Maps of the Week

Mapzen's Tangram mapping platform is a library for creating 2D & 3D maps using WebGL. One of the main advantages of Tangram is the ability to style all aspects of the map to create really stunning looking individual maps.

Patricio Gonzalez Vivo has used Tangram to create a beautiful looking map based on the art of Ryoji Ikeda. The Ikeda Map is a beautiful black & white map, illuminated with the animated lights of road traffic and lights shining from the 3d building windows. Patricio used three pseudo-random procedural patterns to create the animations. You can learn more about how the map was made on the Mapzen blog.


The Berliner Morgenpost's Lärmkarte Berlin provides a heat-map view of road, public transit, airport and industrial noise throughout the German capital.

If you mouse-over any part of the heat-map layer you can view the noise levels at that location. The information includes the recorded decibel levels for both day & night time and a breakdown of the decibel levels from road and transit noise.

The data for the map comes from a noise survey undertaken every five years by the Berlin Senate Administration for Urban Development and Environment. The two information windows, at the top right of the map, provide links to the noisiest and quietest neighborhoods in Berlin, with video interviews with residents who live in these areas.


The GDELT Project map isn't the most beautiful map I've ever seen but it did feature in the most read post of the week.

The map shows all the books from the HathiTrust collection. The data from these books is now available from the GDELT Project as one of two separate BigQuery datasets. These datasets are:

Internet Archive Book Collection in Google BigQuery (includes fulltext for 1800-1922 books)
HathiTrust Book Collection in Google BigQuery
There is obviously a lot of mapping potential in these 3.5 million books. The GDELT Project map shows the locations of all the locations mentioned in the collection from 1800-2011. One obvious pattern on the map is the growth of North American locations mentioned in the books as the years pass.