The Google Maps of the Week

This week I was impressed by two very different data visualisations. American Tech Jobs is a great example of what can be achieved with Google Fusion Tables and Google Maps. The Navy of WWI, on the other hand, shows the amazing possibilities of adding a canvas layer on Google Maps and executing data on the client-side.


The Navy of WWI animates 12 years of location data, starting before the outbreak of war and ending when trade routes resume after the war's end. As the animation plays the ship's tracks are displayed on the map. Beneath the map the month and year updates to show the current time within the visualisation.

The visualisation was created by CartoDB and Zooniverse using data from Old Weather.


American Tech Jobs is a visualisation of U.S. tech jobs. The Google Map tracks private sector employment in tech industries, showing where jobs are concentrated.

Users of the map can select any U.S. county to view the percentage of tech jobs in the county, the percentage of tech job growth and overall job growth. The visualisation includes data from 2002 to 2011 and individual years can be selected from a date slider above the map.

You can view an explanation about how the map was created (with the help of Fusion Tables) and also view the full source (on GitHub) and access all the data on Clare Bayley's blog.


Finally, probably the most share post this week on Google Maps Mania was about The Pelagios Project's new Roman Empire map. They have released a demo map, Digital Map of the Roman Empire, which shows how the map can be used with the Google Maps API.

The demo is just a basic map which replaces the Google Map tiles with the Roman Empire map tiles. If you want to search the map for ancient world place names then you should check out the Pleiades website. Pleiades is a great resource for anyone interested in the history and geography of the ancient world. The site is a community based and open-sourced gazette of ancient places.