Edinburgh Library has created a wonderful map featuring historical stories, photos and maps about life in the Scottish capital.
Our Town Stories - Edinburgh
is a great showcase for some of Edinburgh Library's collection of
historical documents, photographs and maps. My favorite aspect of Our
Town is that you can view historical photos of the city actually
overlaid on your choice of historical maps of the city.
The map includes a handy time-line feature which allows you to search
through the stories, photos and maps by date. Enter a date range on the
time-line and all the documents for that period are shown on the map
using categorized markers.
The Washington Post has published an interesting account of the escape
of three detainees from Alcatraz in June 1962. No one knows if the three
prisoners survived their attempted escape or died while trying to
navigate the strong currents of the San Francisco Bay,
The Washington Post's report,
The Alcatraz Escapees Could have Survived,
is based on the work of Dutch researchers who have been working on a
model which simulates the movement of particles and detritus in bays.
Based on this model the Dutch researchers have concluded that the three
Alcatraz prisoners may have survived, but only if they left the island
at the right time.
The report includes two animated CartoDB maps, one showing the worst
case scenario and one showing the best case scenario. Both maps use
tidal records to model the water-flow in the San Francisco Bay on the
evening of the escape.
As the animation plays out on both maps you can view the likely track of
the escapees based on the different times during the evening when they
could have left Alcatraz. The animated boats on the map are colored to
show the time of escape. In the best case scenario, as long as the
escapees left before 1 a.m. and paddled north, they may have made it to
the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge and freedom.
One of the most popular posts on Maps Mania in 2014 looked at the heat
maps generated by joggers and cyclists using wearable technology. One of
these maps was Mapbox's '1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides',
created using data from Runkeeper users.
Mapbox has now updated that map to include 150,000 additional routes and
higher levels of zoom. Mapbox was able to achieve this extra detail by
using
Tippecanoe, a library developed by Eric Fischer for making vector tiles from large data sets. You might remember Eric's
6 Billion Tweets Map, from earliest this month, which also made great use of Tippecanoe.
The
Superpowered 1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides map overlays Runkeeper routes on top of a Mapbox powered map of the world. The map
includes some quick links to jump to the maps of a few major cities
around the world and you can also pan and zoom the map to view the popular
running routes at any location in the world.
