Biographical Mapping

If you've ever dreamed of walking in the footsteps of your favorite historical figures, then Maptale is the map for you. This new platform lets you explore the life journeys of significant historical and contemporary figures, as laid out on an interactive map.

What Maptale Offers

At its heart, Maptale is a collection of mapped biographies, with each map showcasing the life journey of a notable individual through the significant locations that defined their story. For instance, selecting Abraham Lincoln from the "History and Wars" category allows you to explore locations such as the birthplace of the 16th President of the United States, his family’s farms, his marriage home, the White House, and the Lincoln Tomb, where he is laid to rest.

Maptale’s approach is inclusive - which means that users can upload their own maps, to visualize the life journeys of their own heros and heroines. These custom user maps add a community-driven aspect to the platform. It should also help in ensuring that there is a wide selection of notable individuals whose life journeys can be explored on Maptale.

Improving Maptale

One feature that seems to be missing from Maptale, and which I believe would enhance the platform significantly, is a universal map displaying all the locations in its database, encompassing the lives of all the individuals mapped so far. This consolidated view would allow users to uncover the famous connections in their own neighborhoods. It could help transform Maptale into a fantastic tool for local exploration and educational discovery.

Also See

Notable People Map - a map showing the birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world.

GeoGuessing Reimagined

World Guesser is yet another alternative to the ever-popular GeoGuessr Street View game.

Like GeoGuessr, World Guesser drops you into a random location and asks you to guess where you are based solely on the clues you can find in Google’s Street View imagery. The gameplay is divided into two main phases:

Investigate:

This is where the detective work happens. Navigate through the surroundings to analyze clues. Look at architectural styles, read signs in different languages, and study the geography of the area. For example, a desert landscape might hint at North Africa or the Middle East, while lush tropical greenery could point to Southeast Asia or South America.

Guess:

After gathering clues, you mark your guess on the world map. The closer your guess is to the actual location, the more points you earn.

Why It Stands Out

One of the best features of World Guesser is its accessibility. The game is entirely free to play, with no hidden subscriptions or paywalls. You can dive into unlimited rounds without creating an account, making it easy to start playing right away.

If you find World Guesser too easy (you won’t), then you’re ready for the exceedingly challenging EarthGuessr. EarthGuessr provides a refreshing twist and a whole new perspective on the ‘geoguessing’ format.

EarthGuessr challenges players to explore five random locations on Earth as seen from above. Instead of navigating Street View, you zoom and pan through satellite imagery to identify your location. This aerial vantage point introduces an entirely new layer of deduction, as you’re now challenged to identify locations purely based on the landscapes and geographical features visible from above.

In other words, EarthGuessr is very, very challenging!

If you want even more geoguessing fun then check out these Six Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr.

Your Personal AI Travel Guide

Imagine wandering through a city with your very own AI travel guide, ready to reveal the stories behind every landmark, monument, or hidden gem you encounter. With Google’s Talking Tours, this vision takes a significant step closer to becoming a reality.

Google Talking Tours offers a fascinating glimpse into the future of AI-driven travel guidance. Developed as part of a collaboration between Google Arts & Culture Lab and artist-in-residence Gaël Hugo, this experiment leverages generative audio and Google’s cutting-edge Gemini AI to provide dynamic, location-specific insights about cultural landmarks captured in Street View. 

Talking Tours currently covers 55 major landmarks around the world, offering an AI-generated audio guide that provides insights based on the visual content of Street View panoramas. Users can explore a 360-degree view of a site, take a snapshot, and receive detailed commentary from the AI. Additionally, users can click an “ask a question” button to generate three contextual questions about the location, enhancing interactivity and personalized learning.

The technology relies on a blend of visual analysis and geospatial data. Gemini, Google’s multimodal large language model, processes the scene, combines it with GPS data, and crafts a descriptive script. This script is then converted into audio using a Google AI audio model, creating an immersive learning experience.

You can even explore individual museums and galleries, take snapshots of specific works of art or artifacts, and listen to Talking Tours' AI-generated narrated guides. Unfortunately, at this stage, the AI does not yet possess extensive knowledge of all exhibits in every museum and gallery worldwide. As a result, you may often receive a generic-sounding response rather than detailed information about a specific work of art or artifact. However, if the exhibit is particularly notable - for example, the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum - Talking Tours is able to generate a reasonably informed narration that describes and explains the selected exhibit.

Introducing Terra Draw

James Milner has released a new JavaScript library designed to add drawing tools to various online map developer platforms. While most popular mapping platforms offer built-in drawing tools or have add-on drawing libraries, Terra Draw is specifically created to work cross-platform, seamlessly integrating with many popular mapping libraries.

Terra Draw is a powerful JavaScript library that provides a suite of geographical feature drawing tools for maps. It is designed to work "out of the box" with leading mapping libraries like Mapbox, MapLibre, Google Maps, OpenLayers, and Leaflet.

Why Choose Terra Draw?

