The HMS Cavalier Guided Street View Tour

C Inside Media has created a very impressive guided Street View tour of HMS Cavalier. The tour uses Google Maps Street View in conjunction with a narrated audio guide of the ship.

The HMS Cavalier is a retired C-class destroyer of the Royal Navy, which served in World War II. Using the HMS Cavalier Guided Tour you can explore the ship using the custom Street View imagery. This allows you to explore all over the ship using Google's interactive panoramic imagery.

Being able to explore the Engine Room, Captain's Cabin and the Petty Officer's Mess is impressive enough on its own. However, as you explore HMS Cavalier you can also listen to an audio guide which explains all about different aspects of the ship and life on board. Use the menu at the top right of the Street View to navigate to the different rooms.

While touring the ship also look out for the colored overlays which sometimes appear on the Street View images. If you click on these you can also watch videos about different aspects of the ship.

Remember HMS Cavalier has many steep stairs and places to bang your head. So please don't walk and listen to the guide at the same time.

Viva Street View Vegas

Google's indoor Street View imagery allows you to explore some wonderfully exotic locations around the world. On Google Maps you can take a virtual stroll down Harry Potter's Diagon Alley, check out the TARDIS (it's bigger on the inside) or explore inside a submarine.

Naturally some of the most exotic indoor locations to appear on Street View are located in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has taken advantage of this fact to create an entertaining virtual tour of some of the best indoor Street View imagery available on Google Maps from the 'entertainment capital of the the world'.

GeoVegas includes a number of curated tours inside Las Vegas hotels, restaurants and other venues. There are five tours in total, each of which allows you to explore a number of featured venues using Street View. There is also the option to 'Explore on Your Own', which allows you to search for Las Vegas venues by category, including restaurants, bars, shows, hotels and attractions.

The Paris Map of Desire

The Map of Desire is a real-time map of Paris shoppers based on Twitter activity in the French capital. The creators of the map claim that it uses machine-learning to track the location and level of desire among Parisienne shoppers in real-time.

I'm not sure how much 'machine-learning' is actually taking place. What the map does is search geo-tagged Twitter messages posted in Paris for a number of key-words associated with shopping and desire (e.g. 'want', 'need'). Tweets saying that someone has bought something are shown on the map with orange markers and desires are shown in pink (looking at the code for the map I think the white markers show when someone swears on Twitter in Paris).

As with all these real-time Twitter maps the map is only showing a small subsection of the general population (Twitter users who share their location). However, if this is the demographic which retailers and advertisers actually want to target, then I guess this kind of real-time Twitter map could be useful. At the very least it is an interesting visualization of Twitter activity in Paris.

US Carbon Footprint Map

It seems to be Save the Planet day on Maps Mania. All the best maps today seem to be concerned with raising awareness about global emissions and our carbon footprint. My guess is that last week's UN climate change summit in New York has led to a rise in the global output of environment maps.

Today we've already looked at the Changing Global Emissions Map and the Changing Global Emissions Map, two maps which visualize CO₂ emissions around the world. Now the Cool Climate Network has released a Carbon Footprint Map of the USA.

The Carbon Footprint Map visualizes the average annual household carbon footprint of zip code areas in the United States. On first glance my thoughts were that this heat-map of zip code carbon footprints closely resembled a population density map. This would kind of make sense, assuming that the more people there are in an area then the larger the carbon footprint.

On a second look however you can clearly see that the map doesn't actually mirror population density for the whole of the US. In fact northern zip code areas have a far larger carbon footprint, on average, than those in the south. Again this makes sense if you assume colder areas will require a larger carbon footprint due to an increased need to burn fuel to keep warm.

However, as the authors observe, there is also a clear pattern in large cities, which shows that those living in the center of cities have a lower household carbon footprint than those living in city suburbs. It does appear that city slickers are greener than their suburbanite neighbors.

