The Marvelous Maps of the Week

There has been a huge surge over the last few years of maps which show the age of buildings using colored building footprints. This Los Angeles building age map has the added bonus of including an animation option which allows you to watch the city growing over time.

The LA Building Age map visualizes the age of nearly 3 million buildings in Los Angeles. The colors of the building footprints on the map show the decade of when the buildings were originally built (you can also click on individual building footprints on the map to view the exact year that it was built).

The animation option provides a great sense of how and where Los Angeles developed during the 20th Century.


In 1963 Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. Now, 52 years later, you can explore Jerry's city on an interactive Leaflet powered map.

Using Jerry's Map you can zoom in on any of the over 3,200 eight by ten inch panels of the original paper map. Jerry estimates that he has averaged about 20 minutes a day over 30 years working on the map. He says,

"That would come to 456.25 days or 1 year and 3 months. To have 'wasted' 15 months of my 70 years and nine months doesn’t seem too bad."

How long will you spend in examining this new interactive version of Jerry's Map?


The 2015 European Games is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 12 to 28 June 2015. This will be the inaugural event of the new European Games, an international mini-Olympics type event for athletes representing the National Olympic Committees of Europe.

The Journey of the Flame is a very interesting map which shows the route of the Baku 2015 torch relay. This futuristic 3d map was built using WebGL and three.js. When zoomed out the map presents a traditional top down map view. As you zoom in the map actually transitions to present an oblique view of Azerbaijan and the route of the torch relay.

If you select a town on the map you can view social messages posted by map users at that location. To view a message just select one of the individual flames shooting out of the torch that appears over the town.

The Contours of Crime

The R Tutorial for Spatial Statistics blog has a series of interesting maps visualizing London crime data. The blog post is a great tutorial on mapping data using R.

The maps include a choropleth map showing the number of crimes in each London borough, a heat map of crime in London and a contour map of crime in London. It is fascinating how these different map visualization techniques reveal different aspects about the nature of crime in the UK capital.

The heat map seems to suggest that crime is closely related to residential population. The areas with the lowest levels of crime are the financial districts of the City of London and Canary Wharf. The other areas of low crime in London seem to be other pockets of low residential density, such as the big London parks.


The contour map of crime appears to identify distinct problem areas of crime centered around Shoreditch High Street, Camden Town and the area of the West End around Leicester Square. It may not be a coincidence that these three areas are popular centers of night-life entertainment. It just might be that a large number of intoxicated young people leads to higher levels of crime.

Via: Visualoop


Mapbox recently used animated contour lines to visualize crime in Chicago from 2001-2015. The Mapbox map is a neat demonstration of the capabilities of Turf.js.

Chicago Crime Data with Turf provides a moving timeline of crime in Chicago over more than a decade. The graph beneath the map shows how Chicago crime during this period has declined. One neat feature of the map is that you can select a date-range on the timeline to loop through the selected time period in the map animation.

Mapping Vancouver's Immigrant Groups

Canadian real-estate website EstateBlock allows house hunters to search for properties in the Vancouver area. The EstateBlock map view not only allows users to search for homes by location but also provides a number of data layers which provide data on Demographics, Crime, Schools, Daycare, Transit and Climate at the neighbourhood level.

EstateBlock has also created a couple of dedicated maps visualizing property prices and immigration data for Vancouver neighbourhoods.  The Immigrants of Metro Vancouver by Majority in the Neighbourhood map colours Vancouver by the major immigrant group in each neighbourhood.

Select a neighbourhood on the the map and you can view the the number of immigrants from the major immigrant group as a percentage of the larger population living in the area,


The Vancouver Land Prices Heat Map visualizes the price for Vancouver parcels of land based on the 2014 BC assessment data from tax reports. Land parcels on the map are colored to reflect the price per square foot of the property.

