Snowmobile (snow machining) is a way of life for many in the northern parts of the United States and much of Canada. It’s also a frequent cause of massive injury and death. (Back in 2002, I lost an uncle to a tree … well, really, it was the snowmobile’s fault. The tree just got in the way.)
Or is it alcohol’s fault? (All deaths with alcohol involved have a bottle next to them.)
Many snowmobile trails have numerous bars and pubs lining them so snowmobilers can stop and get tossed while they cruise across half-frozen lakes and the woods at upwards of 160 kph. You’ll notice most of these deaths involve alcohol, so really it’s unfair to blame snowmobiles or even the trees, lakes, trains, deer, moose, or wolves they intersect with. But I digress…
There is no national dataset on snowmobile accidents or fatalities, unfortunately. (Though, given recent trends, there probably won’t be many reliable national datasets for much longer.) Minnesota posts all of their snowmobile fatalities as PDF reports with city and county locations every year. So I downloaded those, asked Dataset Doctor to create a usable GIS dataset from the 23 individual PDF files and… well… here we are. All the people who have died, and which of these accidents involved alcohol in Minnesota since 2002 (through January 2024).
The state doesn’t have this year’s data online yet, but we’re literally under siege right now by the US federal government, so I give my state government a pass. Perhaps later this year I will have a chance to celebrate National ICE Melt Day?
View the map here. Tools Used
- Dataset Doctor: dataset compilation from MN DNR PDFs
- Web Mapper GPT: created the map and blood splatter using my JSON file, TIGER/LINE files it fetched, D3 for mapping, and its own animated SVG blood.
Original Prompt
I would like to make a simple animated map of snowmobile fatalities in Minnesota over time. I would like this to be kind of a melodramatic public service announcement post style map, perfect for mobile screens since Minnesota is a tall, north-south state. Dramatic title, similar to the Bagel Nation style, but perhaps crooked and with a propaganda poster style snowmobile crashing through it or into it would be ideal. A subtitle concerning: How many more must we lose? or similar on there. Please take a look at the two datasets I have. I would really like one with blood splots for each death and a pop up description, alcohol label (if alcohol was involved), for each. However, it hasn’t been geocoded yet. I was thinking we could put the points randomly inside of the correct county, to help protect identities anyway, so maybe this will still work? Please come up to three propaganda-style, don’t drink and snowmobile minimally interactive, animated propaganda poster. Spell out three different ideas, explain how each would look and work briefly, give an overview of their persuasive power, and then provide a brief idea of the tech stack needed to pull it off and ease of production, please. We’ll go from there! Thank you! P.S. Please come up with 5 propagandist titles and 5 subtitles to go with this, as well as three good color schemes. Thanks!
In Memoriam
Uncle Mike (sadly now but a drop on the map)