Maps

Act on Facts is an Australian Google Map designed to promote renewable energy and highlight renewable energy campaigns and projects. Check out the information windows on this map. If you mouse-over a marker on the map a small window opens, displaying the title of the marker project. If you click on the marker the small window animates into a larger information window, which contains the full details about the project.

The Mapdwell Solar System helps Cambridge, Massachusetts residents find out how much electricity can be produced from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, how the financial investment will pay off and how much pollution will be reduced. The map uses Google Maps satellite imagery overlaid with a layer that displays the solar irradiation that falls on each roof in the city. The map takes into account the shape of roofs and even predicts the amount of solar radiation down to every hour of the day. Users can click on their house on the Google Map and receive an overview of their building's recommended system. System tabs allow users to view detailed information in four categories: money, investment, technical and environment.

My guess is that the most mapped data in the world over the last couple of months has been from New York's new Citi Bike scheme. Here's a little round-up of some of the maps created so far. Let's start with the official Citi Bike Stations map. The Citi Bike Google Map shows the location of all the city's bike stations. If you select a station's map marker you can find out how many bikes are currently available and how many docking stations are free. That's about it for this map, although the map does show planned bike stations, using yellow map markers. So you can at least see if a station is likely to open anywhere near you in the near future. The CASA Global Bike Share Map is one of the better bike share maps. The map (using OpenStreetMap map tiles) allows users to mouse-over bike stations and view how many bikes and empty docking spaces are available. The markers are also color-coded to show at a glance which stations are more empty and which are more full. The Global Bike Share Map includes an interesting feature that allows the user to animate through the last few days of activity at each bike station. It is fascinating to watch the bike station activity pick-up and die down through rush hour periods and through the night. The Global Bike Share Map has the added bonus that you can view the same visualisations for many other city bike sharing schemes around the world. The WNYC Bike Share Map doesn't do anything amazing. You can click on each station's marker and view how many bikes and how many empty docks are available. However I have to include it here because it uses the Google Maps API new map style - so it does look beautifully clean and fresh. The Atlantic Wire has a near real-time Google Map that updates with the latest activity at all the city's bike stations. A few times a minute, the map checks the Citibike database and drops a marker on the map where there has been some activity. Messages are also added below the map that report which stations have just seen a bike returned or borrowed. If you want to join the biking crowd then you should check out this map of routes and tips to cycling in New York. The New York Times' Your Biking Wisdom in Ten Words is a handy reader's guide to biking in the Big Apple. The map includes readers' tips on good and bad biking locations and a number of popular cycling routes, care of Strava users. If all these Citi Bike maps have got you inspired you should get along to the City Bike Civic Hack Night on Wednesday June 26th. You should also check-out Citi Bike Stats, which has a lot of interesting graphs and charts using data from the Citi Bike scheme. There are no maps but there is a lot of lovely data.

Chet Van Duzer's Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps does what it says on the tin: you really will find out more than you ever wanted to about the sea monsters that appeared on medieval and renaissance maps. (Van Duzer defines them as anything that a contemporary reader would consider exotic, whether it was real or imaginary, so walruses appear along with krakens.) It's a dizzying catalogue of them, all kinds of them, from medieval mappaemundi (actually, there's a Roman map in there too) all the way to Ortelius and the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century sea monsters were giving way to sailing vessels, and to a loss of ornamentation and illustration in general. But: sea monsters. What was up with them? For the most part this book gets lost in the weeds, focusing in detail on monster after monster, but Van Duzer does sketch out an argument in the introduction: First, they may serve as graphic records of literature about sea monsters, indications of possible dangers to sailors -- and datapoints in the geography of the marvellous. Second, they may function as decorative elements which enliven the image of the world, suggesting in a general way that the sea can be dangerous, but more emphatically indicating and drawing attention to the vitality of the oceans and the variety of creatures in the world, and to the cartographer's artistic talents. Of course these two roles are compatible, and sea monsters can play both at the same time. (p. 11) Van Duzer goes beyond the map in his discussion of sea monsters. For one thing, he points out the non-cartographic sources of sea monsters, such as works of natural history, and compares them to the monsters on the map. He also looks at the economics of sea monsters, which were embellishments that cost extra and may have required a specialist artist: "if the client commissioning the chart did not pay for sea monsters, he or she did not recieve them" (p. 10). For my part, it seems to me that sea monsters in renaissance maps are also holdovers of medieval iconography, sort of a cartographic appendix. Being a big-picture sort, I glazed over a bit at all the detail, but this sort of detail is exactly the sort of thing that illuminates the subject. Between this book and The Art of the Map (reviewed here), I've learned quite a bit about the margins and empty spaces of old maps lately. Previously: Here Be Sea Monsters. Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer The British Library, 2013 Buy at Amazon • publisher's page • Goodreads • LibraryThing