The map shows that many of Vancouver's most expensive properties are concentrated in the Downtown, West End and Fairview neighborhoods. The map also shows that land prices tend to get cheaper the further you move east in the city. If you select a building lot on the map you can view the exact price per square foot for the property.

The Witcher III Leaflet Map

The Witcher III Interactive Map is a Leaflet.js powered map of Velen and Novigrad within the Northern Kingdoms.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an action role-playing video game set in an open world environment. The Witcher games are based on the books of the same name by the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.

This new interactive map of The Witcher III game world, like most interactive game world maps, includes the option to view important locations within the game. These points of interest can be turned on & off on the map by using the options in the map side-panel.

The Witcher III interactive map also includes a comprehensive search option which allows you to search for important locations within the game by name. The search option is powered by the leaflet-search plugin. Leaflet-search is a powerful customized search engine which you can add to Leaflet map to allow users to easily search for markers/features on the map by a custom property.

Terraforming London to Fit the Tube Map

The biggest problem with London is that its geography doesn't accurately conform to the London Underground map. Harry Beck's famous London Underground map distorts geographical space on order to make the Underground map more legible for users.


To overcome the distortions of Harry Beck's map we could of course create a more geographically accurate map of the Underground. The problem with this however is that the resulting map is far less legible and frankly nowhere near as beautiful as Harry Beck's original map.


Maybe we could skew and distort Harry Beck's Underground map to fit the geography of London. We could take Ben Schmidt's approach to transit maps by stretching, squeezing and rotating the London Underground map to align it with the underlying geography of the city. However, if you have a look at Ben's MTA Map of Actual New York, you can see that the result again tends to ruin the aesthetic of the original transit map.

No ... the best and only solution is to terraform the topography and geography of London so that it conforms more accurately to Harry Beck's map. There is the obvious added bonus that after terraforming, London will also finally be suitable for human life. Thankfully Metrography has already created the map of this new London.


The Metrography Map of London transforms the geography of London so that it more accurately represents the London depicted in Harry Beck's London Underground map.

To create this map Metrography uses the Thames and Underground stations from the London Underground Map as fixed positions. They then distort the real geography of London to fit these fixed positions from Harry Beck's map. The result is a London which conforms to the Underground map and is therefore much easier for everyone to navigate.

Work on the New London terraforming project begins next week. London Underground apologize in advance for any disruption you may experience during these essential engineering works.

The Hip Hop Albums of Street View

Mass Appeal has been doing a little detective work to find the locations where a number of famous Hip Hop album covers were photographed. After finding the correct locations they then superimposed the album covers on top of the same view as seen in Google Maps Street View.

Iconic Hip Hop Albums in Street View features album covers by The Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Ice Cube and a number of other famous Hip Hop artists.

Ever since Google launched its 360 degree interactive imagery music fans have been using Street View to find and tour the locations of famous album covers

Back in 2009 the NME created this Musical Tour of London with Google Street View, providing links to Street View locations where a number of classic album covers were taken in the UK capital.


The Guardian also got in on the act. Classic Album Covers in Street View superimposes a number of famous rock covers on images of the same view as found on Google Maps Street View. The Guardian and Mass Appeal both use still screenshots captured from Street View. You could of course overlay the album covers directly on top of Street View using the Google Maps API.

I quickly put together this Street View shot of Pink Floyd's Animals cover. To create an interactive version of an album cover superimposed on Street View I used the Team Maps Street View Overlay library.

If you like The Guardian's version of album covers on Street View you might also like their Classic paintings of world cities meet Google Street View and Classic London paintings in Google Street View.

Open Aerial Imagery

The OpenAerialMap has been reborn. Between November 2007 and December 2008 OpenAerialMap provided a collection of open-sourced aerial imagery. Unfortunately some problems with hosting and licensing caused the first iteration of OpenAerialMap to close in 2008.

Now however Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) has restarted the OpenAerialMap project. OpenAerialMap will provide a central repository for imagery from satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aircraft. At the moment the map is a little sparse. There is quite a bit of aerial imagery in and around Kathmandu. If you search for Finland and zoom in on Helsinki you might be able to find a few more open aerial images.

