Sunday, November 20, 2011

The Google Maps of the Week


ExtendNY - New York City Expanded is a fun little map. It allows you to type in any location in the world and find out where you would live if New York's grid pattern of streets was expanded across the globe. For example, The Eiffel Tower in Paris will sit on the corner of 64,857 St and 12,770 Ave, once Paris inevitably becomes a suburb of New York.


On a more sombre note I was also impressed this week by The Detroit Free Press' homicide map. Living with Murder plots the 3,184 lives lost to homicide in Detroit between 2003 and June 2011.

The map makes good use of the Styled Map feature of the Google Maps API and also allows the user to explore the data in a number of ways.


This week also saw two very good Google Maps about books. GapVis is an interface for exploring the locations referenced in a number of historical texts. Whilst mapFast allows researchers to find books about any location in the world. Users can select a location and then view links to texts about the selected location in the WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database, or on Google Books.

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