Tag: maps

  • Boston Marathon

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post comes from the Boston Globe and maps the locations of the bomb sites along the Boston Marathon route yesterday. Credit for the piece goes to the Globe Staff.

  • Cartograms

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    Brendan Barry
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    Continuing this week’s map theme, we have an example of a cartogram from the New York Times. This piece supplements an article about how some manufacturing companies are starting to look away from China as a place for their facilities. There are two maps, the first (not shown here) looks at economic output overall. The…

  • Choropleth Maps

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    Brendan Barry
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    Keeping with maps, they can be useful, but all too often people fall back upon them because it is a quick and easy way of displaying data for geographic entities. This graphic from the New York Times on ADHD is not terribly complex, but it uses a map effectively. The article discusses how ADHD rates…

  • Waste Water Disposal Wells

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s map comes from the Texas Tribune out of Austin, Texas. The map displays the location of disposal wells, i.e. the sites where the waste water from fracking and related drilling operations are dumped. Firstly, the map hints that the fracking industry is not spread equally across the state. But secondly, the map does this…

  • Arming a Civil War

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    Brendan Barry
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    War is good for the arms business. So a long and bloody civil war in Syria is just what arms manufacturers want. And while arming the Syrian government is fairly easy, how do you get weapons and ammunition to the Syrian rebels? The New York Times maps the flow of arms through an almost Sankey-like…

  • Proposed Expansion of Massachusetts Railway Network

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    Brendan Barry
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    When we talk about new rail projects, or even highway or airport expansions, we like to include maps of new routes and destinations. In that sense this map from the New York Times is not new. However, we often forget in such visualisations that we have the opportunity to add layers of information that show…

  • The Life Expectancy Gap Between Men and Women

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post comes via my coworker Jonathan and his subscription to National Geographic. The spread below looks at the gap in life expectancy between men and women in the United States. Outliers are highlighted by drawing lines to the counties in question while the same colour scale is used on a smaller map to look…

  • Pro Tip #314: Don’t Stare Into the Sun

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Don’t stare into the sun. It’ll burn your eyes out, kid. Okay, so maybe that’s a stretch of a reference, but, seriously, don’t. Let the professionals do it with (properly shielded) telescopes and such. This piece from the New York Times looks at a solar flare from 2012 and shows how quickly it developed. The…

  • Analysing Amtrak

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    Brendan Barry
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    The Brookings Institution released a report investigating the ridership of Amtrak’s various routes in an attempt to identify ways of cutting costs. They also released an interactive piece along with the report that pairs a map with a simple table. Highlighting a route in the table highlights the route in the map and links the…

  • The United States Compared to the Rest of the World

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    Brendan Barry
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    Have you ever wondered how big the United States is? MAPfrappe allows you to compare different geographies in Google Maps. My employer has an office in Chicago and an office in Santiago, Chile. How big is Chile? North-to-south it is quite large. But east to west, the distance is like that of driving from Chicago…