Putting Global CO2 Emissions on the Map

Earlier today we reported on the Changing Global Emissions Map, which animates carbon dioxide emissions by country over the last 160 years. The Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System (FFDAS) has also just released a Google Map visualizing global CO₂ emissions.

The FFDAS Map displays estimates of carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, across the world, for the years 1997 to 2010. The map allows you to view global heat-map layers for any of the 14 years, You can also view carbon dioxide emission layers for domestic and international aviation and shipping.

The map not only visualizes the global estimates of CO₂ emissions but also allows you to download the FFDAS data for any of the calculated years and for any region of the world. You can use the data retrieval tools to download the data for the whole world, for any country or you can use a polygon drawing tool to download the data for a custom drawn area of the map.

Global Carbon Emissions on Google Maps

The World Resources Institute has used the Google Maps API to create an animated map which visualizes carbon dioxide emissions by country over the last 160 years.

The Changing Global Emissions Map uses scaled circular markers to show the carbon emissions of each country around the world. If you hover over the circles you can view the exact figure for each country, measured in millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide.

If you use the timeline beneath the map you can view an animation of the growth of carbon dioxide emissions over time. The timeline shows that a few western countries have managed to stabilize and actually manage to slightly reduce their emissions over the last few years. Unfortunately these reductions pale into insignificance compared to the huge growth in carbon emissions in the developing world.

Before the west gets too holier than thou about the developing world it is worth checking out the other map on the World Resources Institute website. This map shows the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of countries around the world. This map shows for example that while China's carbon emissions now dwarfs that of the USA its per capita emissions are still well under half of the per capita emissions of the United States.

Via: Visual Loop

The Maps of the Week

If you love music and maps then you will love the dancing maps of Rack City. Just share your location with Rack City and you can listen to you favorite tracks from SoundCloud while watching the map of your location dance along to the track.

The application uses data from OpenStreetMap to show a basic map of your location, including roads and buildings. The buildings on the maps are actually dynamic animated audio visualizers that pulse to the beats of your chosen song.

If you don't like the map of your chosen location you can select the location menu (in the bottom right-hand corner) and switch to another city location (currently New York, Tokyo, London or Chicago).


Ubisoft has released a Street View tour of Paris in order to promote the Parisian based Assassin's Creed Unity. Project Widow takes you on a night-time tour of modern day Paris. As you tour the Street Views of modern day Paris you can click on markers to learn about the causes of the French Revolution.

Project Widow will take you on a virtual tour of present day Paris. The tour is very similar to the recent Google Night Walk, a narrated Street View tour of Marseilles at night and I suspect that Google Creative Lab also helped create this new night-time tour of Paris.

As you walk around the modern day Paris at night in Project Widow you can actually find yourself suddenly transported to the game of Assassin Creed Widow. So far I've found one Street View panorama which seems to be taken from the game (screenshot above). I'm sure if you explore Project Widow yourself you will find more panoramas taken from the game.


Japan’s population is aging and declining. Japanese people are living longer and having fewer children and later in life. By 2060 the Japanese government are predicting that over half the population will be over 65.

This Japanese Population Map visualizes the 2040 population predictions for every Japanese prefecture. Using the map you can explore the population predictions for the number of young females and a breakdown of the overall population by age group.

Prefectures that are predicted to grow in population are shown in green and prefectures that are expected to decline are shown in red. If you zoom out on the map you can see that the population is expected to decline across nearly the whole country.

Lead Poison on Google Maps

The factories which once pumped dangerous lead and other toxic metal particles into American skies may have all been closed down but little has been done to clean-up the poisonous lead particles in the ground. The smelting factories may be gone but the dangers live on.

The USA Today's award winning Ghost Factories is an interactive investigatory report examining the neighborhoods and families living in the shadows of ex-iron smelting factories. As part of the investigation USA Today interviewed families living near or even built on the old factory sites and tested the soil for poisonous lead particles.

