Maps of the Week

Tamil Nadu in southern India has suffered the heaviest rainfall in over a century causing massive flooding. Flood Maps has set up a crowd-sourced map to help identify inundated roads in the state capital, Chennai.

Reporting an inundated road on the map simply involves zooming in on a street and clicking on it. The road is then marked pink to show that the road is flooded. So far users of Flood Maps have contributed information on over 3,000 inundated roads in the city.

As well as showing where streets are flooded in Chennai the map includes the locations of open & closed flood relief camps and waterlogged locations in the city.


Shifted Maps is an interesting visualization of personal location data. If you use the Moves mobile application you can use Shifted Maps to view an interactive map of your own location data.

Before testing your own location data you might want to view the demo map to get a feel for how Shifted Maps works. Each location visited in your location data is shown as a zoomed-in circular map inset and the map insets are scaled to show the amount of the time spent there. The size of each circle's circumference line represents the relative number of visits.

You can refine the data shown on the map by date by using the timeline control in the map menu. You can also explore the data by geo-spatial position, travel time, and frequency of movement by using the three icon buttons in the menu. These three buttons rearrange the circular inset maps to provide different visualizations of the location data.


A new map of student debt levels shows the sheer scale of the problem of student debt in each United States neighborhood. The Mapping Student Debt choropleth map shows the average student loan balance in each household at zip-code level.

If you enter the name of a town or a zip-code into the map you can view choropleth leyers showing the average household student loan balance, the delinquency rate and the median household income in that area.

Below the map is some interesting analysis of the geography of student debt across the United States. For example, the map reveals that delinquency is more prevalent in low-income zip-codes than in better off neighorhoods. Affluent zip codes, on the other hand, have higher than average student loan balances per household.