Mapping Dante's Inferno

Dante's vision of Hell consists of nine concentric circles. These circles represent ever increasing levels of wickedness. Sinners in Dante's Inferno are forced to live for eternity in the circle which best fits their Earthly sins. The outside circle is Limbo, where the unbaptized and virtuous pagans are forced to reside. The ninth circle of hell is reserved for those who are guilty of treachery against their friends, families or loved ones.

This Inferno is described in Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. Almost since the Inferno was first published in the 14th Century people have been attempting to map his vision of hell. One of the first maps of Dante's Inferno was created by Antonio Manetti. You can view an interactive version of his 'Section, Plan and Dimensions of Dante’s Inferno' at Cornell University Library - Digital Collections.

Manetti's schematic provides both a plan and a sectional view of Hell. It also provides the dimensions of each of the nine concentric circles.



A new interactive map Topography of Dante Alighieri's Inferno provides a more pictorial sectional view of Dante's vision of Hell. If you zoom in on this map of the Inferno you can learn more about the sinners in each circle of hell and the eternal punishments which they must endure.

For example - if you zoom in on the third circle (Gluttony) you will discover that here the gluttonous are punished by being forced to lie in "a nauseating slush under an incessant rain, while Cerberus barks above them". In the ninth circle (Treachery) those who have been treacherous to relatives are "buried up to their necks in ice".

The Topography of Dante Alighieri's Inferno is in Italian. However if you view the map in Chrome then Google's 'translate this page' option does a good job of translating the important sins and punishments into English.

Chinese Acquisitions in Europe

Over the last year there has been a lot of  speculation about the security threat posed by Chinese technology companies such as Huwei and Tik-Tok.

Huwei's role in telecoms networks around the world has led to a major worry about how much information the company passes on to the Chinese government. Similar concerns have been raised about the use of Tik-Tok and how much personal user data can be accessed by Beijing. Both companies claim that they pose no security risks to their users but many western governments doubt that either company has any power to refuse Chinese data requests.

Of course Huwei and Tik-Tok are not the only companies which could be used by the Chinese to gather data. Datenna has identified over 650 acquisitions by Chinese investors in Europe.You can view all these acquisitions on the China-EU FDI Radar interactive map. On this map you can explore European companies which have been acquired by Chinese investors and also view Datenna's rating of the level of Chinese state-influence in each acquisition.

The level of state-influence and the possible security threat of each acquisition is based on a number of different factors, these include the percentage of shares held, the shareholder structure and the level of state-control of any investors. Based on their ratings Datenna has identified over 160 acquisitions where there is a high level of Chinese government influence. These acquisitions are in a number of different sectors, including energy, transport and information communication technology. These acquisitions have also taken place across Europe and in every major European country.

Mapping 'Good Morning' & 'Good Night'

Waking & Sleeping is a real-time map which shows where people around the world are Tweeting either 'Good Morning' or 'Good Night'. Open the map at any time of the day and you can instantly see where people are currently waking up and going to sleep.

Waking & Sleeping maps in real-time Tweets which mention either 'Good Morning' or 'Good Night' and which are geotagged or include a location. Interestingly the 'about' notes for this map claim that only 1.5% of people permit location sharing on Twitter. The 'about' notes also point to a problem with Twitter's API which means it doesn't parse Chinese, Japanese, or Korean very well. This means that Waking & Sleeping may miss a lot of early morning and late night messages from huge parts of Asia.

Waking & Sleeping uses Glitch, which means that you can remix and clone the project if you wish. To clone Waking & Sleeping go to its Glitch edit page and click on the 'Remix to Edit' button. However if you do want to create your own version of this map you will need to use you own Twitter and Mapbox API keys.

Idle Map Tycoon - the Game!

I'm a big fan of Idle computer games and I've been thinking about how to create a map based Idle game for a few years. Someone has now beaten me to it.

Idle or Incremental computer games usually require the player to perform some simple actions to build up in-game currency. The main aim of these games is to increase the rate of this acquisition of money. Once a player starts generating an income then usually the currency will continue generating even in the player's absence - hence the 'idle' name.

BuDongSan is a new interactive map based realtor tycoon game. In the game you are required to buy or rent property and make money by letting, or subletting, those properties. Once you start building up a property portfolio the money will start rolling in, enabling you to buy ever larger and more expensive properties.

At the moment BuDongSan is a very simple game, with very few features. However, despite this, I've been playing it quite a lot over the last 24 hours (I'm now at level 24). The best Idle games allow you to buy, earn or develop new skills which can help increase your rate of currency acquisition. As a property tycoon idle game, BuDongSan, could possibly benefit from allowing you to purchase or earn some property developments which work to increase the rental value of the properties you own.

You can read more about the game on the BuDongSan GitHub page. The tips provided here, on borrowing money and setting the rental income to pay every minute rather than every hour should help you get started in building your very own property portfolio.

What is the Largest Area Ever Mapped?

