Annexation Visualizations

Notes on how I create the annexation visualizations for San Jose and Mountain View.

Some requirements:

  • requires 1.x version of Topojson (npm install -g topojson@1)
  • requires ogr2ogr (brew install gdal)

  1. Create separate shapefiles for each year range (1945-1950, 1950-1955, etc.). This work is done in QGIS by selecting the features by a range of years and saving as a new shapefile.

  2. Next, convert each shapefile into a topojson file.

ogr2ogr \
    -f GeoJSON \
    -t_srs EPSG:4328 \
    YEAR.json \
    SHAPE.shp
  1. Once each year range shapefile has been converted into a GeoJSON file, we merge them into a single topojson file.
topojson \
    -o mountainview.json \
    -- \
    YEAR1.json \
    YEAR2.json