Hopefully the huge growth in drone mapping in the last few years means that the time for a collection of open aerial imagery is here and HOT will be able to make a success of the new reborn OpenAerialMap.

Interactive Strip Maps

Strip maps are very useful when you want to provide a navigation aide from one specific location to another. These maps, which represent a linear route and leave out geographical detail beyond a thin corridor, provide a focused guide to navigation and essentially ignore any geographical knowledge which isn't germane to the journey.

Linear strip maps have a long history. One great example is John Ogilby's 1675 Britannia Atlas (one panel of which is pictured on the right). Ogilby's atlas is presented in a series of scrolls. Each scroll depicts just one journey - from one English town to another destination town.

Strip maps are still very popular today, particularly in transit maps. Most subway trains around the world feature strip maps, representing the subway route as one vertical line from a terminal subway station at one end to the other terminal at the other, with all the subway stations in between depicted in order.

It is a little surprising that we don't see more interactive strip maps on the internet. The browser, with its often linear scrolling method of navigation, seems to lend itself rather well to the strip map format. However interactive strip maps on the web seem to be few and far between.

Propublica has just published a really nicely created strip map, called Killing the Colorado. The map takes the user on a journey down the Colorado river, exploring how man is engineering the death of this once great river.


As you scroll down the page you follow the course of the river overlaid on a satellite view. On your journey down the river information windows open highlighting some of the water projects that are draining water from the river.

The Propublica map owes a lot of its inspiration to the New York Times' A Rogue State Along Two Rivers. A Rogue State Along Two Rivers explores the rise of ISIS by following the paths of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The interactive stitches together a series of aerial images of both rivers to create a strip map which you navigate by scrolling down the page.

Obviously there is a danger with this kind of linear narrative that the medium becomes the whole message. Any ISIS related news stories which occur some distance from the two rivers are not going to make it to the map. However the fact that urban settlements in northern and western Iraq grew-up along the two rivers means that this linear form of narrative works very well in exploring the rise of ISIS in Iraq.

As you scroll down either river overlays explain the situation in towns and cities, often with links to fuller reports in the New York Times. 

Reinventing the Map

The 2015 European Games is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 12 to 28 June 2015. This will be the inaugural event of the new European Games, an international mini-Olympics type event for athletes representing the National Olympic Committees of Europe.

The Journey of the Flame is a very interesting map which shows the route of the Baku 2015 torch relay. This futuristic 3d map was built using WebGL and three.js. When zoomed out the map presents a traditional top down map view. As you zoom in the map transitions to present an oblique view of Azerbaijan and the route of the torch relay.

If you select a town on the map you can view social messages posted by map users at that location. To view a message just select one of the individual flames shooting out of the torch that appears over the town.

The map isn't entirely successful. The town labels are very unclear when the map is zoomed out (the labels should be larger when the map is zoomed out). It is also a bit difficult to view the route on the map. The route would be more clear if a contrast color to the map background was used. However you can use the timeline at the top of the map to navigate more easily to individual towns on the torch relay route.

The Great San Francisco Earthquake Map

Esri has published an interesting Medium blog post exploring some of the best history maps created using their mapping platform. We've featured some of the maps in Seven Maps That Will Change the Way You Look At History on Maps Mania before but The San Francisco 1906 Earthquake & Fire is one that I haven't seen before.

This Story Map is based on a report by San Francisco Fire Department Captain Henry Mitchell, who was on duty when the 1906 earthquake occurred. The map locates a number of the important locations, mentioned in the report, recounting the tireless work of Mitchell and his crew, who worked for three straight days after the earthquake struck.

The map includes historical photos of the damage caused by the earthquake and overlays them on top of the beautiful pictorial Chevalier Tourist Map of San Francisco, from the David Rumsey collection.

