visualization

An Intriguingly Detailed Animation of How People Move Around a City

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

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.

July 12, 2014 0

The Invasion of America

This interactive map, produced by University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt to accompany his new book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, offers a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776 and 1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear, indicating the establishment of reservations (above is a static image of the map; visit the map’s page to play with its features).

Source: www.slate.com

In the past I’ve shared maps that show the historic expansion of the United States–a temporal and spatial visualization of Manifest Destiny. The difference with this interactive is that the narrative focuses on the declining territory controlled by Native Americans instead of the growth of the United States. That may seem a minor detail, but how history is told shapes our perception of events, identities and places.

Tags: USA, historical, mapping, visualization.

June 20, 2014 0

Why Map Projections Matter

This is a clip from the TV show West Wing (Season 2-Episode 16) where cartography plays a key role in the plot. In this episode the fictitious (but still on Facebook) group named “the Organization of Cartographers for Social Justice” is campaigning to have the President officially endorse the Gall-Peters Projection in schools and denounce the Mercator projection. The argument being that children will grow up thinking some places are not as important because they are minimized by the map projection. While a bit comical, the cartographic debate is quite informative even if it was designed to appear as though the issue was trivial.

Questions to Ponder: Why do map projections matter? Is one global map projection inherently better than the rest?

Tags: Mapping, geospatial, video, visualization.

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