Part of the interactive Ghost Families report includes a Google Map of more than 250 former factory sites. You can explore the map to see if you live near one of these former sites. You can also use the map to explore the sites that the USA Today tested for dangerous levels of lead and read and watch the interviews that were carried out with the local residents.

Weasel Tracking on Google Maps

This week JSTOR Daily published a really interesting article exploring how and why a number of animal species in North America are flourishing by adapting to living in urban environments. Included in the article is a map tracking a Fisher weasel, named Phineas, over five days.

Phineas lives in the suburbs of Albany, New York and was given a GPS collars so that scientists could track his movements. Phineas the Fisher's Work Week is a Google Map showing Phineas' movements over five nights.

The track for each night is given a different color on the map so that you can see Phineas' movements for each night of the week. If you hover over the small circles on the tracks you can find out about some of the significant moments in Phineas' week. For example, after crossing a busy road one night, Phineas became stuck in a small wooded area until he found a drainage pipe which allowed him to cross safely back under the road.

You might also like:

A Day in the Life of Winslow Homer - a day in the life of a Capuchin monkey.
The Secret Life of Cats - tracking domestic cats in a Surrey village
LifeWatch - tracking the daily flights of Eric the seagull

Beautiful WebGL Globes

WebGL Globes are a fantastic way to visualize all kinds of global and astronomical data, from Earth weather to orbiting satellites and space debris. A couple of years ago the Google Data Arts team released the WebGL Globe as an open platform for geographic data visualization and since then we have seen some great examples of data visualizations built open this 3d globe code.


Orbital Objects uses the WebGL Globe code to show the position of active and inactive satellites and space debris orbiting the Earth. Active satellites are displayed in green, inactive satellites in grey and the red points show space debris.


The WebGL Weather Globe uses the WebGL Globe to display current weather conditions around the world. The weather data is very basic and I don't think the cloud imagery is real-time. However the sun icons do provide a basic indication of weather across the globe.


Visualizing Meteorites across Spatial & Temporal Attributes is another neat example of the WebGL Globe in action. This globe shows meteorite collisions with the Earth by decade. You can select to view a decade using the timeline at the top of the page.

The mass of each meteorite is represented by the size of the cylindrical projection and the color of the projection indicates the meteorite type.


Of course globes don't have to just visualize the Earth. How about Earth & Mars, Mars on its own, or the Earth and Moon.

If you want to see more - Google has linked to 36 of these WebGL Globe experiments on the Chrome Experiments website.

Assassin's Creed on Street View

Last month a a Street View tour of Mars, Venus and the Moon was unleashed to promote the release of the upcoming, online multiplayer first-person shooter video game 'Destiny'. The Destiny Planet View Street View tour allows you to explore and preview the game world of Destiny using interactive panoramas powered by Google Maps Street View.

Ubisoft has now entered similar territory by releasing a Street View tour of Paris in order to promote the Parisian based Assassin's Creed Unity. Project Widow takes you on a night-time tour of modern day Paris. As you tour the Street Views of modern day Paris you can click on markers to learn about the causes of the French Revolution.

Whereas the Destiny Planet View promotion provided a tour of the Destiny game world, allowing you to preview the graphics of the game, Project Widow is more of a tour of present day Paris. The tour is in fact more similar to the recent Google Night Walk, a narrated Street View tour of Marseilles at night.

However as you walk around the modern day Paris at night in Project Widow you can actually find yourself suddenly transported to the game of Assassin Creed Widow. So far I've found one Street View panorama which seems to be taken from the game (screenshot above). I'm sure if you explore Project Widow yourself you will find more panoramas taken from the game.

Hat-tip: Google Street View World

Mapping Japan's Declining Population

Japan’s population is aging and declining. Japanese people are living longer and having fewer children and later in life. By 2060 the Japanese government are predicting that over half the population will be over 65.

This Japanese Population Map visualizes the 2040 population predictions for every Japanese prefecture. Using the map you can explore the population predictions for the number of young females and a breakdown of the overall population by age group.