Integrating drawing tools into interactive maps can be tedious, especially when working with different mapping libraries. Terra Draw addresses this by offering:

• Cross-Library Compatibility: With built-in adapters, developers can integrate Terra Draw into their preferred mapping platform without rethinking the core logic.
• State Management with the Store: The Store is the heart of Terra Draw, efficiently managing all the features and providing easy access to their geometries.
• Customizability: Developers can extend the library with custom modes, adapting it to specific use cases.

What Drawing Modes are Available?

Modes define the different drawing behaviors or tools that can be added to your map. Terra Draw includes several predefined modes, such as:

• Rectangle Mode: Draw rectangles.
• Polygon Mode: Draw polygons.
• Freehand Mode: Enable freeform drawing.
• Select Mode: Manipulate existing features.

The Drawing Data 'Store'

The Store in Terra Draw manages the state of all features added to the map by the user when drawing with one of the modes. It is created when Terra Draw is initialized and stores features in GeoJSON format. Features can be added using drawing modes (e.g., TerraDrawRectangleMode) or via the addFeatures method. The Store also supports adding, removing, and restoring features, offering robust data management for interactive map drawing.

Installing Terra Draw

You can install Terra Draw via npm or directly integrate it using a script tag. Adapters act as connectors between Terra Draw and your chosen mapping library, handling map-specific logic for rendering features.

GeoGuessr for History Buffs

Can you guess the date and location of the historical event taking place in these two AI generated videos? If you can then you might just become the Time Portal champion of the world.

Time Portal is a fun and innovative online game that challenges you to pinpoint the time and place of significant historical moments. If you’re a fan of history and love games like GeoGuessr, this one’s for you.

At its core, Time Portal is a guessing game that drops you into a series of random historical events. But instead of just reading about them or looking at static images, you’re immersed in dynamic, AI-generated video footage of the event itself.

Your mission? To figure out when and where you are in history.

The AI-generated videos used in the game are created using a sophisticated pipeline of Flux, Kling, and mmaudio. These tools combine to produce visually and aurally rich recreations of historical moments. While the AI-generated footage often captures the essence of the events, it occasionally takes creative liberties - incorporating elements of folklore or popular myths into the historical narrative.

Every day, a new Daily Challenge awaits you on Time Portal. You’ll be tasked with identifying the time and place of five different historical events, each represented by a unique video.

In each round, your score is based on how close your guesses are to the actual location and year of the event. For those who love a challenge, you can also replay any of the previous daily challenges to refine your skills or compete for higher scores.

Also See

A Nightmare on View Street - Can you identify the locations being attacked by monsters in these AI-generated videos?

Roads, Railways, Runways & Rivers

I have been inspired by OpenSkiStats' Which Way do You Ski to create my own interactive map for visualizing the orientations of roads, railways, runways, and rivers in towns and cities around the world.

In Which Way Do You Ski, OpenSkiStats created a series of "compass rose" visualizations that illustrate the strong poleward tendency of ski runs across the globe. These ski slope orientation visualizations reminded me of Geoff Boeing's Comparing City Street Orientations which uses compass roses to show the orientations of city street grids around the world.

Geoff Boeing's Comparing City Street Orientations

Inspired by Geoff's visualizations Volodymyr Agafonkin created his Road Orientations Map, a Mapbox-powered map that lets users view the street grid orientations of any town or city worldwide. Using Volodymyr's code, I’ve now developed my own Transportation Orientations Map.

My Transportation Orientations interactive map allows you to view the orientations of roads, railways, rivers, and runways anywhere in the world. It provides an intuitive way to observe and analyze how these features are oriented within any area you choose.

Key Features:

1. Dynamic Compass Rose - The compass rose updates in real-time as you move around the map or zoom in and out. It reflects the orientations of the selected feature set in the visible map area.
2. Interactive Geocoding - Quickly locate any place in the world using the integrated search bar powered by OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim API.
3. Customizable Layers - focus on specific infrastructure types by selecting from roads, railways, runways, or rivers. The selected features are highlighted on the map in red, and their orientations are reflected in the compass rose.
4. Downloadable Visualizations - Add a personal touch by entering custom text below the compass rose. Once satisfied, you can download the compass rose visualization as a PNG image with a single click.

My map is largely a clone of Volodymyr's original Road Orientations Map. All I've done is adapt it for MapLibre, add the ability to view the orientations of railways, runways, and rivers, and include an option to download the compass rose as an image.

An Extremely Distorted Map of the US Election

Following the publication of its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, the New York Times was widely criticized for visually misrepresenting the election results. Despite this backlash, the newspaper chose to repeat the error after the 2020 election - and has now done so again!

The New York Times recently released its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election. According to the NYT, the map is still a work in progress, currently displaying results from 73% of all votes cast. Results from some voting precincts are missing but will be added in the coming weeks.

The methodology behind the 2024 map remains unchanged from that used in the original Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election. This decision is surprising, given the widespread criticism the 2016 map received from cartographers and data visualization experts. Cartonerd's Cartographic Hyperbole summarized these critiques into two main points:

1. Use of a choropleth map: The map disproportionately highlights sparsely populated areas, giving them the same visual prominence as densely populated regions.
2. Web Mercator projection: The projection does not maintain equal area, a crucial requirement for accurate visual representation in electoral maps.

