Maps of the Week

Named is a new website which allows people in the UK to find out where their surname is unusually common. The application is very easy to use. All you do is enter a surname and named shows you a heatmap highlighting where there is an unusually high number of people with that name.

Named also allows you to enter two surnames to find locations where both names are unusually common. The application uses data from an old UK electoral roll to work out the distribution of names. The application therefore only works for the UK.


Place Names in the United States visualizes the spatial distribution of town & city place names in America.

For example you can view the distribution of place names starting with Spanish articles (El, Los, Las) and San & Santa (mainly in the Southwest). Alternatively you can search using suffixes. For example the distribution of towns with common British town endings, such as chester, wick, wich, pool, ham, ness, port & worth (mainly in the Northeast).

Place Names in the United States has a database of around thirty thousand towns and cities in the United States. The place name data used is from opengeocode.org and the application was built using Canvas, SVG and d3.js.


Wikipedia has entries for 8,049 battles that have taken place across the world throughout the sorrowful history of the human race. Nodegoat's map, the Wikidata Geography of Violence, visualizes this warfare data throughout time and across the globe.

The map includes a date control which allows you to filter the results shown on the map for any period of time. The battle markers on the map are also color coded by date. If you select a battle's marker on the map you can click through to see its entry on Wikidata and read its Wikipedia entry.