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How Many People Have Been Shot in Your Neighborhood This Year? This Map Will Tell You.

“Thanks to a nonprofit, nonpartisan project known as the Gun Violence Archive, data on gun homicides and nonfatal shootings is now available well before the federal government releases its statistics. Those data include location information that makes it possible to plot those shootings on a map showing how many have taken place in your vicinity.”

Source: www.slate.com

Perspectives of gun rights and public safety are highly divided.  Part of those divisions are ideological, but there are also big differences between urban and rural America.  This map of the NRA’s “report card” on the legislators of Congress shows some pretty powerful spatial patterns.  This interactive map of people how have been shot this year shows a decidedly differnt pattern that the first.  

 

Questions to Ponder: How do most people feel about the second amendment where you live?  What about your local geography might influence those opinions? 

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How Many People Have Been Shot in Your Neighborhood This Year? This Map Will Tell You.

“Thanks to a nonprofit, nonpartisan project known as the Gun Violence Archive, data on gun homicides and nonfatal shootings is now available well before the federal government releases its statistics. Those data include location information that makes it possible to plot those shootings on a map showing how many have taken place in your vicinity.”

Source: www.slate.com

Perspectives of gun rights and public safety are highly divided.  Part of those divisions are ideological, but there are also big differences between urban and rural America.  This map of the NRA’s “report card” on the legislators of Congress shows some pretty powerful spatial patterns.  This interactive map of people how have been shot this year shows a decidedly differnt pattern that the first.  

 

Questions to Ponder: How do most people feel about the second amendment where you live?  What about your local geography might influence those opinions? 

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Satellites Are Now Cleared to Take Photos at Mailbox-Level Detail

The Department of Commerce just lifted a ban on satellite images that showed features smaller than 20 inches. The nation’s largest satellite imaging firm, Digital Globe, asked the government to lift the restrictions and can now sell images showing details as small as a foot. A few inches may seem slight, but this is actually a big deal.

Source: gizmodo.com

As reported by the BBC, this change in the legal use of geospatial information could have a huge impact on many industries.  Some are fearful that it could represent an invasion of privacy, and others see this as a way to harness new satellite technology to provide higher resolution data and improved data quality for researchers. 

Tags: mapping, images, remote sensing, geospatial.

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World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography

“More Americans came into contact with maps during World War II than in any previous moment in American history. From the elaborate and innovative inserts in the National Geographic to the schematic and tactical pictures in newspapers, maps were everywhere. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and by the end of the day a map of Europe could not be bought anywhere in the United States. In fact, Rand McNally reported selling more maps and atlases of the European theaters in the first two weeks of September than in all the years since the armistice of 1918. Two years later, the attack on Pearl Harbor again sparked a demand for maps.”

Source: www.newrepublic.com

Author of Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten explains how historical events created a huge demands for maps, revolutionizing the industry and leading to many new ways of visualizing the world.  

Tags: historical, mapping, war.

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An Intriguingly Detailed Animation of How People Move Around a City

Watch the commuting patterns of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Source: www.citylab.com

This CityLab article and the embedded maps show the rhythms and patterns that make city life so beautifully complex.  The Center for Advances Spatial Analysis has compiled numerous maps, time-lapse videos and other animations to show flows of urban life.  These are great resources to visualize the ‘spaces of flows.’  

Tags: mobility, mapping, visualization, urban, planning, unit 7 cities, transportation.

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Where Do Borders Need to Be Redrawn? – Room for Debate

What parts of the world should rethink their maps? Why and how?

Source: www.nytimes.com

Maps are always changing as a new nation gets added and old lines cease to make sense. Territory is claimed and reclaimed.  This series of seven articles in the New York Times explores regional examples of how borders impacts places from a variety of scholarly perspectives.  Together, these article challenge student to reconsider the world map and to conceptualize conflicts within a spatial context.

 

Tags: borders, mapping, political, territoriality, sovereignty.

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China publishes new map

China has published a new map of the entire country including the islands in the South China Sea (West Philippine Sea) in order to “better show” its territorial claim over the region.

Source: globalnation.inquirer.net

China is attempting to bolster its geopolitical claims through cartographic validation.  It as if to say, ‘it’s on a map, who can question that it is legitimately our territory?’  Why is a map such a powerful and convincing document?  Why is the Philippines upset by this map?  I think that explains this rival Filipino map as the Philippines and China engage in the cartographic version of dueling banjos.  (note the uage of the South China Sea or West Philippine Sea to refer to the same body of water) .  But this is more than just a map; it’s production has the potential to destabilize regional security.     

For more resources, the Choices Program has put together supplemental materials to investigate China on the world stage.

Tags: borders, toponyms, political, conflict, water, China, East Asia.

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Revolutionary War Battles

America’s war for indpendence began on April 19, 1775, when the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.

Tags: USA, historical, mapping, National Geographic.

Source: education.nationalgeographic.com

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Google Maps Smarty Pins

Smarty Pins is a Google Maps based geography and trivia game.

Source: smartypins.withgoogle.com

As stated in a review of Smarty Pins on Mashable, “Google unveiled a fun new game this week that tests players’ geography and trivia skills.  Called ‘Smarty Pins’ the game starts players off with 1,000 miles (or 1,609 kilometers if they’re not based in the United States), and asks them to drop a pin on the city that corresponds with the correct answer to a given question.” 


This game is wonderfully addictive…I haven’t enjoyed a mapping trivia platform this much since I discovered GeoGuessr.  I answered 38 questions before I ran out of miles…how far did you get?  

Tags: google, fun, mapping, place, trivia.

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