In his short story 'On Exactitude in Science' Jorge Louis Borges famously writes about an empire which creates a map on a 1:1 scale. The map is therefore as large as the empire itself. Of course the empire's cartographers don't have to stop there. If they wanted they could create a map on 2:1 scale - this map would then be twice as big as the empire that it represents.

There is therefore no limit to the potential size of a map.

Thinking about Borges's short story this morning I got to wondering not about how big a map a could be but how large an area can be mapped. What is the largest area that has ever been mapped?

Well, in terms of interactive maps there is also no limit to the size of area that can be mapped. Let's start with our own Solar System ...

The Solar System



The Solar System is quite large. The distance from the Sun (at the center of our system) to the outer edges of the Oort Cloud (at the outer edges of our system) is around 200,000 astronomical units, which is about 3.2 light years.

OMG Space is a scaled representation of this space. Starting with the Sun, at the top of the webpage, as you scroll down OMG Space you travel out towards the edge of the Solar System, passing all the planets along the way.

The Sun and the planets and the distances between them are mapped to scale, so without using the links it will probably take you some time to scroll to the very edge of the Solar System. If the thought of scrolling across the whole Solar System sounds a little daunting you can enter hyperspace by using the planet links running across the bottom of the page. Select a planet link and the website quickly scrolls to the chosen planet.

The Milky Way



Our Solar System is just one of about 200 billion solar systems in the Milky Way. You can explore a few of those suns on ESA's Mosaic of the Milky Way.

The European Space Agency's Mosaic of the Milky Way is a huge megapixel image of the Milky Way. This huge megapixel mosaic of the central part of the Milky Way is made from thousands of individual images captured by the Vista telescope. The VISTA survey telescope is housed at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The Milky Way has a radius of 52,850 light years. It is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km from one side to another. ESA's image however only shows one part of the Milky Way. The mosaic shows the view of that part of the Milky Way as seen from Earth, which is about 8 kpc from the center of the Milky Way on what is known as the Orion Arm.

The Milky Way isn't really that big in comparison to some galaxies. The Milky Way is around 1,000 light years in diameter. In comparison the Hercules A galaxy is 1.5 million light years across.

The Universe



The Milky Way and Hercules A are just two of the galaxies which make up the universe. The part of the universe which we can observe from Earth consists of around 200 billion galaxies. Google Sky is a very impressive interactive map of the observable universe. This is a map of a very, very big space.

The nearest neighbor to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy is approximately 2.5 million light-years from the Milky Way. It contains about one trillion start systems. The universe itself is about 93 billion light years in diameter.

We haven't yet mapped all the universe. So there is a long way to go before we have mapped the largest area possible. If we believe that the universe is finite then there is a finite amount of space to be mapped.

I started this post by stating there is no limit to the potential size of a map. This morning I started drawing a map of the universe on a 2:1 scale. When I finish I will have doubled the size of the universe.

Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election

Interference 2020 - Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker is a visualization of foreign interference in this year's U.S. Presidential Election. The map was created by the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council to explore and examine allegations of foreign interference in the U.S. election.

I'd like to give a lot of credit to Interference 2020 for originality. It is a very interesting attempt to combine a timeline and map. However as an interactive experience I find it almost impossible to navigate. The mouse-over interactions on the red circles make it very difficult to select individual interference attempts or navigate from one circle to another. Lines connect each circle to a country on the map but most of the time the information window which opens (when hovering over a circle) hides this line, making it impossible at times to see which country made the selected interference attempt.

Interference 2020 is an innovative attempt to combine a timeline and interactive map. The red circles (attempts at interference) which run across the top of the map are arranged in chronological order. Lines run from these circles to show the country where each attempt at interfering in the election originated from. The size of each circle is determined by its 'attribution impact' (the number of times people engaged with the attempted interference on social media).

Overall I'd say that Interference 2020 is an interesting but not entirely successful visualization of foreign government attempts to influence the American election. What the map does make very clear is that the majority of the attempts to interfere in the U.S. election have originated from Russia, China and Iran.

Streets Named for Athletes

There are over 3,700 streets in the United States which have been given the names of athletes (if you include horses). ESPN has analyzed the names of 1 million roads in America to determine how many streets have been named in honor of individual athletes and which athletes have the most streets named after them (apparently ESPN does believe that horses are athletes).

In The United States of Athlete Streets ESPN has mapped out all the streets named for individual athletes. Using this ESPN story map you can explore all the roads named for athletes across the whole of the United States. The human athlete with the most streets named in his honor is Dale Earnhardt. Earnhardt was an auto racing driver who was known as one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history. However Earnhardt doesn't have as many streets named in his honor as Secretariat. Secretariat is the athlete with the most streets named in his honor (if you include horses). In 1973 Secretariat became the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years.

It turns out that Americans really like horses. More streets in the USA are named in honor of individual horses than are named in honor for athletes from any other sport. There are 276 different horses with streets named in their honor in the USA. The next most popular sport is golf. 207 golfers have streets named in their honor. In total there are 1,835 different streets in the US named for horses and 777 streets named for golfers.

