Colonizing the Planets

One of the world's most popular interactive maps is the True Size Of ... , which is a fun tool for comparing the size of different countries by placing one country on top of another. The True Size Of ... is particularly useful for showing some of the size distortions which are inherent in the Mercator projection, for example by placing Greenland on top of the continent of Africa. 

One thing that the True Size Of ... isn't very good at is providing an inter-planetary scale. Obviously the most pressing question on most American's minds is how big is the United States compared to the planet Venus. Which is where Countries Mapped onto Solar System Bodies comes in. Countries Mapped onto Solar System Bodies is an invaluable tool for comparing the sizes of countries and continents to the planets and moons of our solar system.

Using the tool you can overlay the shape of any country on top of an interactive globe of any of this solar system's planets or moons. This is actually a very good way to visualize the size of the planets. Most people have a reasonable understanding of the scale of their country compared to the Earth. Projecting a country onto a planet provides a fantastic reference for judging the size of that planet using a scale that is very familiar to the user.

Boston's Favorite Streets

MIT's Sensable Lab has discovered a unique method to determine which streets are seen as the most desirable. By analyzing the routes taken by pedestrians to get from A to B Sensable Lab discovered that on average pedestrians chose to walk 10% further than the shortest route. 

So why do pedestrians  go out of their way when walking from A to B? They might deviate from the shortest route to avoid busy streets, to visit amenities & shops or to access green spaces. By working out which streets people are prepared to deviate to from their shortest route Sensable Labs can work out which which are people's most liked streets.

In Desirable Streets Sensable Labs has analyzed the deviations made by people in over 120,000 journeys in Boston, in order to work out which are the city's most desirable streets. They have published an interactive map which colors Boston's most desirable streets. From this map they have discovered that three main features characterize the most desirable streets. These are: 

1. access to parks
2. nearby shops & businesses 
3. sidewalks & street furniture.
   

Polygon Tweening

2020 was a record breaking year for wildfires in California. Four of last year's fires are in the largest six wildfires ever seen in California. These include the August Complex fire which was California's largest wildfire in history by some margin .

Reuters has created a very impressive data visualization to illustrate the devastating size of last year's fires in California. At the heart of The Age of the Megafire is a visual comparison of the size of California's largest historical wildfires. To achieve this comparison Reuters has created a series of animated tweens of the fires, morphing the polygon shapes of each fire into squares of the same sized area. Representing the size of the fires as separate squares allows the user to easily compare the size of California's historical wildfires. 

To show how wildfires in recent years have started to become significantly larger than fires from the past Reuters has included a 'wildfire race' visualization. This involves showing the largest ten fires chronologically by year. As the years pass the larger squares (of the more recent wildfires) start pushing out the smaller squares (representing the largest historical wildfires from previous years). 

At the heart of Reuter's visualization is the transition of geographical shapefiles into geometric squares. Achieving this can be very difficult. However if you want an easy-ish introduction into how you can create a similar effect you should have a look at Mike Bostock's Shape Tweening demo. This small demo shows you how to tween a polygon shape (from a json file) into a circle.In Mike's example the shapefile of the state of California tweens into a similar sized circle.

The Bendy Video Map

Both Mapbox and Leaflet.js include options which allow you to overlay videos on top of an interactive map. Mapbox's raster layers and Leaflet's L.VideoOverlay class both make it very easy to add playable videos on top of the satellite imagery (or road map) of the location shown in the video. This is particularly useful if you want to add animated timelapse satellite images or show drone captured video on a map.

Now that Mapbox has the option to Add 3D Terrain to the Map you can now also drape a video layer over a curved 3D terrain.For example this Lombard Street Video Map overlays drone captured video of cars driving on San Francisco's most famous winding street. Because the map also uses Mapbox's 3D terrain when you adjust the 'pitch' of the map the video twists and bends to fit the underlying height of the sloping street. 

