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Randall Munroe of xkcd presents a dozen different ways to project the earth onto a map, and analyzes the fans of each. My favorite (after the globe, of course) is the Robinson projection, which pegs my lifestyle pretty well. Link -via the Presurfer
The Mississippi River seems eternal, but it changes over time. How much? You can see in a collection of colorful maps at Visual News. Cartographer Harold N. Fisk produced them in 1944, with different colors to show the past and current flow of the mighty Mississippi. Link -via the Presurfer
The Migrations Map is an interactive map that lets you see which countries people are moving to and from across the world. Here, for example, are the ten largest streams of immigrants into Australia. The UK contributes the largest share with over one million current residents of Australia.
This map was made by Martin De Wulf, a computer scientist in Brussels.
Link -via MetaFilter
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René Voorburg, an archivist at the National Library of the Netherlands, digitized a Roman road map from about 300 AD. OmnesViae displays a route between two towns of your choice and provides driving directions. Pictured above is one that I created from Ostia to Brundisium.
Link -via The Presurfer
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Ingrid Dabringer likes to “…elevate the mundane. The Mundane is so saturated with meaning if we just take an extra second to dwell on it.” Among other expressions of this desire, she finds the forms for human figure drawings in maps. Link -via Geekosystem
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I reside squarely in the “iceberg-with-ranch-dressing-eating” area even though I dislike both those things intensely. The best, I think, is the huge collection of countries in Europe who think the others are all arrogant, though “old and bad at real estate” made me giggle. You can see a larger version of this on Laughing Squid. Link
Google Maps has a list of punny slogans that users have tagged onto towns and cities. A sample:
Gas, KS
“Don’t pass gas, stop and enjoy It.”Hooker, OK
“It’s a location, not a vocation.”Bushnell, SD
“It’s not the end of the earth, but you can see it from here”Walla Walla, WA
“The city so nice they named it twice.”
Click on a slogan at the site and the map will show you where the town is. Link -via Buzzfeed
Artist Nikki Rosato creates amazing sculptures of human figures by using old street maps people have tossed. She started out by cutting flat silhouettes out of maps, then progressed to this stunning 3D work that she creates by eliminating all of the landmasses from the maps. She then uses wire to guide the remaining roads and waterways into the shape she wants. The result is “ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like,” as she says in her artist’s statement.
Link via Flavorwire
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Even driving down the highway can be a virtual experience! With this Google Earth application, just enter your location and destination, hit “go” to find your route, then go to the simulator panel and hit “start.” You can adjust your speed as you drive along. Now, slow down and enjoy the scenery! Requires the Google Earth plug-in. The screenshot shown here is where I’m either getting on the Brooklyn Bridge or plunging into the East River. Link -via Metafilter
Matthew Cusick composes collage portraits and landscapes out of maps, such as the above Red & Blue. Each work at his gallery at the link includes a detail image, demonstrating the remarkable work that Cusick put into selecting map colors and shapes.
Link via Dude Craft
R. Luke Dubois sifted through the profiles of 19 million people in the United States on 21 dating websites. He then plotted the words that they used in their profiles the most frequently with their geographic locations. Pictured above, for example, is central Michigan. “Companionship”, I think, is Lansing. You can view other maps at the link.
Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff created interactive world maps which denote the locations from which scientific papers were authored. Green dots represent higher quality research and red dots signify lower quality research. There are three maps, one each for physics, chemistry, and psychology:
The idea is simple enough – scientific papers cite other scientific papers and it is usually held that the more a paper is cited the more important it is. So taking the data from the Web-of-Science database the researchers simply counted how many papers originated from each city and plotted a circle with a radius proportional to the number of papers on Google Maps.
They then looked at the number of papers that you would expect to be in the top 10% most cited papers from each city, i.e. 10% of the papers compared to the number that were actually in the top 10%. The difference indicates how successful the city is in producing important papers and not just their volume. They plotted the circles in red for lower performing cities and green for higher performing cities.
Pictured above is a selection from the physics map.
Japanese photographer, Sohei Nishino, walks around cities taking pictures and pasting and arranging the results to create layered icons of a city from his memory. He has mapped Istanbul, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Osaka and London.
Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London . He took over 10,000 photographs, which he edited down to 4,000. He cut them up and pasted them together into a composite photographic map of the city of London measuring 7.5ft × 4ft.
Nishino’s collages are on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London until April 2.
Link- Via The Map Room
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Forbes presents an interactive county map of the United States that shows where people are moving. Just click on a county to view where new arrivals came from or people are going to. You can also select from nine major metropolitan areas.
Link via Glenn Reynolds
Charts Bin presents an interactive map showing the distribution of passenger cars throughout the world. Iceland leads the world with 668 per 1,000 people. At the link, you can hover over each country to view more details.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
The following is reprinted from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
Dr. Eilert Sundt, Secretary General, Norwegian Cartozoologic Society
cartozoology n. The science or practice of discovering and studying animals outlined paradigmatically by street layouts as they appear in maps, especially with reference to physical evidence of the animals’ presence in the corresponding terrain.
cartozoologist n. [From French carte ‘map, card’ + modern Latin zoologia (as ZOO-, -LOGY)]1
As the dictionary definition indicates, cartozoology is a study of maps: a search for animal outlines hidden in the street layouts primarily of cities. But equally, if not more importantly, it is a field study, a study of the terrain: the animal outline is meticulously explored on foot. In cartozoological terms, this exploration is referred to as a “con-tour”.
