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Do you want some inspiration to create a visually stunning - yet fully optimized - data graphic? Well, let's go back about a 140 years... Handsome Atlas [handsomeatlas.com], developed by Jonathan Soma of Brooklyn Brainery, provides a stunning new online interface to a large collection of beautiful data visualizations from the 19th century. While all the visualizations shown can already be found in some long list at the US Census website, this website is specifically designed so to encourage you to explore, investigate and enjoy.
All the featured data visualizations were originally printed in 3 different books, namely the Statistical Atlas of the United States of the year 1870, 1880 and 1890......
The Save the Elephants charity has created the Elephants in Peril website with the help of a Google Earth Outreach Development Grant. The website includes two Google Maps to show the location of where elephants are being illegally killed in Africa and the current African elephant population density. The maps were created with the help of Fusion Tables and Google Maps Engine. By creating and maintaining these two maps Elephants in Peril hope to bring together public data sets and to reveal the complete story of elephant populations over time and understand what trends can be seen.
The maps come from a new collection of 800 "California as an island" maps at the Stanford Libraries. They collected by Glen McLaughlin, one of the nation's top map collectors.
"To my knowledge, it is the largest collection featuring California as an island in private hands in the world," said McLaughlin. "The collection was built over a 40-year time period, from 1971 to last year." "California and the Northwest coast of America was one of the unexplored places on Earth, along with Antarctica and Australia," McLaughlin said in a statement from Stanford University.
Here's how it started, from the Stanford release:
The earliest Spanish maps from the 16th century show a continuous coastline, but a Carmelite friar, Antonio de la Ascensíon, accompanied Sebastian Vizcaíno on his West Coast expedition of 1602-03 and apparently drew a map depicting California as an island around 1620. Plunder was commonplace, and Spanish maps were a hot commodity. They were also a state secret. It's generally accepted that the Dutch captured a ship en route, and the charts were waylaid to Amsterdam. What we know for sure is that the maps were widely copied. Perhaps it's just what the Spanish wanted, suggested [says Stanford Library fellow Rebecca] Solnit. "I've been told that Spain knew it wasn't an island, but it was politically expedient for others to think it was. They weren't going to share what they knew with everybody else." Enough was enough in 1747, when King Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a royal decree proclaiming, "California is not an island."
The representation of California as an island was present on a few Asian maps even into the 1860s. Here are several of the maps showing California as an Island that Glen McLaughli picked out as iconic maps from the collection.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-used-to-think-california-was-an-island-2012-8?op=1#ixzz25G0oDGY5
The size and overall distribution of the U.S. population has changed over time, as some states--especially those in the South and West--have grown faster than others. This series of cartograms shows the distribution of the population in 1890, 1950, and 2010. A cartogram is a map that represents the size of geographic units by a statistic such as population count instead of by actual land area. In each cartogram below, one square represents 50,000 people. SOURCE: Census 2010 tables showing historical populations for states based on current boundaries. NOTE: Population counts for 1890 do not include "Indians not taxed." The number of squares per state was calculated by dividing the state population by 50,000 and then rounding to the nearest whole number.
Our planet's changing climate is devastating communities in Africa through droughts, floods and myriad other disasters.
Using detailed regional climate models and geographic information systems, researchers with the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program developed an online mapping tool that analyzes how climate and other forces interact to threaten the security of African communities.
The program was piloted by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin in 2009 after receiving a $7.6 million five-year grant from the Minerva Initiative with the Department of Defense, according to Francis J. Gavin, professor of international affairs and director of the Strauss Center......
In honor of the city's 775th anniversary, a team of artists is painting a map on a central square. Berlin is turning 775 this year. To celebrate, a team of eight artists are creating a giant city map in a central square. The 2,500-meter map will be at a scale of 1:775. When it opens on August 25, visitors can walk on top, pointing out their home and office to friends. A photo, below, by Thomas Peter of Reuters.....
