Wednesday, August 12, 2020

This Man is an Island



John Donne famously said that 'No man is an island'. But then John Donne had never met Matthew Mercer. Matthew Mercer is not only an island he is also an interactive map.

Matthew Mercer is an American voice actor. According to Wikipedia he is best known for his work in anime, video games and cartoons. Matthew Mercer is now also an interactive map. Map Mercer is a very strange interactive map in which the face of Matthew Mercer is portrayed like a tropical island in an otherwise empty sea.

Red Giant Maps has used QGIS to turn a portrait of Matthew Mercer into a topographical map. That map has then been made interactive using Mapbox GL. I have no idea why Red Giant Maps felt the need to make a huge interactive map from the face of a voice-over artist. The whole exercise seems a little pointless to me and I definitely haven't spent the last few hours trying to work out how to use hexbins to create my own pixelated interactive map portrait.

Map Mercer is I think the first non-geographical map I've seen use Mapbox GL. Leaflet.js has been used extensively to create map-like interfaces to explore non-geographical images. I recently linked to a few of these non-geographical interactive maps in the post Microscopic Mapping.

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