The Lombard Street Video Map is just one of a number of fun and interesting experimental maps which have been made with Mapbox's new 3D elevation data. You might also like: 

• 3D Stereoscopic Anaglyph and Crossview Map  
• Vintage Mapper
  
• Joy Plots in 3D
  
• 3D Map of the Golden Gate Bridge

Mapping Cubism

I am a huge fan of Jason Farago's art criticism for the New York Times. His close readings of famous works of art are illustrated with interactive scrollytelling paintings. Farago's critiques owe a lot to the navigation and presentation techniques developed for online interactive maps. As you progress through one of his close readings the interactive painting zooms and pans to illustrate Farago's observations of the artist's work.

Farago's previous critiques of individual paintings include:

• Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
• Albrecht Dürer's Self Portrait
  
• Thomas Eakins' painting The Gross Clinic
  
• Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe

In his latest article for the New York Times Farago looks at the work of Cubist artist Juan Gris' "Still Life: The Table". In An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue Farago explores Gris' use of collage to create a new form of painting. As well as the close reading of Gris' Still Life collage the essay explores the influence of works of art by Cezanne and the sculptures of African artists on the Cubist movement. 

If you are familiar with the Leaflet.js mapping library then you can create your own interactive painting critiques - using image tiles from paintings instead of map tiles. Museums and art galleries around the world use the iiif format to present artworks as zoomable images. This means that for many works of art, if they have a iiif manifest, you don't even have to create the image tiles for yourself.

The fantastic leaflet-iiif plugin allows you to seamlessly use iiif manifests with the Leaflet mapping platform.This means that you can quickly turn any painting with a iiif manifest into an interactive Leaflet map. You can view a demo of this in action on my own The Drawing Lesson critique. In this scrollytelling examination of Jan Steen's painting (depicting an artist teaching two young pupils how to draw) I have used the Leaflet mapping library to take a close look at Steen's 17th century Dutch masterpiece. 

You can explore how my critique of the Drawing Lesson works by exploring the JavaScript code on its Glitch page. You can even clone the page if you want and use the page as a template for creating your own interactive scrollytelling painting essay.

The Healthy Streets Index

University College London (UCL) has released a new interactive map which rates London's streets based on how 'healthy' they are. The Healthy Streets Index ranks every single street in Central London based on ten different indicators. 

The map reveals that some London boroughs have a much higher proportion of healthy streets than other boroughs. According to the index Camden has some of London's healthiest streets. One in five of the borough's streets are in the top 5% of London's Healthy Streets Index. The borough of Hillingdon, on the other hand, has a lot of unhealthy streets. One in 14 of the borough's streets are in the bottom 5% of London streets.

The ten key indicators which have been used to determine the health of individual streets are designed to measure the appeal of streets for walking, cycling and spending time in. They measure environmental factors such as noise, air quality, the volume of road traffic, tree cover, accessibility to public transit and land use. The Healthy Streets Index interactive map visualizes the score given to each street using different colors. The roads colored red have a low index rank and green roads have a high index rank (there are alternate blue-yellow maps available as static downloads).

At the moment the Healthy Streets Index only has available an interactive map showing the health of London's streets. However UCL are currently working on adding maps of other UK and international cities to the Healthy Streets Index.

Mapping the Eternal City

In 1748 the Italian architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli published an ichnographic plan of Rome. Nolli's 'Great Plan of Rome' was remarkable for a number of reasons. It was easily the most accurately surveyed and drawn map of the city to have ever been published. It was also one of the first ichnographic maps of Rome. Before Nolli all the maps of Rome produced since the Roman Empire has almost always been drawn from a bird's eye / oblique perspective.

The Interactive Nolli Map allows you to explore Giambattista Nolli's exceptional map for yourself in close detail. The original Nolli map includes around two thousand numbered locations around the city. These numbers refer to the map index which names each of the numbered sites. On the Interactive Nolli Map these numbers have been made interactive. When you click on one of these numbers on the map an information window opens providing information on the selected feature.

The Interactive Nolli Map also includes a story map introduction to Nolli's Great Plan of Rome. Under the 'Curated Essays' heading you can find a link to The Nolli Map as Artifact, which is a guided tour of the illustrations around the edge of the original map. A number of other essays are also linked under the 'Curated Essays' menu but these essays don't appear to have been completed yet.