As newspaper graphics go, scatterplots are a fairly advanced technique. They tend to show a reasonably large amount of data as single points, and they require the reader to have an idea what to look for. Most newspapers never bother using scatterplots for that reason, which is really too bad. With some explanation, a scatterplot can be a very effective means of displaying data, and in particular to allow the user to drill into the data a little bit. In 2010, The New York Times’ Hannah Fairfield and Graham Roberts created a wonderful interactive visualization of the pay gap between men and women (requires Flash). While at first it seems like a straightforward scatterplot, there are some simple yet clever additions that make it much more approachable.
Ever since Gerardus Mercator created his iconic map of the world in 1569--the one that first enabled ships to navigate at sea without getting lost--people have been drawing maps using the same fundamental concept of conveying physical space. Cartographers have gotten more sophisticated over time. They’ve figured out how to distort that space, how to portray that Massachusetts has more electoral votes than Wyoming, or that countries closer to the equator are larger than we think. But for hundreds of years, we’ve been tethered to the idea of looking at the world through the shape of its land. Now that there’s virtually none of that left to explore and discover, it may be time to start thinking about our world in new visual ways: not according to physical space, but to how people are distributed across it, and what their presence can tell us about global poverty, health inequality, environmental impacts, and geopolitics......
Journal of Geography, Volume 111, Issue 5, 2012 Peggy Hauselt and Jennifer Helzer “One of the primary missions of our university is to train future primary and secondary teachers. Geospatial sciences, including GIS, have long been excluded from teacher education curriculum. This article explains the curriculum revisions undertaken to increase the geospatial technology education of future teachers. A general education class introducing geospatial technology to the general student body has been developed, a cartography class has been modified to provide applied geospatial experience explicitly for future teachers, and a service learning partnership with local K–12 schools has been established where students are working with teachers to integrate geospatial sciences in their academic programs.”
The Mercator Map
The most widely used map in the U.S. today is the Mercator projection map. Mercator maps often appear in businesses, in libraries and in classrooms where geography is taught. This popularity is surprising, given the fact that the Mercator projection was first constructed in 1569, primarily for use by navigators. The Mercator projection’s undeniable value to navigators stems from the fact that a straight line drawn by the traveler will have a constant compass bearing. This is accomplished, however, by spacing the parallels (lines of latitude, measuring North and South) in specifically increased amounts from the Equator to the poles, which results in an enlarging exaggeration factor of 33 past 80? latitude......
MapTime is still in development and documentation is in the process of being written around the day jobs of those involved. For the first-time user, here is a quick guide to how to use the website. This will be fleshed out into some more informative documentation in time, so please let us know which bits are particularly unclear or need more explanation. The MapTime website (www.maptime.co.uk) currently has only a single TimeLine. (This will be explained in a future post.) You do not, therefore, need to worry about which TimeLine or TimePoints to use when you first visit the site - the only thing to worry about is where you want the course of Organic Evolution to be plotted. Click on the "TimePoint" tab if you want an explanation of the current time points in the system, or just click "TimeLine" to get started. This will open up the main TimeLine page, which lists, for your information, the time points that will be plotted. Most of these come from The New Scientist evolution of life page, for reasons we will explain another time. For now, just scroll down to the map so that you can get started. To make a MapTimeline, you only really need two things: (1) an end point, usually where you currently are (or intend to give your Deep Time lecture), and (2) a start point, which should be somewhere your audience will know. At this stage, it matters not if you do not have a (2) - you can always experiment later. To give an example that will hopefully resonate with most people, I will create a MapTimeline that goes from John o'Groats in Scotland to Land's End in Cornwall - the furthest two points apart on the British mainland.
Here’s an interesting map that shows the largest religious groups for each county in the United States. As always, I’m surprised at the geographical concentrations of different denominations and traditions which points to the rich social history that produced religion in the US.
