Mapping our Tweeting MPs with MapTube

One of the geometries available in MapTube shows the 2010 parliamentary constituencies. I’ve used to create a map, based on the list of MPs’ Twitter pages listed at Tweetminster and updated to reflect the boundary changes earlier this year. The map is clickable – choose a blue constituency, i.e. one which has a tweeting MP, and click on it to get a direct link to their Twitter page.

There’s more MPs on Twitter than you might think – over 200 currently, which is roughly one-third of all the MPs currently in parliament.

The map is OK on its own, but it’s real power comes when you can combine it with another political one, using MapTube’s map search functionality. You have to be careful when combining maps together, as maps with lots of colours will quickly become tricky to interpret when the colours, with varying translucencies, are laid on top of each other. However, with simple maps, it works quite well. There’s currently one showing which MPs have agreed to back an Early Day Motion banning Wild Animals in Circuses.

If you overlay both these maps together, you can interpolate the colours to quickly identify which MPs are on Twitter but (for example) have not agreed to back the motion, and then tweet them! In this example, the “haven’t signed” colour is red, and the “has Twitter” colour is blue, so the “target” list is purple.

The map doesn’t include Northern Ireland as we don’t have the constituency boundary geometries for those.