Category : maps

Matt Green is walking every street in New York City and taking photos along the way. He figures it will take a little over two years. Read more and watch a short video here.

You’ll really like Nikki Rosato’s Cut Maps. The Boston artist has created lacy, ghost figures out of roadmaps.

The New York TImes has created a great infographic that looks at Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Who knew Mad Men was such a consistent demographic predictor.

Calling it the Real Good Experiment, furniture retailer Blu Dot is placing nice, modern chairs around New York City for people to take home and use for free. The chairs, which retail for $129, are undoubtedly a great curbside score. The trouble is the chairs are equipped with GPS tracking devices so their journeys can be monitored publicly. Take a look at where they’ve been placed.

Check how federal stimulus money is being spent in California in this great interactive map.

Invasion of Poland began this morning. Warsaw bombed. For more than a year, the folks at the Orwell Prize and the Orwell Trust have been posthumously blogging George Orwell’s diary entries in real time, 70 years to the day since each entry was originally written. See images from the diary and follow along in a Google Maps travelogue.

Sunset at the end of the road on Google Streetview.

Spend some time exploring the amazing map of the Mannahatta Project. If you zoom in and click around, you can explore every damn block on the island of Manhattan and see what was there before 1609. After nearly ten years of research, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, working through the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, has used old maps and modern spatial analysis techniques to map every hill, valley, stream, spring, beach, forest, cave, wetland, and pond that existed on the island of Mannahatta. It also lists all possible animals, humans, and plants that could have been in there– on every damn block! The project claims the GIS database for the project is the most complete description of a landscape ever attempted. This year marks the 400th anniversary of of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Bay and other coinciding history goodness includes the exhibit Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City, at the Museum of the City of New York and the publication of Sanderson’s book, Mannahatta: Natural History of New York City.

Watch shoes being bought in real time on the Zappos Shoe Map. It’s nice real-time data visualization and more fun than watching paint dry, I guess.

You should go full-screen on the map above (top-right). Information Architects has come out with the (beta version) of their fourth Web Trends Map. A design firm with offices in Japan and Zurich, Information Architects has produced an annual visualization of web trends that reflect growth in traffic and branding. The map is modeled on the Tokyo Subway with heights representing traffic and branding and train lines colored by area of interest. Check out a final version of the Web Trends Map from last year.

There’s a great Immigration map in the New York Times today that shows how foreign-born groups settled across the U.S. during the past 120 years.

The latest release of Google Earth is out and version 5.0 has added some amazing 3D views of the ocean. Along with views of the terrain features below the sea, you can also see wave action (if your video card is new enough) and links and features from National Geographic, Cousteau Society, BBC, NOAA, and locations of shipwrecks and GPS tracks of sea life. GE5 now shows you historical views of locations, all the better to watch a suburb sprawl in a 50-year time lapse. Full exploration of planet Mars has also been added– and the flight simulator (Ctrl + Alt + A to start it) even works on the Red Planet. If you need to dig down more into the specifics of the 3D bathymetry or read more about the new release check out the (unofficial) Google Earth Blog or the (official) Google Lat Long Blog.

Google added a great feature to Google Maps today. It lets you see street level images in a few cities. So far it only looks like it works in San Francisco, NYC, Miami, Las Vegas and Denver. Let this nerd explain it. Or check it out yerself. A9.com had something like this a few years ago, but without Google’s muscle, it flopped I guess.

What’s the demographic lowdown on where you live? Check Neighboroo.

Here you go, an atlas of world faiths showing who believes what, where.

Great things spring English artist Susan Stockwell’s obsession with maps. Take a look at the Empire Dress, a Victorian style dress made from maps of the British Isles; or The Americas, a map of North and South America made from used coffee filters. She’s also made a lace from the pattern of South London arterial roads.