Prefectures that are predicted to grow in population are shown in green and prefectures that are expected to decline are shown in red. If you zoom out on the map you can see that the population is expected to decline across nearly the whole country.

You can use the city links at the bottom of the map to quickly zoom in on Japan's biggest cities. You can then click on individual prefectures on the map to view the predicted population of females aged 20-39 in 2040. You can also view a breakdown of the predicted population in the selected prefecture by age group.

The California Pollution Map

Back in April the LA Times mapped pollution in the city based on data from the California Environmental Protection Agency. The Pollution Burdens map provided a visualization of a number of pollution concerns in Los Angeles, including ozone concentration and drinking water quality.

The LA Times has now released a new pollution map of California using data from the California Environmental Protection Agency. The CEPA has scored census tract areas by their exposure and vulnerability to pollution. Using the California Pollution Risks map you can view the scores for any census tract in the state under a number of different pollution concerns.

Users can select a criteria from the drop-down menu and then mouse-over any census tract to view the CEPA score for the area. You can also use the search box to find a specific census tract on the map.

Fall Colors on Google Maps

The Wisconsin Fall Color Report is a Google Map showing the color of autumn leaves throughout the state. Click on a county on the map and you can view the estimated date of when the county's trees will be at the peak of their fall colors.

You can use the Wisconsin Fall Color Report to not only find out the best time to visit the state but also discover great places to visit and stay. As well as providing a guide to the best time to travel within the state to view Wisconsin's trees in their full fall colors the Wisconsin Fall Color Report includes a photo gallery, events and activities guide and recommended restaurants and hotels.


The New England Foliage Map can help you discover where New England's legendary fall foliage is in its fullest splendor. The map aggregates user reports to try and show where New England's trees are showing their fall colors. Users can also submit photos to the map, so the map is also a great place to browse photographs of New England in the fall.

Just click on any of the submitted reports on the map, shown by the camera icons, and you can view the submitted report and photo. The map also includes a colored overlay which provides a guide to the fall colors throughout the state.

Tracking the X-Men

For over 60 years the X-Men have been fighting evil around the world. Surprisingly during that time no-one has bothered to try and track their movements.

UNTIL NOW!

The World of X is a Google Map of the locations where the X-Men have been active across the globe. The map is not only an important cultural insight into the secretive world of these superheroes, it is also a really impressive application of the Google Maps API.

The World of X uses the Marvel Comics API to retrieve the all important location data from the X-Men series of Marvel Comics. This location data is displayed on a custom base-map of a stylized night-light satellite view of the earth. These custom built map tiles are displayed using the Custom Map Types feature of the Google Maps API.

The marker labels, which appear when you hover your mouse over a label, are created with the help of the Marker with Label utility library. The map also includes a full-screen option, which is becoming more common with maps from other mapping libraries, but which I haven't seen used too often with the Google Maps API.

Mapping Suspicious Wi-fi Networks

Enter a location into the Skycure Threat Map and you can view nearby wi-fi networks that 'carry suspicious traffic'. After you enter a location Skycure will show you a map with suspicious wi-fi networks highlighted with red map markers.

Users of Skycure's mobile applications can detect network threats and at the same time help Skycure build data on wi-fi networks with suspicious traffic. Everyone can now access this data with the new Skycure Threat Map. The map provides you with an overview of nearby threats and their locations, allowing you to avoid wi-fi networks which may not be safe to use.

How to Create Styled Google Maps

Yesterday I wrote about Six of the Best Mapbox Styles. Today I thought it might be interesting to look at styling maps with the Google Maps API. While the Styled Maps feature in the JavaScript Map API is nowhere near as powerful as Tilemill or Mapbox Studio it does allow developers to control some design elements of a Google Map, such as defining the colors of map features.


A good example of what can be achieved with the Styled Maps feature is Yarr, Pirate Maps. Yarr, Pirate Maps uses a few clever tricks to create a distinct pirate themed design, complete with animated waves, birds and pirate ships.