Google Earth has opened up potential for students in classrooms around the globe with its bird’s-eye view of the world. Whether you are a veteran teacher looking for new ways to teach old topics or you are a still an education student getting ready to make your debut in the classroom, these exciting ways to use Google Earth are sure to infuse your lessons with plenty of punch. Find ideas for any age student and a handful of virtual tours that will not only help you instruct your students, but might even teach you something along the way.....
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Google first added Street View imagery to Google Earth in 2008, and gave it a substantial upgrade in 2010 with the release of Google Earth 6. Rather than having a separate layer for Street View, they added a "pegman" icon to the controls on the right side of the screen, very similar to how it works in Google Maps. Here's a quick video on how to use it::.....
Shortly after I started Per Square Mile, I produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people. There was a wrinkle, though—the city’s limits changed drastically depending on which real city it was modeled after. If we all lived like New Yorkers, for example, 7 billion people could fit into Texas. If we lived like Houstonians, though, we’d occupy much of the conterminous United States. Here’s that infographic one more time, in case you haven’t seen it:....
This week's visualization from the U.S. Census Bureau looks at county-level changes in population density for the 1930-40 decade, comparing and contrasting it with the 1920s and the 1940s. County-level population change for the 1930s differed from the 1920s or the 1940s, as shown in this set of three maps. In the 1920s, a number of predominantly rural counties in the nation's eastern half saw declines in population and population density, often reflecting outmigration to cities. During the 1930-1940 decade the pattern reversed, with population and population density declines primarily located in the Great Plains. Between 1935 and 1940, 12 percent of the population moved to another county or state. This represented a lull in population movement that changed during and after WWII as geographic mobility increased in the U.S. For instance, between 1940 and 1947, 21.5 percent of civilians moved to different counties or states. In the 1940-1950 period, population density increased for the more urban and populous counties in the Northeast and Midwest, but declines were widespread in predominantly rural counties. SOURCE: Maps are based on decennial census data 1930 to 1950. National migration figures quoted in the text are from the 1940 decennial census and the 1947 Current Population Survey. NOTE: County boundaries are based on 2010 geography, to ensure comparability between decades. For counties in which there have been changes in extent between 1920 and 2010, decennial census data are used as the basis for estimates of historical populations. Data values were rounded to the nearest whole number before classing.
Loads of companies and online publications are mapping the Olympic metal count, including most of the large online news outlets and now Esri via their popular story map resource (http://mapstories.esri.com). The latest Esri story map is called Mapping the Metals and provides a simple to use map UI (think ArcGIS Online) to share real time (almost) updates of the geographic distribution of the Olympic medals via data derived from heroku.com. Click on a country’s medal count icon and you’ll be taken to that country’s official page on the 2012 Olympics website for more info on the athletes. The story map also provides users with quick sharing to facebook and Twitter although no apprent embed map option is provided – if it is then it’s hidden pretty well! Check out this latest story map at http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/olympicmedals/
The last thing you want to do in Chicago is cross City Hall.
But a local mapmaker says he's fed up and preparing to sue Mayor Rahm Emanuel's government after the city allegedly "stole" his maps nearly a decade ago and has refused to pay him royalties.
Christopher Devane, founder of Big Stick/Neighborhood Ties, told FoxNews.com that the city repeatedly has rebuffed his appeals. Though maps might seem a matter of public domain at first blush, Devane claims that the city -- and subsequently other companies -- have gradually plucked away at his work.
"They just refuse to acknowledge the fact that they plagiarized my map," he said.
A cursory glance at the map Devane produced and the map used on the city's Geographic Information Systems website shows striking similarities. Though the color scheme and design is different, each map contains similar neighborhood boundaries and labels. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/03/businessman-claims-city-chicago-stole-his-maps-threatens-to-sue/#ixzz22XetfZOf
Symbol maps, such as those used by Oakland Crimespotting, are great for visualizing discrete events across time and space. But what happens if you want to show thousands of points? Here we use k-means clustering to coalesce dots and visualize the density of crime in Oakland. The map background is a monochrome image layer from CloudMade. Register a developer account with CloudMade for your own API key. Crime data is sourced from CrimeWatch.....