Ten Years of the Google Maps API

It has been nearly ten years since the launch of the Google Maps API. That's right - the Maps API is almost as old as Maps Mania.

To celebrate the occasion Google is sending the Google Maps bus out on the road. Starting tomorrow a  customized 1959 GM tour bus will be at Google I/O in San Francisco. After Google's developer conference the bus will set off on a road trip across the USA. On this 14 stop journey across America the bus will be meeting-up with developers and customers before reaching its destination at Disney World.

If there's a Google Maps road-trip then there must be a map. There is - and it's called Code the Road. The map shows all the bus' scheduled stops on its American road-trip and the dates of each stop. It also features a Street View tour, which allows you to explore the inside of the Code the Road bus.

On this trip the bus will be hosting three developer meet-ups, in Boulder on June 4, Chicago on June 9 and New York on June 18 (click on the links if you want to sign-up).

New Jersey's Real-Time Buses & Trains

Last week Maps Mania featured a round-up of live, real-time New York transit maps. If you live in New Jersey you have no reason to feel neglected as you can also view buses and trains in real-time on your own maps.

The New Jersey Live Bus Map shows the position of New Jersey buses in real-time moving on a Google Map. Judging by the number of buses flying around on this map, if you live in New Jersey, you presumably don't have to wait too long for a bus. However, if you do find yourself waiting at a bus-stop, you just need to fire up this map to see how far away your next bus is.


If you find yourself waiting for a train instead then you need to check out the New Jersey Transit Rail GPS map. This map shows the live position of New Jersey trains. Click on one of the trains moving on the map and you can view its full schedule, with the times it will be arriving at each stop on its journey.

Fractal Mapping

MandelbrotGL is a Leaflet based map of infinite Mandelbrot set pattern. The map uses WebGL to render the Mandelbrot set on the fly in the browser. Therefore the map has infinite zooming, so you can keep zooming into the fractal pattern for ever.

Unfortunately the pattern starts getting a little pixelated after zoom level 20. That still leaves you with a lot of beautiful maths to explore.


Fractal Map also uses the Leaflet library to visualize a number of beautiful fractal patterns. Using the map you can view a number of different fractals and use the map controls to zoom in and out on the repeating patterns.

The map includes a leaflet hash library, which means that you can pan and zoom the map to find your favorite fractal patterns and then share the view by cutting and pasting the URL. The map is also a neat demo of using the Leaflet mapping platform with HTML5 canvas and Web Workers. You can explore how this is achieved on the map's GitHub page.

It Took 30 Years to Draw This Map

In 1963 Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. Now, 52 years later, you can explore Jerry's city on an interactive Leaflet powered map.

Using Jerry's Map you can zoom in on any of the over 3,200 eight by ten inch panels of the original paper map. Jerry estimates that he has averaged about 20 minutes a day over 30 years working on the map. He says,

"That would come to 456.25 days or 1 year and 3 months. To have 'wasted' 15 months of my 70 years and nine months doesn’t seem too bad."

How long will you spend in examining the new interactive version of Jerry's Map?

New York Safety Maps

In 2014 New York lowered the speed limit for cars to 25 mph. Walk Safe NYC has examined the number of pedestrian accidents for Jan to March for this year and for the same months in 2014. The data shows that the policy has already reduced the number of pedestrian accidents in all five boroughs.

Walk Safe NYC has also released an interactive map showing the most hazardous intersections for pedestrians in the city. The map shows the most hazardous intersections from this year's data and allows you to compare the results with the data for 2012, 2013 and 2014.


New York has set a 'Vision Zero' goal, to end traffic accident deaths and injuries on the city's roads. To help achieve this aim the City of New York has released a map, Vision Zero View, which shows detailed information on traffic injury and fatality crashes within New York.

The map has two main views; a visualization of New York's traffic accidents and a visualization of the city's attempts to make the streets safer. The 'Crashes' view allows users to visualize the locations of pedestrian,cycling and car injuries and fatalities. This map view includes a timeline which allows you to filter the results shown on the map by year.