The colored map tiles are created using the Google Maps API Styled Maps feature. The styled map is augmented by a few other non-Styled Map features. For example, the paper looking effect is created by using a number of background images and z-index on the map. The animated waves, birds and ships on the map are achieved by using animated gifs as map markers.


If you want to use a styled Google Map then your best bet is probably to start with having a look at styles that have already been created by other users. Luckily a great repository of ready made Google Maps styles already exists.

Snazzy Maps is a collection of different styles for Google Maps. You can browse through the many example map styles on Snazzy Maps by the 'most popular' and 'most recent'. You can also filter the maps shown by a number of useful tags, such as 'dark', 'light', 'two-tone' etc.

Map developers contribute to the repository by adding map styles that they have created themselves. Once you find a map style that you like you can click on its title and grab the style array. Snazzy Maps even provides an option to download a simple example of each style.


If you want to start from scratch and create your own Google Maps style then you can use Google's Styled Maps Wizard. The wizard allows developers to play with the colors and styles of individual map elements and create the JSON code that can then be used with the Google Maps API.

Other, third party, style wizards also exist to help you create your own Google Maps styles. Map Stylr, Think Tank's Custom Google Maps Style Tool and Google Maps Colorizr are all great style wizards designed to help making your own map styles as easy as selecting map features and selecting your favorite colors.

If you want more inspiration for creating your own Google Maps styles then you can also have a look through some of the great map styles previously featured on Maps Mania by using the Styled Maps tag.

Mapping Global Poverty

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative has developed a method for measuring poverty that takes into account a number of factors, including health, education, and living standards. This Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is made up of ten indicators, divided into these three main dimensions of poverty.

The Global Poverty Map provides a number of global views of poverty based on the MPI. The map provides an overview of poverty around the world based on the 2014 Global MPI findings, with each country shaded on the map based on each country's MPI score.

The map also includes a map view based on the three main dimensions of the Index, health, education, and living standards. For this layer of the map countries are colored to show the predominant dimension of poverty in each country.

The Global Poverty Map also provides map views looking at how each of the three main dimensions affects poverty in each country.

The Streetcars of San Francisco

I've always been a big fan of Vasile Coțovanu real-time transit maps. Using Vasile's Transit Map library it is possible to create a simulated real-time map for any transit system in the world.

A good example of the library in action is the Transit Map of San Francisco MTA.This Google Map shows the real-time position of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency buses and trams based on the published MTA timetable. The vehicles, moving in real-time on the map, are represented by markers displaying the route number.

The map works by plugging the city's GTFS dataset into Vasile's Transit Map library. Vasile has released the code for the GTFS plug-in as well. The code converts a set of GTFS files into a SQLite database and the GeoJSON's needed by the Transit Map library.

If you want to create your own simulated animated map of a city's transit network all you need to do is to grab the city's GTFS dataset, use GTFS-viz to create the database and GeoJSON's and then plug the data into the Transit Map library.

You will then have your very own animated simulated transit map.

Six of the Best Mapbox Map Styles

Mapbox's Tilemill and Mapbox Studio applications are incredible tools for map developers to control the design and style of nearly every aspect of their maps. Using Tilemill or Mapbox Studio it is possible to create some truly gorgeous looking maps.

To see what is possible with these tools you should have a close look at some of these beautiful maps:

The Woodcut Map

This woodcut style map makes great use of textures to create a beautiful looking map. There is a lot to love about this map. I really like the wooden shielded country labels and the level of detail which emerges at different zoom levels.

The map's creator, Eleanor Lutz, has also taken the time to explain some of the design choices and technical details behind the design of the map on the Mapbox blog.

Space Station Earth

Space Station Earth is a lovely science fiction themed map. The map changes city names to space colonies, uses custom textures for road and building borders and uses over-sized markers for stores, parks, and other points of interest to simulate city lights.

The accompanying post on the Mapbox blog includes an interesting account of some of the design choices made in creating the map.