This map was created using the Kartograph SVG renderer. It shows the East Coast of the United States projected in the tilted perspective projection (aka Satellite projection). The rendering took 35 seconds and the resulting SVG has a total size of about 7 megabytes. Labels were added manually in Illustrator.
Joining Waldo Tobler as the second Geographer Hall of Fame inductee is Gerardus Mercator. Mercator was a 16th Century cartographer best known for inventing the Mercator projection. You can read more about Mercator on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cartography And here are a few related books that may be of interest: Mark Monmonier wrote about the Mercator Projection in Rhumb Lines and Map Wars (here’s an excerpt). For the serious scholar of cartography, you’ll want to check out the History of Cartography series by J.B. Harley and David Woodward. There are several volumes including Cartography in the European Renaissance: Part 1 and Part 2. Thanks to everyone who voted and submitted nominees! Stay tuned for the 3rd inductee!
In their cheeky new book, America But Better, Chris Cannon and Brian Calvert have come up with an illustrated example of how Americans view Canada.
A new visual guide will expose areas of corruption in Colombia, where misuse of funds, bribery and fraud are common. The "Monitor de Corrupción" (or "Corruption Monitor") will give journalists and citizens the opportunity to digitally map reports of political misconduct. About 60 reports from journalists have been mapped since the project launched July 24. No citizen reports have been incorporated into the mix yet, but the map's administrative staff and journalists will confirm them once they are submitted.....
Cartography is the art and science of map making. It requires a steady hand, attention to detail, and comprehensive knowledge of geography. Though most people can't name one cartographer off of the tops of their heads, let alone a group of them, maps play an influential role in everyone's lives. Here are famous cartographers who established themselves as some of the world's best known and significant mapmakers. PTOLEMY Ptolemy wrote his Geographia around the year 150 AD which compiled existing knowledge about the world's geography at the time. The work refered to a system of latitude and longitude, as well as a means of describing locations on earth based on astronomical observations from those areas. Ptolemy's original maps from the work were never found, having presumably been lost over the years, but his work was descriptive enough that cartographers were able to recreate his observations in 1300 AD, and create the Ptolemy map. His world map is notable for its probable role in the Roman expansion. Ptolemy's idea of using a latitude and longitude system had a significant impact on the work of later cartographers.......
The simple answer to this is they never existed. The reduction seen across much of England and Wales in the population of the 30 to 44 age range between 2001 and 2011 is a consequence of the low birth rates seen in the 1970′s. The majority of those born in that decade now fall within the 30 to 44 age range and because less people were born in the 1970′s compared to the 1960′s there was always going to be a reduction shown for this particular age range when compared with the previous decade. In 2001 the 30 to 44 age range accounted for 22.6% of the total population of England and Wales, by 2011 this figure had dropped to 20.5%. In contrast to this those who were previously aged between 35 and 44 at the 2001 Census have now been combined with the population of the post-World War II baby boom to create the only age range, 45 to 64, that has not had any population decreases over the past decade in any local authority. The 45 to 64 age range accounted for 25.4% of the total population of England and Wales in 2011, a rise of 1.6% when compared to 2001. Another interesting pattern seen is the population decrease in the 0 to 14 age range. This once again can be accounted for by low birth rates around the start of the millennium. These low birth rates can be seen clearly in the population structure of England and Wales, and to illustrate this point those who were aged 9 at the time of the 2011 Census accounted for 604,000 of the total population of England and Wales – the lowest contribution of any individual age band to the total population of England and Wales from the ages of 0 to 64. It is not until you reach the 65 age band where a lower contribution – 557,600 – towards the total population of England and Wales can be seen.....
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