To explore New York's traffic crash data in detail you can use NYC Crashmapper. This map visualizes New York intersection collision data between August 2011 and February 2014.

Using the filter buttons on the right of the map you can view heat maps of collisions involving pedestrian, cyclist or car driver injuries. You can also use the slide control at the bottom of the map to filter the results shown by date.

If you click on an intersection on the map you can view a detailed breakdown of the type of collisions that occurred there.


MIT has released a number of maps showing areas of perceived safety in New York, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Using Street View images of the cities StreetScore assesses the perceived safety of locations throughout the city. Green dots on the map represent the areas which StreetScore has assigned as having a high perceived safety rating and the red dots are the locations with a low perceived rating score.

One thing missing from the MIT StreetScore maps is the ability to filter the results shown on the map by score. However MIT has made the data available for download so I decided to make my own map of New York and add some filters.

In this Safe New York map I've taken the data for Manhattan, New York. The map shows the safest and least safe locations as perceived by the MIT Street View algorithm. The MIT q-score assigns a value up to 43 for each Street View image. The higher the q-score assigned the higher the safety perception. The lower the q-score the lower the safety perception.

I've marked every location which has a score under 15 with a red marker and every location with a score over 30 with a green marker. All locations with a score between 15 and 30 are displayed with a yellow marker.

The Peace & Tranquility Map

It shouldn't be hard to find a little tranquility in England's green and pleasant land. The first step is to escape the country's towns and cities. Before doing that you might want to consult the Tranquility Map to find the best locations to relax.

The Tranquility Map shows you where you can go to escape the incessant noise of modern life. On the map each 500m by 500m square of England has been given a tranquility score. The scores are based on a survey by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

The nationwide survey asked people what they thought tranquility is and what they thought it isn't. Once they had established what tranquility is they then used a range of national databases to assess how likely each location in the country was to make people feel tranquil. The darkest green areas on the map are the places most likely to make people feel tranquil, the brightest red are the locations least likely to make you feel tranquil.

Putting the Book on the Map

There have been many attempts over the years to map novels based on the primary locations where they are set. Lovereading is the latest.

Search for a location on Lovereading and you can find novels that have been set in that location or nearby. Click on the markers on the map and you can view the name of the text, the author and a brief description of the importance of the location to the text.

For some reason these book location maps never seem to survive very long. On the surface these maps seem like a great idea. When I travel I do like to read novels that are set in the location I'm visiting.

There is also some value to be had in using a map to explore the locations that are mentioned in novels. For that purpose Google Lit Trips might be a better option. For many years now Google Lit Trips has been plotting the character journeys undertaken in famous works of literature.

The site plots the journeys of characters and locations mentioned in a large number of literary texts. The journeys can then be downloaded in the form of a KMZ file and viewed in Google Earth. Google Lit Trips is designed with school students in mind. Each location plotted in an individual text includes information windows containing a variety of resources, including media, thought provoking discussion starters and links to supplementary information about the locations featured.


LibrAdventures is another Google Maps based literary atlas which allows you to explore locations across the globe in terms of their association with famous authors and works of literature.

The scope of LibrAdventures is a little wider than Lovereading. LibrAdventures not only plots locations from novels but also maps the places where their authors lived, the journeys of their heroes and the history and locations of historic libraries and bookstores.

LibrAdventures also has far more search options than Lovereading. Using the map you can not only explore by location but by individual author and literary genre. Individual entries on the map provide detailed textual context and the option to view the location in Google Maps Street View.

Watch Los Angeles Grow

We are definitely witnessing a mini revolution in the presentation of building age maps.

A couple of weeks ago the map team at the City of Amsterdam released Housing Plans, an animated map of new housing projects in Amsterdam. In a Twitter conversation with the creators of the map I remarked that I'd been waiting for someone to create a similar animated map, using building age data to show how a city has grown over time.