Cartozoology in Norway, as in the world at large, is a young science. Tor Åge Bringsværd’s seminal article “Den store fisken i Reykjavik” (“The big fish in Reykjavik”)2 is generally accepted as the first properly cartozoological work. The term “cartozoology” is more recent still. The first recorded instance in print is from Bringsværd’s book London3 from 2003. The archives of the Norwegian Cartozoologic Society show the term in use in private correspondence in February 2003. In other words, we are dealing not with a young, but virtually an infant science. Nevertheless, we find that not only has a cartozoologic method been developed, but also elements of self-reflection and a critical methodology can be found in the cartozoological texts. As yet no fully-fledged meta- cartozoology can be said to have emerged; this article is intended as a first seed.
The Origins of Cartozoology
Even though cartozoology is a neophyte in the academic arena, it has of course not sprung full-born out of nothing. As Aphrodite rose from the ocean foam, cartozoology has been shaped by ideas and thought currents that have undulated through human consciousness since the beginning of history.
A fundamental trait of the human psyche is our search for meaning and understanding in addition to mere knowledge. This wish is naturally accompanied by a deep assumption that the meaning of existence is inscribed in the world, in the shape of more or less hidden messages that may be read and understood by she who acquires the requisite knowledge and skill. These are important ingredients in the ideas whence cartozoology sprang forth.
An early example of cartozoology: the constellation Cygnus the swan, and for comparison, a swan.
In cultural history, we find several cases of discovery and examination of emerging animal shapes that have so much in common with modern cartozoology that they rightly may be described as examples of proto-cartozoology. A clear example is the surveying of celestial constellations. However, a critical examination of a fairly typical example, the constellation Cygnus (the Swan), juxtaposed with an image of an actual swan should illustrate that this is not particularly fruitful from a cartozoological point of view.
The format of this article prohibits a detailed treatment of all proto-cartozoological precursors of the modern science; such a project should be reserved for a future monograph. In this short article we jump instead to contemporary literature.
more …
According to data compiled by environmental think tank World Resources Institute, Scandinavians drink a lot of coffee. Between 6.8 and 12.0 kilograms per year. So world travelers, does this map match up with your experiences?
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Cartographer Daniel Huffman measured the propensity of six swear words in tweets by geographic location within the 48 contiguous states. So this map is actually adjusted for population. Redder areas swear a lot more than blacker areas.
Link via Geekologie
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The Economist created a map of the United States that matches each state with a national economy of comparable size as measured by Gross Domestic Product in 2009. It’s interactive. So at the link, you can hover your cursor over each state and get more detailed information.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Previously: Map of US States Showing Equal Population
This animation is a 3D rendering of Mortimer’s Cave, one of many available at the Nottingham Caves Survey. You’ll also find photographic virtual tours of caves, movies, images, and a Google map to find more of the 450 specific caves in Nottingham. You could get lost in here! Link -Thanks, John James!
Rich Aschmann, a linguist, created a huge map of North America describing the boundaries and differences between various dialects of the English language. Keep scrolling down at the link, and you can find Aschmann’s extensive listing of audio examples of many of these dialects.
Link via The Agitator
Paul Butler, and intern at Facebook, created this map of the world using ten millions online friendships:
I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.
At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.
Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.
Vincenzo Cosenza created a series of maps tracking the most popular social networks around the world over the past year and a half. This month’s map is above. Consenza writes:
Zuckerberg’s creature continues to gain users around the world (almost 600 millions). Since June 2010 Facebook has stolen new important nations from local, previously strong, competitors (in 115 out of 132 countries analyzed it is market leader) especially in Europe. In particular:
- From Iwiw: Hungary
- From Nasza-Klasa: Poland
- From Hi5: Mongolia
- From Orkut (Google): Paraguay and India. Orkut remains the first social network in Brasil.
In Japan Mixi is still the most used web-based social network (Ameba that I previously mentioned it’s not a pure social networking site, but also a portal/blog-hosting provider). But if we look to mobile social networks usage the leader is Gree followeb by Mobage Town.
Link via Geekosystem
Click here for larger image
This map rearranges the world by correlating the population of a country to actual size. Some countries (the United States, Yemen, Brazil and Ireland) remain in their original location. India has replaced Canada on the map. I’d better start packing my bags because Canada is located way over in Pakistan.
Bruno Kurth and Tobias Reichling. Vanessa Graf, Tanja Kusserow-Kurth, and Torsten Scheer built an enormous relief map of Europe topped with models of famous monuments. They used 53,500 pieces to create a structure that measures 12.5 feet on a side. 44 monuments lie on the surface of the map.
Link via Make | Photo: Tobias Reichling
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Kris Kowal created an interactive map of Middle-earth. You can zoom and pan, search for or center a location, and link to a particular area. Place names are labeled in both English and Elvish.
Link via Geekologie | Image by Kris Kowal used under Creative Commons license
This is a portion of a 1858 map of property lines along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The map reminded the author of shotgun houses -long, narrow houses with all the rooms stacked in a line, one behind another. Is there any relation between the two? Maybe the odd property shapes point to the fact that every landowner wants a bit of riverfront. See the entire (enlargable) map at Strange Maps. Link
Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes:
Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the state and planet, famous landmarks, or slightly randomly selected (but loosely based on facts) from my brother and myself.
Link via Geekologie
Dimensions is a neat feature from the BBC that overlays historical or ecological events over modern maps centered on the postal code of your choice. The above map that I created shows the Great Wall of China shielding Lubbock, Texas. Other options include the route of the original Marathon, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the ongoing floods in Pakistan.
Harvard University graduate student Bill Rankin owns the site Radical Cartography. It’s filled with unique and imaginative maps, such as the above world map plotting relative population by lines of longitude. Other maps include displays of an actual cartographic “axis of evil”, US counties named after Presidents, and youth skater culture.
Link via Geekosystem | Rankin’s Professional Website