The Hand Drawn Map

The Hand Drawn Map of Toulouse, created with Tilemill, customizes the look of OpenStreetMap data to create a beautiful hand-drawn styled map. It is the lovingly created detail on this map that help make it so special. From the post-it note themed labels to the hand-sketched textures it is easy to actually mistake this for a real hand-drawn map.

The map's creator Karl Azémar has also published an interesting post about how he created the hand-drawn style (in French).

The Pencil Map

Similar in style to the hand-drawn map above, the Pencil Map has the look of a lovingly illustrated map, The map makes use of textures for water and building features. I think the map looks best when zoomed in on urban areas (as in the screenshot above), where the buildings really do look like they have been sketched by hand.

The Pirate Map

A J Ashton's Pirate Map is another map that make great use of textures to create a vintage map style. The Pirate Map also makes great use of the map label fonts to create a unified theme for the map's overall design.

There is an even better version of the Pirate Map which comes included with Mapbox Studio. So, if you download Mapbox Studio, you can play with the design of this map yourself.

The Van Gogh Map

The Van Gogh Map uses a few images actually taken from Van Gogh paintings as textures for the map feature types. The result is a map style which you probably wouldn't want to use very often but the map does serve as a neat demo of how developers can create interesting and unique map styles.

This might not be the map that Van Gogh would have made himself, if he were a cartographer, but it does include details from some of his paintings. Feature types on this map, such as water and different types of land cover, are made up of map tiles created with textures taken from a few of Van Gogh's paintings.

The Incredible Dancing Map

If you love music and maps then you will love the dancing maps of Rack City. Just share your location with Rack City and you can listen to you favorite tracks from SoundCloud while watching the map of your location dance along to the track.

The application uses data from OpenStreetMap to show a basic map of your location, including roads and buildings. The buildings on the maps are actually dynamic animated audio visualizers that pulse to the beats of your chosen song.

If you don't like the map of your chosen location you can select the location (in the bottom right-hand corner) and switch to another city location (currently New York, Tokyo, London or Chicago).

Tracking the Bike Thieves

Earlier this year Seismograph released an interesting map showing Where Your Bicycle is Most Likely to Get Stolen in San Francisco. The map plots the location of every bicycle theft reported to the San Francisco police in 2013.

The map uses an interesting system of concentric circles to show locations where more than one bike was stolen. You can mouse-over the individual circles to reveal the time and date of each bike theft. Seismograph also provide a useful bar chart that shows you at what time of day your bike is most likely to get stolen.

Judging by the map it might be a good idea not to park your bike on Market Street, at the Ferry Building or outside Mission BART.


Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche has taken a different approach to mapping bike thefts. The newspaper hid GPS tracking devices in three bikes. They then left the bikes in three Swiss cities Bern, Geneva and Zurich and waited for them to be stolen.

Over 40,000 bikes a year are stolen in Switzerland every year and the Le Matin Dimanche were interested to see what happens to these bikes once they are stolen. By tracking the stolen bikes the newspaper was interested to find out what kind of people steal bikes and what they do with their stolen bicycles.

Using the GPS data from the stolen bikes they were able to create a StoryMap for each city, plotting the movement of each bike in the days after its theft.

In Geneva the first time the bike was stolen it was taken to a Cash Converters shop and sold for 200 Francs. The manager of the shop revealed that the thief was a regular seller of bikes. Le Matin Dimanche then placed the bike outside a police station to see if that would deter the bike thieves. It was soon stolen again.

The first theft of the bike left in Bern ended up in a woman's garage. The newspaper retrieved the bike from the garage's owner. She claimed that the bike had been abandoned there and she was planning to report the stolen bike to the police. In Bern the bike was also stolen by a 15 year old schoolboy who claimed that he thought the bike had already been stolen and he did not intend to keep the bike.

In Zurich the bike was stolen by a man described by locals as a 'drug addict' and sold to a cabaret dancer for 50 Francs.

