Using maps to find out more than directions:
This recent post at The Society Pages looks at a website called Mapping The Measure Of America, which uses a variety of census data combined with interactive maps that let you slice-and-dice the United States by a number of different measures and see the results in several infographic styles. The post is a bit critical of using maps as a way to represent some of this information, but the project website itself is very interesting to poke around with. (I discovered the hard way that the Measure Of America site isn’t compatible with Chrome, so if you visit, be sure to use a browser other than Chrome).
Back in June at the height of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I posted about a site called If It Were My Home that superimposed the outline of the dimensions of the oil slick onto your Google Map coordinates to help illustrate the size of the spill in terms anyone could relate to. The BBC now has a site called “Dimensions” that does sort of the same thing, but with a variety of historical events and places: here, for example, is the Great Wall Of China superimposed over a map of New England, with Boston at the center. The wall would stretch from somewhere near Indianapolis, IN all the way to Newfoundland, Canada.
Via Eric Fisher, the guy who did those racial diversity maps of American cities, here’s a brand new blog called Bostonography by a pair of map/information design guys with ties to Our Fair City. One of their very first posts is a consideration of how we locals make mental maps of the Hub Of The Universe based on landmarks (including things long gone from the local landscape — a sure sign of being a REAL local is knowing where you are based on where things used to be), as inspired by the seminal work of urban planner Kevin Lynch. I’m watching this blog with keen interest to see what else they have to offer about the unique geography of Boston.
