Maps of the Week

The Seventeenth Century mathematician and philosopher Eilhard Lubinus was commissioned in 1610 to create a map of Pomerania. Lubinus.pl has made the inspired decision to use Lubinus' beautiful Pomerania map as the basis for a guided tour of the region.

Mapy Lubinusa uses the Google Maps API to turn Lubinus' Seventeenth Century map into an interactive guide for visitors to modern day Pomerania. The border of Lubinus' map is decorated with portraits of the 49 towns of Pomerania. Mapy Lubinusa has created nine guided tours, which you can follow on the interactive version of the map, taking in all of the 49 towns featured in the map border.

You can therefore use Mapy Lubinusa not only to explore the Lubinus Pomeranian map in detail but as a modern tourist guide to the region. The map itself is augmented with an animated cloud layer and a number of animated map features.


Heatmap News is a heat map showing the concentration of global news stories indexed by Google News. The map is a great way to determine where major news events are currently taking place around the world.

The map uses the Google Maps API Heatmap Layer to visualize current news hot-spots. For example, at the time of writing, the map shows news hot-spots for the Ukraine elections, for news related to the attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and news surrounding the shooting of the captain of the South African football team.

You can also use Heatmap News to view heat maps for any date (18/08/2014 onward).


Visualizing Emancipation is an interactive map exploring the emancipation of four million slaves during the American Civil War. The map allows users to explore and discover patterns which emerged during the ending of southern slavery through the use of contemporary documents and primary sources.

The map calls these patterns of emancipation 'event types' and Visualizing Emancipation allows you to view these patterns in any combination or on their own. The patterns include emancipation event types leading from the destruction of slavery in law, through military action and through the impetus and actions of enslaved people throughout the U.S. South.

As well as exploring the map by the patterns of emancipation you can explore the mapped events using a time-line. The time-line allows you to filter the events displayed on the map by any month between 1860 and 1865.