The Maps of the Week

James Cheshire and Ed Manley's maps of the Twitter Languages of London and the Twitter Languages of New York have rightly proved very popular visualisations of the multi-cultural nature of both cities.

Inspired by James and Ed's maps Simon Jackson has now created a similar map for Melbourne. Tweets of Melbourne uses ESRI maps and data from November 2012. Simon says he is updating the map with new data every weekend.

One of the most interesting aspects of the map for me is the number of Asian languages being used in the city. It is shame that Twitter is so young. It would have been interesting to view a similar map from the 1970's. In 1975 Australia dropped it's controversial 'White Australia Policy'. Does this map reflect a wider realignment of Australia's geopolitics away from Europe towards closer integration with its South East Asian neighbours?


Metropolitain is a data visualisation of traffic on the Paris Metro. Users can click on any of the city's Metro stations and view data on how many passengers passed through the station in 2011.

The Metro map includes a great 3d view that allows the user to turn a 2d heat map of traffic on the Metro system into a great contour map of Metro traffic.


The World Food Programme's Hunger Map shows the prevalence of undernourishment in countries around the world as of 2010 - 2012. The indicator is an estimate of the percentage of the population having access to an amount of energy from food insufficient to maintain a healthy life.

Users can click on individual countries on the map and learn more about the food security situation in that country and the WFP's work in the country using the tab controls in the map sidebar.