Within 24 hours the City of Amsterdam responded with the Amsterdam Growing Over Time map. This incredible animated map shows how the city of Amsterdam developed and grew from a few houses in the 17th century into the dynamic city it is today.

Thanks to cityHUB Los Angeles you can now also watch an animated map showing Los Angeles development in the 20th Century. The LA Building Age map visualizes the age of nearly 3 million buildings in Los Angeles. The colors of the building footprints on the map show the decade of when the buildings were originally built (you can also click on individual building footprints on the map to view the exact year that it was built).

In truth these animated building age maps don't provide a true picture of how cities have grown over time. The maps only show the age of buildings that exist today. So what is missing from this map is historical buildings which have been replaced by newer buildings over time. However animating the maps by the age of build does provide a great sense of how and where cities have developed over the decades (or over the centuries in Amsterdam's case).

Liberals Don't Marry

The New York Times has mapped where you are more likely and less likely to be married by the age of 26. How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage shows there is a strong correlation between where you grow-up and your chances of marrying by 26.

It appears that growing up in a city can seriously effect your chances of marriage. Those who are raised in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington are far less likely to get married. If you do want to grow-up in a city and still have a good chance of getting married then you should make sure you are raised in a Republican voting area. The map suggests that Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Fort Worth, some of the few metropolitan areas to vote Republican in 2012, are also cities where you are more likely to get married.

The Times map is accompanied by a chart which shows that marriage by 26 is far more likely among those who voted for Romney in 2012 than among those who voted for Obama.

Via: Visualoop

Mapping the Non-Representation of Women

In the United States women have very little political representation. According to the United Nations only 19% of U.S. 'parliamentarians'  are women. This is a lower percentage than in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Rwanda has the highest number of women parliamentarians worldwide. In Rwanda 63.8 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women. The Nordic countries also do comparatively well in the equality stakes, with 41.5 per cent female parliamentarians across the region.

The Daily Telegraph has mapped the United Nations report on female parliamentarians (as of January 2015). The Percentage of Female MPs Around the World map uses a choropleth layer to show the percentage of female parliamentarians in 186 countries around the globe. Globally the situation is very depressing with women only making up 22 per cent of all national parliamentarians.

Maps of the Week

Isochrone Maps of Europe is a beautiful looking series of maps visualizing train travel times across the continent. The series includes a number of static isochrone maps which visualize the travel time by train across Europe from a number of major cities.

There are probably more useful dynamic isochrone maps out there, which can calculate travel times from any location. However, while these Isochrone Maps of Europe only provide travel time maps from a number of set locations, they are very beautiful looking maps.

The travel times for each city map were calculated using the the Swiss public transport API. The travel time data was then converted into contour lines using conrec.js, and then plotted as paths using d3.js and finally overlaid on a Leaflet.js map.


Pregoneros de Medellín is a wonderfully immersive virtual journey around the colorful streets of Medellín in Colombia. The experience is vaguely similar to exploring locations with Google Maps Street View - only with sound, smoother transitions and lots more interactivity.

Pregoneros de Medellín was not created with panoramic images but with video. However this isn't video as you normally know it. To progress through the video you need to scroll down on the web page. As you scroll you move through the stills of the video.

While you stroll around Medellin you can listen to the sounds of the streets and the street vendors. You can also interact with some of the characters you find on your journey. The interactive characters are indicated on screen with map markers positioned above their heads. Click on the markers and you can view short documentary type videos about the selected individual's lives.

Making Pregoneros de Medellín was obviously a huge technical challenge. You can read about how the video was captured (using a GoPro camera attached to a gimbal and fixed to a bike), how the immersive sound was added (customizing Sounds of Street View) and how the video interface was created, in this Making Of post.

Chasing the Matterhorn is a thrilling account of the first ascent of the notorious Alpine mountain. This account of the first successful climb to the top of the mountain is illustrated with a 3d model of the Matterhorn.