Mars in 3D

Ares is an interactive map which uses NASA elevation data to create a 3D map of Mars. Using the map you can explore the red planet at will, climbing in and out of craters like an energetic Mars rover. 

In December Mapbox released Mapbox GL JS V2. This latest build of Mapbox's interactive mapping library includes the option to view the Earth's terrain in 3D using a global Digital Elevation Model. The Ares Mars map works in a similar way - except it uses aerial imagery of Mars draped over the Mars MGS MOLA DEM.

There has been a flurry of Mars maps over the last few months in anticipation of next month's landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. NASA's 2020 Mars mission will land the rover in the Jazero crater on the 18th of February. You can find some of these other interactive maps of the red planet by checking out the Mars tag on Maps Mania.

Virtual Tourism

Do you remember vacations? 

In the past, before the global pandemic, once or twice a year people would often take a break from their normal work in order to travel and relax. They would sometimes spend this time visiting far away places and exploring famous landmarks in person. 

Sadly this freedom to travel, which many of us enjoyed in the past, no longer exists. Which means we now have to explore the world virtually from within the confines of our tiny Covid bubbles. 

If you are wondering where to spend your virtual vacation this summer might I suggest a little online trip to the Mediterranean and to the ancient port city of Marseilles. On this journey allow yourself to be guided around the city by Marseilles 2021. Marseilles 2021 by La Phase 5 is a wonderful virtual mapped tour around some of the amazing sights of the French city of Marseilles. 

Marseilles 2021 consists of a custom designed map on which a number of the city's most memorable landmarks are highlighted using numbered markers. Click on a marker and you can visit the location virtually with a custom 360 degree panoramic 'Street View' image. These attractions include the Chinese Garden (pictured above), the Opera House, the Fort St John and the Villa Valmer. Each of the panoramic images includes a little 'information' button which, when clicked, will provide a short guide to the selected landmark. 

Of course one of the highlights of every vacayion is the exotic nightlife that you can enjoy by exploring a city at night. Some areas of Marseilles can be a little dangerous at night so it is wise to take a guided tour with someone local.

Google Night Walk is an amazing narrated Street View tour of Marseilles at night. Google Night Walk takes you on an immersive journey through the lively Cours Julien neighborhood of Marseilles. The tour includes an audio narrated guide by Julie and Christophe, two urban storytellers, who help explain the living history of the city. Many of the custom Street View panoramas in the tour are also enhanced by sound experiences recorded at the same time as the panoramas.

Covid Risk Maps

The New York Times has released an interactive map which shows the risk level of catching Covid-19 in every U.S. county. The See Covid-19 Risk in Your County map uses data from Covid-19 tests and reported cases to show the risk assessment of catching Coronavirus at the county level. 

Individual counties on the NYT map are colored to show the current risk level. If you hover over a county then you can view the number of average daily cases in the county and the average number of cases per 100,000 people. Even though the number of daily cases in the U.S. has fallen a little during January you can see from the map that in the majority of the country the risk of catching Covid-19 is still 'extremely' or 'very' high.

 

Another way that you can assess your local risk of catching Covid-19 is to consult the Harvard Global Health Institute's COVID Risk Level map which shows the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak at county level across the United States. The map reveals which counties have a green, yellow, orange or red risk level, based on the local number of new daily cases.

On the map counties that have fewer than one daily new case of Covid-19 per 100,000 people are colored green. Counties with one to nine daily new cases are colored yellow. Counties with between 10 and 24 new cases are colored orange and counties with 25 new cases per day are shown in red. The map also allows you to view the Covid-19 risk levels at state level.

Alongside the map the Harvard Global Health Institute has released recommendations and guidance about how counties should respond to the Covid-19 outbreak risk levels. If a county is shown as red on the map then stay-at-home orders are absolutely necessary. Counties shown as orange are advised to have stay-at-home orders and test and trace programs. If a county currently has a yellow risk level then a rigorous test and trace program is advised. Counties which are shown as green should continue to monitor with testing and contact tracing.