Noah Veltman - History of San Francisco Place Names
Click around and learn a little bit more about The City by The Bay.
Reuben Fischer-Baum/Deadspin - Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (2013)
Our highest paid public employees tend to be university athletics coaches, but there’s a bit more to the story than that. Hop over to Deadspin and read the full explanation.
Abigail Reynolds - Mount Fear (2010)
One of the coolest concepts in thematic cartography is the statistical surface: the act of representing numerical data as a 3D landscape.
Reynolds’ cardboard sculpture of London obliterates the city’s physical terrain and replaces it with one derived from crime data. The result is a mountainous and desolate landscape, one that offers a potentially more realistic representation of the hostilities of the urban experience.
Dataphilia: Society x Numbers
Welcome to the first in a two-part essay examining the role of quantitative information and data visualization in modern society. This first part offers a critical investigation of the uniquely politicized and privileged role that quantitative information plays in our everyday lives. The second part will discuss what all of that means for those in the community of information visualization.
In February 2013, famed U2 frontman and activist Bono stood in front of an audience at TED and delivered a most curious manifesto:
“It’s fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data.”
Quirky one-liners aside: Bono’s TED talk was essentially about discussing exciting new statistics regarding world poverty. Bono promised to “forget the rock opera, the usual bombast”, instead embracing his “inner nerd” as an “evidence-based activist: a factivist”.
Switzerland: Demographics and the SVP (2013)
I’ve updated one of my older maps as an excuse to get my hands dirty with D3.js. It’s not outrageously sophisticated or anything, but it turned out relatively (…relatively) glitch-free and hack-free, so I’m decently satisfied.
The map focuses on the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a right-wing political party that has been a major player in the country’s politics since its rise in the 1990s. It’s a simple li’l interface that lets you cruise around various demographic and social data (college attainment, growth by immigration, foreign nationals, and unemployment), and learn a bit about how it relates to the SVP’s platform.
View it at http://www.resources.maphugger.com/switzerland/index.html
Susie Cagle/Josh Leeman - the Gilded City (2013)
I loves me some qualitative mapping, and this map combines the best in sketchy stylings with hard numbers.
Kelsey Dake/New York Times - A World of Secret Watering Holes (2013)
When life gives you lemons, use them to map the world’s most fascinating bars.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/07/magazine/food-global-drinks.html
Ursula Hitz - Swiss Alps in Words (2012)
Swiss mountains and their elevations assembled into a charming typographic map.
Northwest, near Grand River
This whole blog compares the Detroit-area street imagery from Google (circa 2009) and Bing’s (circa 2012). What a difference three years can make.
