Schiaparelli’s Beautiful Canali

For those of you without at least a passing interest in Martian cartography, Giovanni Schiaparelli was one of the first astronomer's to map Mars using a halfway decent telescope. He drew exceedingly detailed maps of what he saw, depicting massive, linear trenches he called canali. He firmly believed these were too straight to be formed by any natural process, and that they must have been artificially produced by inhuman minds (perhaps even cool and unsympathetic ones). His maps were the state of the art for about 20 years. BibliOdyssey has a wonderful post showing some of Schiaparelli's maps, which are far more beautiful than I had imagined, having previously only seen crude reproductions in 2-tone print. Wonderful stuff. Via The Map Room

Skulls, Bones, and Mother Ships

It's probably wrong of me to find a UNOSAT map of recent pirate activity off the coast of Somalia kind of hilarious, but they actually used the skull and cross bones to iconify pirate attacks, and did, in fact, use the phrase "mother ship." I'm sort of ambivalent about the map as a whole. The spatial distribution of attacks is interesting (why so many hijackings around Mogadishu and Mudug?) as are the narratives, but the cartography leaves something to be desired. Land features get an inexplicable amount of detail and attention for a map depicting strictly maritime activity, and the iconography is almost meaningless (we get it, skulls and bones mean pirates). The colors create thematic associations fairly well, but seem primarily focused on the narrative callouts, which are arguably of secondary important to the locations of the attacks. Probably the most interesting data graphic is the bar chart at the bottom, depicting a (significant?) drop in absolute pirate attacks correlating with changes in government. Via humanitarian.info and Nick

Chicago Field Museum Maps Exhibit

This site is gorgeous. Suggested by Jeremy.

Flow Map Layout

Several researchers at Stanford have written some software for visualizing flow maps. There pictures are very pretty, and, I think, good data vis. The map above shows the top ten states providing migrants to NY and CA. Here's their abstract:

Cartographers have long used flow maps to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network. The advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. Most flow maps are drawn by hand and there are few computer algorithms available. We present a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. Our techniques are inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings and distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another. We demonstrate our technique by producing flow maps for network traffic, census data, and trade data.