The Amazingly Awesome Maps of the Week

This week I was very impressed by two location based web-documentaries. One was Be Norilsk, a fascinating account of the history of the world's most northerly city, Norilsk in Siberia. The other is Sons of Gallipoli, an account of the Battle of Gallipoli during the First World War.

Both use location data in different ways. Be Norilsk uses a 3d map of the city to show the growth of Norilsk during the Twentieth Century. Sons of Gallipoli, on the other hand, uses a beautifully designed custom map to show key locations during the infamous battle.


I was also very impressed this week with Mimi Onuoha's Pathways project. Four different groups of people agreed to share one month's worth of mobile phone location and message data with Mimi. She then set about mapping their movements for that month.

Mimi Onuoha uses the four tracking maps to try and interpret the data to see what she can infer about the lives of the individuals tracked. On each map you can click on the 'insights' and 'conclusions' buttons to reveal what Mimi thinks the data reveals about the four tracked groups and the individuals within those groups.


This was also another week when Mapzen created some astounding maps. In Escape from Mercator Mapzen present a number of experimental Tangram maps which actually don't use the ubiquitous Web Mercator projection.

Among the more experimental map projections in the Mapzen blog post is an Inception map projection (which Maps Mania looked at last week), a Katamari projection (pictured above), a psychedelic wavy map projection and a 2d to 3d transitional projection.