Mapping

• Maps as kaleidoscope in Rorschmap

  August 1, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  Maps aren't just a way to see directions from point A to point B anymore. In some cases, they're not even meant to show location. Rorschmap by James Bridle is a kaleidoscopic map that is more eye candy than anything else:

  Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said.

  Enter a location and Rorschmap does the rest. Click go on the top right and the map will start to pan, which makes for a pretty animation.

  [Rorschmap via Waxy]

• If the world lived in a single city

  July 27, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (58)

  

  World population is estimated to be 6.9 billion people, and while that is a lot of people, it suddenly doesn't seem like that much in these maps by Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile. Simply imagine that the world lived with the same density of a real city, and see how much area they take up. If we all lived like they do in San Francisco (space-wise), we'd take up just under 398k square miles, or rather, only four states. Same density as New York? We'd all fit in Texas.

  [Per Square Mile]

• Data reenactment via stolen iPhone

  July 21, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  Remember when Joshua Koffman was posting pictures of the guy who had this stolen Macbook? That was oddly fascinating, even if it was peeking in on a pretty mundane day-to-day. Brian House, who works at The New York Times R&D lab, did something similar sentiment but different approach.
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• iPhone fireflies across the Europen sky

  July 18, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  A few months ago there was a lot of hoopla around the iPhone and the recording of your location. Crowdflow wants to take advantage of this opportunity to build an open database of location traces that people can use for research. Using their existing data so far, from 880 phones, Michael Kreil of Crowdflow mapped people moving around in Europe (in Germany for the most part). The results are beautiful.
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• Netflix favorites by location

  July 15, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  

  If you have Netflix, you know that there's a section for local favorites, and it can change quite a bit depending on where you live. After moving a few times in the past couple of years, I've definitely seen local favorites that seem to reflect the culture or majority demographic in a city. Slacktory used this simple idea and looked up favorites in each state. The map above is the result.

  There are quite a few amusing stereotypes in there, although I'm not sure what's going on with a few of them. Beverly Hills Chi Hua Hua in Mississippi... Kindergarten Cop... A Little Princess?

  What's a Netflix favorite in your area?

  [Slacktory]

• Geography of Wikipedia edits

  July 14, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  A while back we saw the history of the world according to Wikipedia. Erik Zachte, a data analyst
  at the Wikimedia Foundation, takes it from the angle of those who are actually editing Wikipedia. The animated map shows edits from a single day (May 10, 2011, to be exact) when there were nearly 370,000 edits from around the world.
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• Community connections via SMS and phone call data

  July 13, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (10)

  

  We often think of communities in the framework of government-set boundaries, but relationships can exist across states and counties. In a collaboration between researchers from AT&T Labs Research, IBM Research, and MIT SENSEable City Laboratory, these relationships are revealed through an analysis of SMS and call data.
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• Flickr and Twitter mapped together – See Something or Say Something?

  July 12, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  

  For all the maps by Eric Fischer I've posted, it's amazing how little I actually know about him, but in his most recent series, See Something or Say Something, he places geocoded tweets and Flickr photos on the same map. Blue dots represent tweets with location and orange dots are Flickr photos. White dots are locations with both.
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• In pursuit of the American dream (house)

  June 17, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  

  Trulia Insights sure has been having fun lately. In their most recent dig into housing trends, the team maps international searches for American homes.
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• Trulia Crime Map helps you find safe living places

  June 2, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (14)

  

  Real estate site Trulia made a great move when they acquired mapping outfit Movity late last year to help users make informed decisions in home buying. A month ago, they launched a price reductions map to let you see how housing prices were changing. Now you can see what crime is like in that area you're thinking about living in with Crime Map.
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• How we describe ourselves, according to online dating profiles