The map is undeniably a powerful tool for exploring precinct-level vote counts for each presidential candidate. It also allows users to quickly identify precincts that overwhelmingly voted for one candidate. However, it suffers from the same flaw as its predecessors: it overemphasizes large, rural precincts (which usually vote Republican) , leading to a visually skewed representation of the overall election results.

In the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, Donald Trump secured 49.9% of the vote, narrowly defeating Harris, who garnered 48.4%. Yet, the NYT's 'Extremely Detailed Map' gives the impression of a landslide victory for Trump due to the vast swaths of red representing rural areas. You could almost say that the NYT map creates an extremely distorted view of just how close the 2024 election truly was.

Global Ski Slope Orientations

OpenSkiStats has analyzed ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel for ski trails worldwide. In Which Way do You Ski OpenSkiStats has used ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel of all ski trails in ski resorts around the globe. 

By gathering the coordinates of all trail segments, connecting these points, and treating each segment as a vector scaled by its vertical drop, OpenSkiStats creates a "ski rose." This circular chart, akin to a wind rose, characterizes the directions of all trail segments at a ski area. Each petal represents a compass direction, with its radius proportional to the combined vertical drop of trail segments in that direction.

map and ski rose of all ski trails in Holt’s Ledge and Winslow Ledge, in Lyme, NH

As depicted in the U.S. ski rose cartogram at the top of this page, in the Northern Hemisphere, a majority of ski slopes are on the northern side of mountains. OpenSkiStats found a 'strong poleward' tendency in ski slopes worldwide - in other words, the majority of runs in the Northern Hemisphere are oriented toward the north, while those in the Southern Hemisphere are oriented toward the south.

Interestingly, OpenSkiStats also discovered a 'moderate eastward' preference in ski slopes in both hemispheres. This trend reflects a preference for morning sun, when temperatures are lower, over afternoon sun, influencing the orientation of ski trails.

Notable Memorial Map

Notable Memorials

This morning, I created a map of memorials in central London.

My Notable Memorials map displays the names of individuals with memorials in central London, many of which are blue plaque memorials.

While there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the map itself (although seeing the names of individuals rather than just markers is quite engaging), what stands out is how quickly I was able to create it. In under five minutes, I gathered the data and built the map thanks largely to the Download Data from OpenStreetMap tool.

Download Data from OpenStreetMap

Download Data from OpenSteetMap is a new tool that makes it remarkably easy to view and extract geographical data from OpenStreetMap in GeoJSON format.

Anyone familiar with Overpass Turbo knows it is a powerful querying tool for OpenStreetMap data. However, mastering the Overpass Query Language (OQL) can be quite challenging (though tools like ChatGPT have made writing Overpass QL queries much easier). That’s why I believe there’s a significant demand for simple, user-friendly tools like Download Data from OpenStreetMap.

The tool uses OpenStreetMap categories to populate a drop-down menu. To view and download data, you simply select one of these categories. Any subcategories are conveniently displayed in the map’s sidebar. Then, with just a click of the green 'download' button, you can export the selected data as a GeoJSON file.

Notable People Map

If I wanted to make my Notable Memorials map into something people might actually use when traveling around London I could use the Wikipedia API to add a brief biographical paragraph for each of the notable individuals displayed on the map. 

For now you might prefer Topi Tjukanov's Notable People Map, which shows the most notable people born in locations around the globe. If you want to find memorial markers then the Historical Marker Database records the locations of permanent outdoor historical markers and commemorative plaques across the world. Read the Plaque has also mapped the location of thousands of historical plaques.

LA Fires Damage Inspections Dashboard

Around 105,000 Los Angeles residents remain under mandatory evacuation orders, with an additional 87,000 under evacuation warnings. Many of these residents are uncertain and deeply concerned about the safety of their homes. So far, more than 12,000 buildings have been destroyed by the Los Angeles fires.

To provide clarity and transparency, the County of Los Angeles has published preliminary maps of buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles fires. There are four separate Damage Inspection Dashboards, one for each fire:

• Eaton Fire
• Palisades Fire
• Franklin Fire
• Bridge Fire

These interactive map dashboards display the latest assessments of damage to buildings caused by each fire. Individual buildings are categorized as Destroyed, Major (damage), Minor, Affected, Inaccessible, or No Damage on the maps.

Each map provides a sobering visualization of the devastation caused by the LA fires. Unfortunately, the extent of the damage is expected to increase, as these maps are only preliminary. Damage assessments are ongoing, with updates being made daily. If a building on the map lacks an attached report, it means it has not yet been inspected.

By zooming into a neighborhood on any of the maps, the dashboard automatically updates to show the current statistics within the selected area. These include the number of buildings inspected, the number of residential and commercial buildings, and the count of structures categorized as damaged, destroyed, or unaffected.