The most honored athlete still active in sport is Tom Watson, who has 19 streets named in his honor. Closely followed by Tiger Woods with 16 streets.

3D City Ninja

CityJSON is a popular format for saving the data of 3D city models. The CityJSON format supports most of the common 3D features found in 3D city models, such as buildings, roads, bridges, and city furniture. As well as saving the data for the geometry of these objects CityJSON can be used to encode data on their appearance, for example the textures and colors of the buildings.

You can view CityJSON files online using CityJSON Ninja. CityJSON Ninja is an online editor for CityJSON files. The editor allows you to load CityJSON files and view 3D city models online (as seen in the screenshot above of a 3D model of a neighborhood in Delft). Viewing and editing a CityJSON file in CityJSON Ninja is a good way for learning how CityJSON files are formatted and structured.

Once you load a CityJSON file into CityJSON Ninja you can view the 3D model online. You can then select the 'Settings' menu to change the colors of buildings, roads, and other objects. You can also click on individual objects on the 3D map to edit the object directly in the CityJSON file. Any edits instantly appear on the online city model and then all your changes can be saved and downloaded as a new CityJSON file.

If you want to test or play with CityJSON Ninja you can find some examples CityJSON files to use on the Datasets page of CityJSON.org

The Art of the Interactive Painting

The New York Times has released another superb close examantion of an individual painting. Seeing Our Own Reflection in the Birth of the Self-Portrait is a detailed examination of Albrecht Dürer's self portrait of 1500 - "the greatest self-portrait ever painted."

This isn't the first time that the NYT has published a detailed examination of a painting which treats an artwork as if it was an interactive map. Back in June the Times released Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece, a great scrollytelling crtique of Thomas Eakins' painting 'The Gross Clinic' by art critic Jason Farago. In his latest scrollytelling critique for the Times Farago explores the birth and development of the self-portrait, with particluar emphasis on Dürer's implacable self-portrait.

In both Seeing Our Reflection in the Birth of the Self Portrait and Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece Farago explores painting in very close detail, using some of the interactive techniques perfected in the development of online interactive mapping. Both of Farago's scrollytelling critiques use image tiles of paintings in an identical manner to the way image map tiles are used for interactive maps. This means that as you zoom in on these paintings you can view ever more detailed images just as you can with interactive maps.



If you are familiar with the Leaflet.js mapping library then you also 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 map 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 detailed look at Steen's 17th century Dutch masterpiece.

If, like me, you find it easiest working from other people's code then you can clone my The Drawing Lesson interactive on its Glitch page. To start hacking my interactive painting look for the iiif manifest URL in the JavaScript code and try replacing it with the manifest for another painting or image.

The Sexist Streets of Berlin

Around 25% of Berlin's streets are named after individual people. Of those streets over 88% are named for men and only 11% are named for women.

You can explore Berlin's sexist street names for yourself on EqualStreetNames: Berlin, an interactive map which colors all the city's streets based on whether they are named for men or women (or gender neutral). On the map streets which have been named after men are colored yellow and streets named for women have been colored red. EqualStreetNames: Berlin also includes a graph which shows the percentage of the city's streets named for men and women.

The Berlin map uses a methodology first developed for EqualStreetNames: Brussels, an interactive map which visualizes the inequality between male and female street names in the Belgium capital. The code and methodology developed for the Brussels map has also been used to create:

• EqualStreetNames: Belgrade
• EqualStreetNames: Assen
• EqualStreetNames: Gronigen

Geochicas has been at the forefront of revealing the under-representation of women in street names by building interactive maps showing the distribution of streets named for women and men in many different cities. Las Calles de las Mujeres is an interactive map which reveals all the streets named for men and women in a number of cities in Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

A number of other interactive mapping projects have explored the sexist culture of naming streets in other cities around the world.

• Street Names in Vienna - explores streets named for men and women in the Austrian capital
• From Pythagoras to Amalia -shows the distribution of male & female street names in Amsterdam
• Mapping Female versus Male Street Names - maps male & female street names in a number of major cities around the world

You can learn more about German street names in a fascinating Zeit Online analysis of the most popular German street names.

In Streetscapes: Mozart, Marx and a Dictator Zeit Online explores how there is a distinct east-west split to some German street names, which owes a lot to the differing politics of the former East and West Germany. One thing that is probably true in both east & west is that women are much less likely to be commemorated by having streets named for them than men. For example in Hamburg 2,511 streets are named after men and only 397 are named after women.

As well as exploring the distribution of male and female street names Zeit Online has also analysed which periods of history are commemorated in Berlin's street names. The most popular period is the era of the German Empire (1870–1918). The Nazi era is, for obvious reasons, very unpopular and "all street signs bearing the names of leading figures in the Nazi era have been removed." However you can still find street names from that period in Germany which "typify their ideology".