As you progress through the narrative, following the story of the climb, links in the text pan & zoom the 3d model to the locations on the mountain mentioned in the text.

The story of the race between two separate climbing teams to be the first to reach the summit of the Matterhorn is an incredible tale on its own. Being able to view the locations of some of the hair-raising moments in both climbs on the 3d model really helps to convey the dangers involved in these first two successful attempts on the Matterhorn.


The New York Public Library has done a wonderful job in geo-rectifying thousands of historical maps from their collections. Now thousands of the library's historical photographs have also been geo-tagged.

OldNYC is a Google Map locating 40,000 NYPL historical photographs of New York to the closest intersection. This isn't the most beautiful or the most well made map of the week but the content makes it hugely interesting. Click on a marker on the map and you can view historical photographs of New York taken near that location. You can even use Google Maps Street View to explore the same views portrayed in the photos as they look in New York today.

OldNYC was created by the same team that built OldSF. OldSF is a similar map for San Francisco, which allows you to browse historical photos from the San Francisco Public Library collection.

The London Food Inspection Map

London Food Hygiene is a map showing the food hygiene rating or inspection results of London restaurants and other establishments serving or selling food in the capital.

Food hygiene inspections in London are carried out by each local authority. After inspection an establishment is given a score from 0-5, with 5 being the top rating and 0 the lowest. The London Food Hygiene map allows you to filter the results shown on the map by the food hygiene rating given. This means that you can search for local restaurants with the best ratings or you can search for places to avoid by showing only those restaurants with the lowest scores.

It also possible to filter the results shown on the map by type of establishment. This allows you to view just restaurants and cafes, pubs, supermarkets or other establishments.

Via: Visualoop

Mapping New York's Historical Photos

The New York Public Library has done a wonderful job in geo-rectifying thousands of historical maps from their collections. Now thousands of the library's historical photographs have also been geo-tagged.

OldNYC is a Google Map locating 80,000 NYPL historical photographs of New York to the closest intersection. Click on a marker on the map and you can view historical photographs of New York taken near that location. You can even use Google Maps Street View to explore the same views portrayed in the photos as they look in New York today.

OldNYC was created by the same team that built OldSF. OldSF is a similar map for San Francisco, which allows you to browse historical photos from the San Francisco Public Library collection.

Life - Updated in Real-Time

Who needs horizons?

Online we count our days in seconds. For us the sun is always rising, always setting. We watch the day meet the night and the night greet the day on Instagram & Twitter.

When the animation plays on the map of our lives, the days pass by and another colored dot gets added to our digital archive. This is All Our Suns, our animated map of today, played out through Instagram photos tagged #sunset and #sunrise.

Our mediated experiences, our tiny colored dots of life, flashing by on a two dimensional plane. All our days remembered in the digitization of the sun at the beginning and the end of the day.

Our lives uploaded to Instagram. The map updated in real-time.


Sometimes the world seeps through into our virtual lives. The inexorable passing of time - expressed in one hundred and forty characters or less.

The Sunrise Around the World, is a yellow pixel of flashing light. These our days. These are the maps of our real-lives.

The Street Views & Sounds of Medellin

Pregoneros de Medellín is a wonderfully immersive virtual journey around the colorful streets of Medellín in Colombia. The experience is vaguely similar to exploring locations with Google Maps Street View - only with sound, smoother transitions and lots more interactivity.

Pregoneros de Medellín was not created with panoramic images but with video. But this isn't video as you normally know it. To progress through the video you need to scroll down on the web page. As you scroll you move through the stills of the video.

While you stroll around Medellin you can listen to the sounds of the streets and the street vendors. You can also interact with some of the characters you find on your journey. The interactive characters are indicated on screen with map markers positioned above their heads. Click on the markers and you can view short documentary type videos about the selected individual's lives.

