ZIPScribble Map Italy

Earlier I’ve blogged a two-parts tutorial on how to create ZIPScribble Maps using the Processing visualization framework.

The map uses a background I made with TileMill and CC-BY-licensed postcode data from the Geonames gazetteer portal. (By the way, here’s an informative short TileMill tutorial by Pierre La Baume)

As explained earlier, there are different levels in my ZIPScribble Maps:

• Level 1 ZIPScribble Map: Only the first digit of the postcode is compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected, for example, between postal codes 8679 and 9000, but no discontinuity is detected between 8399 and 8400.
• Level 2 ZIPScribble Map: The first two digits are compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected between postal codes 8679 and 9000 as well as between 8399 and 8400.
• The Level 3 ZIPScribble Map works analogously.

What I find interesting, comparing the ZIPScribble Maps of Italy to those of Switzerland, is that in the Italian maps the difference between levels 2 and 3 is not very big. In Switzerland level 3 is much more fragmented than level 2. In Italy, level 3 seems to distinguish big cities from their surroundings.

Consider, for example, Genova on the coast of the Mediterranean sea in the top-left/north-west corner of the ZIPScribble Map. At level 3, Genova (coloured bright green) stands separate from the surrounding towns (purple/fuchsia). Similarly, the cities of Milano, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Rome, Napoly and Palermo stand out at level 3.

Finally, in celebration of the recent political events in Italy I had fun producing these maps (exact colours courtesy Wikimedia):