita style like that other dude is probably more interesting, and I'll probably do that next, this is just a quick and dirty proof of concept I thought might be interesting. I may keep this thread updated if you guys find it interesting too.

Interesting that New York and California are consistently metal hotbeds...

Kinda surprised to see Ohio pop up there a couple times. Cleveland just sucks that much, eh?

Cool! I work in geomatics so GIS and metal is right up my alley. You should give it a spin with metal bands active rather than being formed, and maybe try with using a gradient colour scheme.

Not really. The OP's graph is bands per state, not bands per capita. It makes enough sense that the first and third most populous states in the countries (with the second being Texas, a firmly conservatively-rooted state) would have the most bands.

OP, can you upload this as a set of slides rather than as a GIF? I want to look at these in more detail but it cycles through frames so quickly that I hardly get the chance.

Yeah, the colour scheme isn't the greatest (it is a gradient though, right?), anyway, it would be nice to work with active bands, but that would require sifting through a tonne of bands. Unless I'm missing a more convenient way to pull data from the database (there's no MA API right?), I'd have to use the advanced search to bring up all the bands from a given state, then click through each one to determine when they were active?

Here's 1984: http://imgur.com/F0pfNcP

And here's the rest: http://imgur.com/a/RMbqf

I studied some GIS while doing one of my degrees and I disliked it mostyl due to shitty tutors and a really crappy Lecturer. For my main project i analysed data to show where god locations to base a new NBA franchise would be. That was quite a few years ago now and i really couldn't remember how to operate that software at all.