Making Pregoneros de Medellín was obviously a huge technical challenge. You can read about how the video was captured (using a GoPro camera attached to a gimbal and fixed to a bike), how the immersive sound was added (customizing Sounds of Street View) and how the video interface was created, in this Making Of post.

Climbing the Matterhorn in 3d

Chasing the Matterhorn is a thrilling account of the first ascent of the notorious Alpine mountain. This account of the first successful climb to the top of the mountain is illustrated with a 3d model of the Matterhorn.

As you progress through the narrative, following the story of the climb, links in the text pan & zoom the 3d model to the locations on the mountain mentioned in the text.

The story of the race between two separate climbing teams to be the first to reach the summit of the Matterhorn is an incredible tale on its own. Being able to view the locations of some of the hair-raising moments in both climbs really helps to convey the dangers involved in these first two successful attempts on the Matterhorn.

The Global Homicide Rate

According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime there were 437,000 homicides across the globe in 2012. The Homicide Monitor visualizes the 2012 homicide rates for countries around the world on a 3d globe.

When you first load the Homicide Monitor the globe animates through the ten countries with the highest homicide rates. If you pause the globe you can explore the data yourself by selecting individual countries on the map.

Click on a country and you can view the country's homicide rate, a graph of the homicide rate over this century, the percentage of those killed by firearms and the percentage of people killed by gender.

The United Tastes of America

There have been a few maps this week purportedly visualizing distinctive features of each state in the USA.

For example the Most Distinctive Causes of Death map visualizes the most 'distinctive' cause of death in each of the 50 states. The map doesn't show the top cause of death in each state but the cause of death which is proportionally higher in each state than in all the the other states. Or something like that - there is a formula.

The most distinctive cause of death in each state is at least twice the national rate for that cause of death. Therefore I'm guessing that the map could be quite useful to health care practitioners in highlighting causes of death in a state which appear to be abnormally high.

I'm going to say that despite being an ugly map that it might actually be useful to planners in the health care profession.

The opposite is true of Foursquare new America's Most Popular Tastes map, which is a beautiful looking interactive map but essentially useless. The map supposedly shows the most unique flavor in each state.

Foursquare claim that they used a mix of data sets (menus, tips, ratings, and more) and normalized for size against other states. Which seems to be a similar approach to the Most Distinctive Causes of Death map. My guess however is that a few ageing hipsters at Foursquare just sat around and came up with a list of what they thought were the most distinctive foods in each state.

The map is gorgeous though. I love the little icons for each state. The mouse-over interactions on each state are very nice as well and, if you select a state on the map, the map automatically zooms in and picks out the state in a different highlight color.

To be fair the map isn't really pointless. When you select a state on the map you can view the restaurants in that state with the highest ratings for the state's most distinctive food. If you click on one of the restaurants you can also view its listing on Foursquare.

So America's Most Popular Tastes Map is successful in identifying some top places to eat in each state and of course Foursquare hope it will be succesful in promoting Foursquare.

Mapping the Demolition of Austin

Since 2007 over 5,000 demolition permits have been granted in Austin, Texas.  You can view the footprints of all the buildings given demolition permits on the Austin, Demolished: Eight Years of Wrecking Ball Data map.

You can select individual footprints on the map to view a static Street View of the building and view details of the demolition work carried out on the building. The map also includes an interactive bar chart of Austin building demolitions by year. Using the slider controls you can select any time period to filter the building footprints displayed on the map by date of demolition.

Train Travel Times of Europe

Isochrone Maps of Europe is a beautiful looking series of maps visualizing train travel times across the continent. The series includes a number of isochrone maps showing the travel times across Europe from a number of major cities.

The travel times from each city were calculated using the the Swiss public transport API. Using conrec.js. This travel time data was then converted into contour lines which were then plotted as paths using d3.js and overlaid on a Leaflet.js map.

Isochrone maps of train travel times across Europe are available for 28 of Europe's major cities.