Burning Man from Space

Skybox has released a series of satellite images showing  Black Rock City, NV before, during and after this year's Burning Man festival.

The Transformation of Burning Man uses satellite imagery captured with SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 between August 12 and September 3. The images show how Black Rock City is built up and dismantled in just a matter of days.

In the screenshot above you can see the area of the round Center Camp, before, during and after the festival. Skybox has overlaid all the satellite imagery on top of a Google Map. Each image has its own transparency control, enabling you to compare and contrast the imagery of the whole festival site over nearly a month of time.

International Animal Resue

For 50 years World Animal Protection has been working to support and promote animal welfare around the world. Since 1964 the charity has directly treated over 3.5 million animals in 350 disasters.

To mark their 50th anniversary World Animal Protection has launched an interactive map highlighting some of the disaster work carried out by the organization around the globe. The World Animal Protection Map showcases some of the disaster responses undertaken by the charity in every year of its existence.

You can select a year from the map timeline and then choose an individual disaster response from the selected year. The map will then zoom to the chosen location and display photos, videos and information about the disaster and the World Animation Protection's response.

Dublin Mapped

The DublinDashboard is a new initiative from Maynooth University and Dublin City Council to provide access to a wide range of city data. The site provides thousands of data visualizations, many of them interactive maps, about all aspects of life, work and travel in Dublin.

The DublinDashboard includes both visualizations which have been developed by the initiative and links to data visualizations created by third parties. The interactive maps include real-time maps of traffic, parking and sound and air pollution in the city. Other maps includes visualizations of census data and visualizations of housing, crime, planning and access to city amenities.

All the data-sets used in DublinDashboard's own data visualizations and maps is freely available to developers who want to build their own applications and visualizations.

Mappa di Papa

The Vatican Insider has used the StoryMap JS library to map the international travels of Pope Francis, since his election to the papacy in March 2013.

Pope Francis' International Visits provides a chronological mapped journey of Pope Francis' international visits over the last 17 months. You can use the forward and back buttons to follow Pope Francis' international journey. As you progress through the story map the left-hand map updates to show the locations visited while the right-hand information panel provides date, photos, video and text providing background on the Pope's international visits.

The map is available in Italian, English and Spanish.

Maps of the Week

It is a disgrace that nine years after the release of Google Maps, Google still haven't managed to properly map one of America's most loved towns. Luckily where ever Google fails Esri comes to the rescue.

Look up Springfield on Playgis and you will find a gloriously detailed map of this most famous of American towns. From the world's first ever Kwik-E-Mart to Springfield Elementary School, this Spingfield map has it all. You can even use the map to look up the address of individual families, for example the Simpsons family at 742 Evergreen Terrace.


Although Google Maps doesn't yet cover Springfield it does have Street View. Thanks to Amplifon we also now have a neat library to add sound to Street View panoramas.

Last month Amplifon created Sounds of Street View, a new platform which allows you to add sound to Google Maps Street View. If you visit Sounds of Street View Create Your Own you can download the Sounds of Street View framework and read a detailed guide explaining how to create your own Street View with sound experience.

Zombie Sound Experienz uses the Business Photos Street View tour from the Zombie Manor in Drayton with the Amplifon library to create a creepy virtual tour, with full 3d sound. The custom Street View tour was created for Drayton Manor by 360 Agency, who also created the Street View tour of Diagon Alley for the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

As you progress through this zombie filled virtual Street View tour you can now actually hear the zombies pursuing you.

As you visit the different rooms in the Zombie Manor you will hear a variety of creepy sounds. Different zombies and rooms have different sounds attached to them, which get louder or quieter as you approach or travel away from them.

As well as a Simpsons' map and a creepy Zombie Street View tour we also saw some great serious maps this week. I  particularly liked the Urban Institute's map showing where minorities in the USA are being priced out of the housing market.

