Category: GIS Christmas

Map of McDonalds restaurants – image  used under a creative commons license © Copyright Sasi Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Maybe you have seen this kind of map before? Worldmapper has lots of this maps where the area of each country is modified according to the datas being mapped. I think it is a nice way to present data, as it gives an immediate idea of how those datas distribute worldwide. For instance, in the map above it’s immediately visible that McDonalds restaurants are very common in USA, Europe and Japan.

Then we’re half way to Christmas of the days in December. Today I will share something that most probably have seen already, and that is the articles with “40 maps that… ” which were popular earlier this year. I’m happy for that, since it means that more people will learn about geography, maps and what kind of information can be presented through cartography. I have not checked if some of these maps are repeated in these articles.
40 maps that explain the world
40 maps that will help you make sense of the world
40 maps they didn’t teach you in school

For today’s post I thought I could make a list of the map-themed XKCD comics (one of my favourite webcomics). As for all XKCD comics, don’t forget to read the mouse-over text, which is always fun.

Randall Munroe, the creator of XKCD have made two maps of online communities, one in 2007 and the second in 2010. The most notable difference is that on the older map, Myspace, Yahoo and Windows Live are the biggest communities, while on the newer map Facebook and Facebook games are the biggest communities. Online communities 2007 and Online communities 2010.
He has also created a wiki about geohashing, a sort of adventure where an algorithm gives you some random coordinates every day, and you have to get to these coordinates. This can make for adventures like geocaching, or give you a new and interesting place to discover or meet someone. It now has its own community of XKCD readers who go on expeditions to random places.
Also check out his project What-if, that answers many interesting physics questions.

A comic about what your favourite map projection says about you: http://xkcd.com/977/
This comic makes fun of using population maps for mapping anything else: http://xkcd.com/1138/
Google maps does not always give simple driving direction according to this comic: http://xkcd.com/461/

A few other map-related comics:
Movie narratives, and also a sort of map of Lord of the Rings: http://xkcd.com/657/
An older map of the internet: http://xkcd.com/195/
All the subway systems in USA: http://xkcd.com/1196/
And finally, two comics about GPS:
Cheap GPS: http://xkcd.com/407/
And what you can do if you should get a GPS receiver for Christmas: http://xkcd.com/201/

At carbonmap.org, you can see CO2 emissions from oil, coal and gas extraction, from fossil fuel use and the carbon footprint of all goods and services consumed. You  can also see which countries are most vulnerable.

Maybe you have played an online game called Desktop tower defense? It’s a game where you have to protect your desktop from loads of “creeps” that try to get over your table. If you have then you might also like MapsTD, a game where you have to protect a place on a map from being attacked by creeps. You can choose the map area yourself, and then you have the choice of the ordinary Google Maps, Google Satellite or watercolour background map. It’s a simple but good timekiller.

The TeleGeography map gallery

Image source (click for full size).

The telecommunications market research and consulting firm TeleGeography have a big and nice gallery of maps with maps of global internet communication, submarine cables and voice traffic. They have both static and interactive maps. On the maps above you can see that there is a big cable between Norway and Svalbard. This is mainly due to the Svalbard Satellite Station, which downloads information from most of the polar orbiting satellites (for customers like NASA and ESA). These maps show the huge amounts of information being sent through the internet every second, and I, who has grown up in the internet age, can’t imagine how it was before the internet.

Since it’s Saturday I will link to a more fun map, the map of Vaguely Rude Place Names Of The World. The name of the map says what it is all about, places that have rude names. The Nordic countries have few places on this name, and I think this is due to the languages, as rude names in Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish will be hard to get for non-natives. I guess it’s a similar thing for Russia, where the Cyrillic names are hard to read if you don’t know the letters. But I’m surprised to see Canada this “clean”. Only Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in Canada have some rude place names. Otherwise I like the simple black and white layout of the map, and using open data like OpenStreetMap and Leaflet to power the map is in my opinion good ideas.

Here are several European maps showing the origin of common used words. I find it interesting that almost all of Europe uses the word ananas for pineapple (pineapple being one of few exceptions). These maps also explain the source of the word variations, which shows that our languages have more in common that I was aware of.

Today I want to share a link to another brewer, called TypeBrewer. This is a tool to help explore typography and get an idea of how different types can change the look of a map. The typography can also have an impact on how easily readable a map is, so it should be considered when designing a map. In TypeBrewer it is possible to choose between twelve different templates and then continue by choosing the font size, text density and text tracking (spacing between the letters). The template can be downloaded or printet out as a spec sheet. This is a useful tool that is based on best professional practices and principles in cartography and typography, so it may give a better result than just playing with the fonts in a map or graphics program.