Chronological Maps with Flourish

Flourish, the data visualization studio, has released a new interactive mapping format which allows you to show geographical data changing over time.

The new Point Map template allows you to show points on a map over time, either by rate or cumulatively. Using the template you can show events occurring over time as points on an interactive map, which can be scaled and colored based on the data. Flourish's introductory blog post on the new template, Visualize large geographic datasets with the “Point map” template, has an example map which shows AirBnB bookings made in London over the summer of 2018.

Flourish has also created another demo of the Point Map template showing the jaw-droppping rise of AirBnB in Istanbul. This interactive map shows the rise of AirBnB properties in the Turkish capital over recent years. One of the big selling points of Point Map is that you don't need to do any coding and can easily set up a map if you have a spreadsheet of time based location data. Another useful feature in the Point Map template is that you can zoom and pan the map to easily pick out features in the data in a story map format. You can see this in action on the demo maps by simply clicking on the forward and back buttons above the maps.

You can also show geographical data changing over time using Carto's Torque library. Torque is a JavaScript library for animating data on an interactive map. Torque does require you to be able to code. However because of this it does give you more control over how you wish to present and visualize your time based geographical data than Flourish's new Point Map template.