Unveiling New Perspectives: Visualizing Change with Interactive Mapping
Discover the Power of Interactive Web Maps -- and Meetings -- in Revealing Before-and-After Imagery of St. Tammany Parish
Every two weeks, the leadership team at the St. Tammany Parish Assessor’s Office gets together to discuss the big picture at the office. These meetings include representatives from each of the departments in the office, including the administration. They are valuable in terms of communicating project updates, sharing success stories and challenges, and setting priorities.
Another significant benefit of the leadership meeting are all the new ideas that are generated as a result of the mixture of voices in the room.
During the last leadership meeting, it was communicated to the leaders that new 2023 aerial imagery was incorporated into all of the office’s mapping products. This new imagery was flown during the most-recent Winter by the imagery provider EagleView and delivered to STPAO in the early spring.
The last time STPAO received imagery was 2019. There are a lot of changes in St. Tammany Parish since that flyover. One of the more dramatic changes since 2019 is the development of the Lakeshore Estates subdivision near Slidell, Louisiana.
During the meeting I demonstrated how different this particular area looks now by toggling the 2019 imagery layers on-and-off on the map. Basically, I just clicked a bunch of buttons to create a before-and-after effect.
That was an effective enough method in a pinch, but there is a better way to achieve this kind of visualization. One of those better ways is to create an interactive web map with Leaflet with the proper functionality to do a side-by-side comparison.
Here it is, the map born from that inspiring leadership meeting:
Here is a closer look …
You can use the pan buttons to move around the map, or search by address on the map …
You can zoom in and out using a scroll wheel …
The last time I created and shared an interactive map was during the first few months of the stay-at-home period of the pandemic. It was the spring of 2020 for a client that I landed through UpWork.
This map also was for a job, but it did not feel like work. This one felt more like an expression of creativity within the context of work. It felt like something for me as much as for the job.
It turns out that your meetings can be sources of inspiration if you look for the good in them. It is in your perspective, in how you direct your gaze — toward the positive, or toward the negative? — that matters.