I would be remiss if I didn’t send everybody off for the end of year hibernation without some good internet mapping fodder to keep them busy in between big meals, hot drinks, and bad television watching. Here’s hoping that some of you get iPads for Christmas and can enjoy some of these mapping sites while laying on the couch or under the covers.
This one is not so much a map as a pretty cool interactive documentary that empahsizes geography in its interface: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow/
rapidFTR is a project started by a friend of mine that he is trying to implement with the UN. Basically, it helps refugee workers to track, locate, and reunite refugees with their families or with things like medical services. Not a map really, but it does function to locate people in space: http://rapidftr.com/
9eyes is interesting and often hilarious. Basically, this guys trolls google street view and takes the weirder sights and takes screen-grabs of them. Sometimes you look at them and take astep back, saying, “wait, why would a google street-car be driving there?: http://9eyes.tumblr.com/
Ok I promise I’ll get to a map eventually. These are Florence Nightingale’s “Coxcomb” diagrams – probably the origin of the modern idea of data visualization: http://understandinguncertainty.org/coxcombs
Ok, a map! though now its out of date, this was conceived as a live map of the protests that happened a couple of weeks ago in England, showing where groups of students and police were; you can see the updates on the side. This was devised by the protest groups as a way of attempting to circumvent the dastardly practice of “kettling”, in which the police force protestors into a space and don’t let them leave, even when its really cold and you have to pee: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=113314616990789414427.000496f96fd6739e0982d&ll=51.506338,-0.126847&spn=0.003599,0.009645&z=17
I’m sure some of you have seen this, and rightfully, it was all over the place a week or so ago; this is an amazingly comprehensive and interactive map of census data. You can zoom in and out and see who lives where (and make your own guesses as to what that means). Like the map Adrian presented a while back, this one needs a slider and also data from older censuses so we can compare: http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer
Generally, this is a pretty cool graphic design/information visualization site, and they have maps galore, some silly, some serious: http://www.verysmallarray.com/?cat=15&paged=10
and finally, the Guardian took one of the earlier wikileaks information leaks and created a map of all of the (documented) deaths in Iraq. Chilling stuff: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-deaths-map
And last but not least, while its not a map, I’m sure someone is figuring out ow to make it into one, we have Google’s newest time-suck, the ngram viewer; if you haven’t seen this yet, its tons of fun: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
When you plug in “maps” this is the graph you get:
[well, it wouldn’t upload, so just go here and have a look]
Looks like we’re all part of a growing trend!