A New View of the Housing Boom and Bust plots 100 million mortgages from 2000 to 2012 across the United States. The map shows each owner-occupied mortgage origination for twelve years, in which the borrower’s race and ethnicity were fully recorded.  Zoom in on just about any city on this map and you can see a clear pattern of African American and Hispanic households being disproportionately affected by constrained mortgage lending.

Another map which caught my eye this week was Infoamazonia's  Visaguas, which examines the availability of clean drinking water & sewage in Amazon municipalities and the incident rates of a number of diseases caused by poor water & sewage infrastructure. 

If you use the tabs, above the map, you can select to view Water Supply, Diseases or Access to Sewage on the map. When you select either of the three main categories you can then select from a number of subcategories. For example, if you select diseases you can view the incident rates, per municipality, for a number of different diseases, including Cholera, Dengue Fever and Typhoid.

Mapping US Household Income

Income Craters - 2012 uses data from the 2012 US Census Bureau to visualize household income across the United States.

The choropleth map view provides a quick overview of household income across the US. You can also zoom in on individual cities to view median income levels at neighborhood level. Mouse-over an area on the map and you can view the median household income in the yop right-hand corner of the map.


The Washington Post has mapped the zip-code areas in the USA that rank highest for income and college education. The map displays the nation’s 650 Super Zips, those are the zip-code areas where people rank highest on a combination of income and education.

The Washington: A World Apart map shows a long corridor of affluence running from New York to Washington DC. The accompanying article from the Post looks in particular at the third of zip-code areas in D.C. which rank in the top 5 percent for income and education.

Users of the map can search by zip-code to find out the ranking for their area. If you click on a zip-code area on the map you can view the median household income and the percentage of college graduates in the area. It is also possible to view a breakdown of the percentages in each household group and the percentages in each educational attainment group.

3d Hexbin Mapping

LuminoCity3D has released a hexbin map of population and employment density in Great Britain.

Hexagonal binning is an effective method of creating a spatial histogram by coloring hexagonal overlays within a geographical area. Like most hexbin maps LuminoCity3D uses color to represent population density. However LuminoCity3d also uses the height of the grid cells to visualize density in 3d. This 3d cartogram effect works really well in visualizing the various mapped city indicators.

As well as displaying population and employment density LuminoCity3d has also mapped other key city indicators in Great Britain, such as transport, housing, society and economy.

Scottish Referendum Results Maps

There are quite a few maps around today showing the results of the Scottish Referendum. Most of the maps, such as these maps by City A.M. and CTV News, decided to show the results by simply shading electoral regions using two different colors, to indicate areas where voters voted 'Yes' and where voters voted 'No'.

This approach works well in showing the overall vote in each electoral region. However because there is a wide variation in the number of voters in each region this approach fails to show the size of the voting population in each region. In fact this approach could actually be quite misleading.

For example in the map pictured above, the 'Yes' vote in Glasgow looks fairly small compared to the 'No' vote in the Scottish Border simply because the Scottish Borders is a far bigger geographical area. In fact however Glasgow has 486,219 registered voters, compared to the 95,533 voters in the Scottish Borders.


As it turns out the huge numbers of regions voting 'No' compared to the very few regions voting 'Yes' means that this approach doesn't really distort the overall picture. If the vote had been closer however this approach could have been quite misleading.

The only map which I have seen which attempts to account for the number of voters in each region was Oliver O'Brien's Scottish Referendum Data Map. The Scottish Referendum Data Map uses different sized circular markers to represent the registered voting population in each electoral region.

The Scottish Referendum Data Map also attempts to show the percentage differences in the vote cast in each electoral region by using a color scale ranging from bright red for a high percentage of no votes to bright blue for a high percentage of blue votes.


BBC Scotland has mapped what people have been saying about Scottish Independence around the world. Using the Google Maps API the BBC has mapped Twitter messages containing the hashtag #'indyref'. The Tweets were sent between the opening of the polls at 7 am on 18 September, and the announcement of the decision this morning.

Using the BBC's Tweetmap you can see when and where people tweeted around the world. You can even click on the map makers to see what people had to say.