Mapping the world’s writing systems. Also see this visual history of how sounds became shapes and this short animation on who invented writing.
maps
LATEST
Gorgeous vintage map of the Moscow metro, 1980. Pair with Transit Maps of the World.
Mapping LGBT rights by country. Also see this map of LGBT rights in the American workplace and the Guardian’s stellar visualization of LGBT rights by state.
Pair with The Politics of Homosexuality, the seminal 1993 article that turned the tide.
Mapping the sudden move towards marriage equality between 1970 and 2012, in an animated GIF. Compare and contrast with a map of European laws about LGBT marriage, then wash down with a heart-warmer.
Gorgeous 1660 map depicting New York’s humble start. Next, the story of how Manhattan got its famous grid.
Also see Mapping Manhattan, hand-drawn personal memory maps by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Gladwell, and 72 other New Yorkers.
Gorgeous altimetric radar image map of the Ishtar Terra region of Venus. Pair with a visual history of mapping the cosmos.
The history of the U.S. Civil War, in a beautiful timeline from 1897. Pair with Cartographies of Time.
A jarring look at how quickly the U.S. got fat between 1985 and 2010. To put things in perspective, see this visual tour of how the world eats.
Tweets sent by the same person within a 4 hour time-window were used as samples of speed and direction. These samples were used to construct a vector field representing the average flow of people within the area. The vector field and total tweet density over the space were then used to simulate the movement of people. Particles, representing people, were released at locations where actual tweets were recorded and their subsequent movement was determined by the flow field. The particles start out blue and gradually change through purple to red over time so each trace shows the direction of movement. Locations where there is little movement will have blue dots or very short blue traces. Longer traces with more red show a greater speed at that point.
Movement in Manhattan based on tweets. Complement with some deliciously analog, subjective, hand-drawn maps of Manhattan.
XKCD mashes up all of North America’s subway systems into a single giant map. Pair with Transit Maps of the World.
The Facebook data team maps support for marriage equality based on the geography of those who changed their profile pictures to the Human Rights Campaign’s pink-on-red equal sign.
Juxtaposed here, for some striking correlations on the geography of open-mindedness, with a map of passport ownership.
Body mass index around the world, visualized. Pair with What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.