Back in April, the Bingham Canyon Mine was home to the largest non-volcanic landslide in the history of North America, when nearly 70 million cubic meters of dirt and rock collapsed into the pit.  The NASA Earth Observatory website has posted imagery of the post-collapse site, which can be seen here: You can view that imagery in Google Earth by loading this KML file. Fortunately, because of the forethought of mine ownership, no one was injured or killed in the collapse: The company that operates the mine had installed an interferometric radar system months before the event that made it possible to detect subtle changes in the stability of the pit’s walls. Signs of increasing strain prompted the mine’s operators to issue a press release seven hours before the collapse, with a warning that a landslide was imminent. All workers were evacuated and production had stopped before the landslide occurred; as a result, no one was injured. You can read more about the collapse and the imagery on the NASA Earth Observatory site. The post The Bingham Canyon Mine landslide in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The Development Tracker provides detailed information on international development projects funded by the UK Government. The site includes a section entitled the 'Top 5 places we work'. This section includes Google Maps of five countries alongside details about the UK aid given to each country. Interestingly each of the Google Maps includes a nice little reminder that maps are always political. The Development Tracker has felt the need to add a disclaimer to all of the Google Maps that reads, "Country borders do not necessarily reflect the UK Government's official position". The Development Tracker also contains a prototype version of an API (application programming interface) enabling developers to retrieve the data in JSON format. There are also plans to open source the code for the Development Tracker, so that anyone can freely re-use or even contribute to the code.

StreetScout is a handy application for finding places to stop along a walking route. You tell StreetScout what you're looking for and where you're going, and it'll give you advice about where to stop on the way. Simply add a starting point and a destination and StreetScout will display the best walking route on a Google Map. If you fancy a coffee or maybe something to eat, or even a new pair of jeans then you just need to tell StreetScout what you are looking for. Places to stop along your route are also added to the map. Click on any of the suggested stops on the route and you can even view how far off your route the location is.

The MTB Project is a great resource for mountain bike riders, to find and share mountain bike trails. The home page of the MTB Project includes a searchable Google Map that can help users find nearby trails. Each trail also comes with a dedicated Google Map showing the route of the trail. The map is accompanied by an elevation chart, GPS route info, photos and detailed descriptions of the distance, surfaces and other important features. Each route includes an option to 'Take a Virtual Ride', which animates a fly-over route of the trail using the Google Earth browser plug-in.

A few days ago, the official +Google Earth page shared a neat tip to be able to see the sun’s shadows on the earth from “days gone by”: click View > Sun. Tilt your view so the horizon is in focus, and then adjust the time of day by using the slider in the upper left. Watch the sun and the stars move across the sky. The result looks amazing! It’s not a new technique, but it’s so much more beautiful in Google Earth 7.1  The image reminds me of some of the stunning screen captures that Dimitris Manias shared with us back when Google Earth 7.1 was first released. It’s amazing how far Google Earth has come since it was first released back in 2005, and it just keeps getting better! The post Shadows from days gone by appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The UK's Liberal Democrats Party has created a Google Map that purportedly shows how the political party has created 1 million private sector jobs whilst it has been the minority partner in the UK's coalition government. What's happening in your area? shows locations presumably where the Liberal Democrats believe jobs have been created. The map is obviously contentious. I've been trying to dig around employment rate statistics and the most optimistic statistic I can find suggests that the employment rate in the UK has grown by about half a million during the present government. However even if the employment rate has risen by 1 million the implication of the map is that all these jobs are the direct result of the Liberal Democrats' 'job creation' schemes. OUseful.Info has been digging around a little in the data behind the map. His post Critiquing Data Stories: Working LibDems Job Creation Data Map with OpenRefine is a very interesting account of how to access the data behind the map and how OpenRefine can then be used to start exploring the data. In a second post, Do Road Improvements Really Create Jobs, he then explores a little deeper into some of the claims made by the map.