  June 2, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  The traditional way to gauge who we are as a country, state, or city is to turn to Census data for population, salaries, and family size. Many interesting stories can come from this data and it's indispensable in making country-wide decisions and policies, but it only glosses the surface. Census data doesn't so much tell us who we are than it tells what we are. Media artist Roger Luke DuBois takes a different type of census — from online dating profiles — called A More Perfect Union.
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• Find everywhere you can go in 15 minutes or less

  June 1, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (9)

  

  A lot of the time when making plans to meet up with friends or family, you're not so concerned with how far possible locations are than you are how long it takes to get there. Similarly, when deciding where to live relative to your workplace, you care more about how long it takes to get to work in the morning than you do how many miles away it is. Mapnificent lets you do this. Place the pin on the map, and see where you can get in a specified amount of time via public transportation or bicycle.
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• 11.3m player deaths visualized in point cloud

  May 31, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  Sometimes visualizing everything can turn out beautiful results. It seems to work especially well when the data is geographic, as we saw with All Streets, OpenStreetMap edits, and tourist maps. It turns out the everything method works for fictional worlds, too. The above and the video below are nothing but 11.3 million deaths by impact with object or terrain in the game Just Cause 2.
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• A deadly year of tornadoes

  May 23, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  As reported by The New York Times, the tornado in Joplin, Missouri, known to have killed at least 100 people, makes 2011 the deadliest year of tornadoes since 1953 (519 deaths). There have been over 450 tornado-related deaths this year. This NYT interactive shows number of deaths per year with yellow circles and tornado touchdowns and paths with blue lines and dots.
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• Geography of hate

  May 19, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (54)

  

  Richard Florida for The Atlantic takes a closer look at hate groups in the United States:

  Since 2000, the number of organized hate groups -- from white nationalists, neo-Nazis and racist skinheads to border vigilantes and black separatist organizations -- has climbed by more than 50 percent, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Their rise has been fueled by growing anxiety over jobs, immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the election of Barack Obama as America's first black president, and the lingering economic crisis. Most of them merely espouse violent theories; some of them are stock-piling weapons and actively planning attacks.

  The map provides a basic state-by-state view of hate groups per capita. Montana and Mississippi have the highest rates. Straightforward stuff. The interesting part, however, is how the rate correlates to other factors, such as support for John McCain. The greater the support for McCain, the more hate groups per capita a state tends to have.
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• Super detailed map of the skies

  May 19, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  

  The title just about says it all:

  The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.

  Play around with the super high-resolution image, get the desktop wallpaper, or get the print.

  [Photopic Sky Survey via Chart Porn]

• Global search volume by language

  May 10, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  To show off their new toy that is WebGL, a 3D graphics API for JavaScript, the Google Data Arts Team maps global search volume by language:

  The Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors. You’ll see a bright landscape of queries across Europe, and parts of Asia for instance, but unfortunately we see many fewer searches from parts of the world lacking Internet access—and often electricity as well—like Africa. We hope that as the Internet continues to become more accessible over time and people continue to ask questions, we’ll see this globe shine brightly everywhere.

  We've seen this sort of view before, but the interesting thing is that this runs native in the browser (and will probably send your fan whirling). Rotate and zoom in to your heart's content.
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• Stats of the Union tells health stories in America

  May 9, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (8)

  

  Stats of the Union, the new Fathom-produced iPad app, maps the status of health in America. Browse, pan, zoom, and explore through a number of demographics and breakdowns.
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• One man’s travel patterns – Atlas of the Habitual

  May 9, 2011 to Mapping, Self-surveillance  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  

  FInding himself in a new town, with a new job, Tim Clark started tracking his location on August 24, 2010, and ended 200 days later on March 13, 2011. Every time he stepped out, he turned on his GPS logger, and then would tag that trip with information about what it was for or what happened. Atlas of the Habitual is the result.
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• Art, science, and cartography

  April 22, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  Similar discussions going on in the cartography branch among UW Madison geography folks. Start with the post by Tim Wallace (where the above Venn came from). Then read the responses of Andy Woodruff and Daniel Huffman.