The Maps of the Week

You might be surprised at how many cities you could name on a map that has no text labels. Even without text labels you could probably name many worldwide cities just from the general shape of the road networks and other mapped features.

But can you guess a city with no other mapped features except the locations of Starbucks branches?  The Slate Starbucks Map Quiz requires you to do just that. It presents a series of global city maps with only the locations of Starbucks shown. You are given four possible cities to choose from and, after you make your educated guess, the full OpenStreetMap of the city is revealed.


Riding the New Silk Road is an interesting interactive story from The New York Times.

The Silk Road is a centuries old trade route from Asia to Europe. Hewlett-Packard has apparently revived the route as an alternative to shipping electronics from China to Europe by sea. This NYT feature looks at part of the modern route using a vertical scrolling map, illustrated with photos and videos from one section of the modern route.


Global Land Temperatures is a heatmap of world land temperature since 1900. The map shows over 100 years of monthly land temperature data collected from over 7,200 weather stations around the world.

This data visualisation was created by Halftone. You might also like their Story of The US Told In 141 Maps.


There has already been 1,240 shootings in Chicago this year. The Chicago Times has created a Chicago Shooting Map to show where people were shot in Chicago, broken down by community area.

The darker the shade of blue on the map, the larger the number of victims. A bar graph in the map sidebar displays the number of shootings by month and the latest victims of gun crimes is also listed.