A piano has 88 keys; Ohio has 88 counties. Cartographer Andy Woodruff noticed this fact while driving through Ohio to complete his Counties Visited Map, and decided, despite knowing nothing about music, to make a map based on this coincidence.
posted by yiftach on Aug 19, 2009 - 29 comments

Biblemap.org is an interactive map system for the bible, which is great for visualising where certain biblical events are said to have occured. It's also great for people who don't subscribe to any kind of organised religion but do like looking at maps (like me!).
posted by Effigy2000 on Jun 14, 2009 - 24 comments

A map of the top 50 craft breweries in America by volume. State map of per capita beer consumption. [more inside]
posted by baphomet on Mar 29, 2009 - 119 comments

"We can have all the applications and Internet connectivity [...] but that still won't get at issues of lack of electricity and cartographic literacy and suppression of geospatial information by the state and their complicit corporations" reads a recent post on Geowanking, a mailing list for GIS nerds. [SLMLP] [more inside]
posted by finite on Oct 9, 2008 - 13 comments

Visualizing Early Washington. A project at the Imaging Research Center of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has reconstructed the original landscape of Washington DC before its radical transformation into a modern capital city. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Sep 2, 2008 - 21 comments

Place Spotting ― Try to solve this Google map quiz. In the upper part of the page you see a satellite picture. Drag and zoom the map in the lower part of the page until it shows the same location as the upper map. Here's how.
posted by netbros on Aug 16, 2008 - 32 comments

John Henry Wilbrandt Stuckenberg emigrated from Germany to the United States, where he was eventually a Chaplain in the American Civil War. He also really liked maps; in the course of traveling over his lifetime, he collected hundreds of maps, some dating back to the 16th century. [Most maps in Latin]
posted by Rykey on Jul 26, 2008 - 6 comments

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome is a rich and innovative geographic database that projects Vasi's 18th century engravings of Roman architecture onto the contemporary map of Giambattista Nolli [previously] with supplementary modern satellite, photographic and mapping overlays together with copious background detail. The work was undertaken by researchers at the University of Oregon (announcement) [via]
posted by peacay on Jun 11, 2008 - 3 comments

Google to map the oceans.
posted by Artw on Apr 30, 2008 - 18 comments

Discoveries made using satellite imagery, particularly via Google Earth, have made headlines in the blue and green before. Increasingly high-resolution photos, combined with obsessive interest, have lead inevitably to the next step: interpretation and analysis of spots on the Earth's surface for which information is restricted, censored, or classified, such as the preparedness of military defenses in North Korea and Iran, or the viability of Saudi Arabia's next big oil play. Of course, not all mapping is benevolent.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Mar 13, 2008 - 9 comments

What does "globalization" look like? Princeton's searchable collection of historical maps and present-day analysis, including Artists' Travels in the Renaissance, an 1891 ethnographic chart, Telegraph Lines in 1869, Global Terrorism c. 1983, Oil reserves vs. consumption, a visualization of world development since 1960. (via)
posted by desjardins on Jan 6, 2008 - 13 comments

Maritime New York
posted by Miko on Dec 6, 2007 - 5 comments

Lost? Why not consult a map? Because, according to a past exhibit at the British Library, the mapmaker might have a political agenda.
posted by Rykey on Nov 12, 2007 - 14 comments

Maps new and old. Music maps - Find out who is listening to what and where l Cool Google Maps - Who knew maps could be fun? l Subway maps on five continents l Free printable world map and blank maps l Free Clustr Maps - Locate all site visitors. l Index of some users of WorldKit - Easy web mapping (including the excellent and previously mentioned, RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service) l Number of Inhabitants Per Doctor around the world l And some beautiful antique, old and vintage maps, such as this one of the names of the Mediterranean winds in five languages. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Nov 4, 2007 - 17 comments

The IDIOM Media Watch on Climate Change aggregates web content from 150 sources, accessible in the form of semantic maps, on which the topology of the Earth is redrawn as mountains and valleys according to the density of available information, or a three-dimensional 'knowledge planet' viewable in NASA World Wind. [Via Information Aesthetics.]
posted by jack_mo on Jul 7, 2007 - 5 comments

The Imperial History of the Middle East is a flash based map of the Middle East, with a sliding timeline showing the various forces that have established dominance in the region over the last 5,000 years. Just one of many interesting interactive demonstrations over at Maps Of War.
posted by jonson on Oct 2, 2006 - 33 comments

Do you know where you are? With Google Maps and Google Earth so commonplace now, GPS everywhere, and with websites such as our own Metafilter making use of latitude and longitude did you ever stop to think about how all this latitude, longitude and height above sea level works? The UK's Ordnance Survey explains it all in A Guide to Coordinate Systems in Great Britain. Discover that different coordinate systems might differ by as much as 200m, and that your house may be moving as much as 1m up and down each day relative to the centre of the Earth, and many other bits of geographical interest.[more inside]
posted by edd on Sep 6, 2006 - 4 comments

CensusScope. US Census 2000 data displayed through maps, rankings, and charts. [more inside] Warning: some pages render funny, but usable, under Firefox 1.5.0.4.
posted by Slithy_Tove on Aug 18, 2006 - 7 comments

A Cultural Geography of the United States and Canada. Many, many great maps from Valparaiso University. The section on religion, in particular, contains a great deal of interesting data.
posted by Gamblor on Sep 20, 2005 - 27 comments

Online Historical Map Exhibits from the Smith Centre for Cartographic Education. Nice collection - take a look at the Columbus Letter, Portuguese America and the exhibit on diasporas.
posted by plep on Aug 12, 2004 - 3 comments

Fool's World Map: "This is a project visualizing the world map which many fools in the world imagine. If you can see this map comfortably, you are definitely a fool." The creator updates and reformats the malleable map based completely on capricious, erroneous geographical inconsistencies found within oblvious statements from his comment logs. Examples: (095. Upper right side of Germany became Australia due to a posting by another stupid American thinking "Australia is beside Germany.") and (001. Due to a Texan who thinks "Japan is accessible from Texas by car", Japan and Texas is land-attached."). He also has a page of user-submitted maps, where he encourages you to create your own global eyesore and send it to him.
posted by naxosaxur on Aug 3, 2004 - 26 comments

Illusions, Delusions, and Confusions: Mythical Geography in Antique Maps, courtesy the Philadelphia Print Shop. (via tui)
posted by Ufez Jones on Jul 30, 2004 - 7 comments

MapMachine.
posted by Gyan on Apr 23, 2004 - 3 comments

If Mapquest just isn't cutting the mustard, or you feel compelled over the holidays to take your geekery to new and mysterious depths, the National Map Viewer from the U.S. Geological Survey is your new best friend. The dynamic interface lets you layer roads, topos, and satellite imagery on top of one another at your whim. And if you're really hardcore, make your own app by downloading and mining the Census Bureau's TIGER database.
Note: Map viewer and interface may not be friendly to all browsers; this is a common limitation of government websites.
posted by PrinceValium on Dec 24, 2003 - 7 comments

Geographical fun: being humourous outlines of various countries, with an introduction and descriptive lines.
posted by monju_bosatsu on Dec 11, 2003 - 5 comments

Nation Master An amazing resource that displays all sorts of comparative national statistics on practically everything, and with an option of selecting any region / list of countries you choose. It plugs itself as "The world's biggest general stat site" (which might or might not be true I don't know), and it has a wealth of data on economics, sports, population, geography and a dozen more categories. Some interesting statistics; Top 100 in Olympic medals per Capita. Top 100 Murders with firearms (per capita). Top 100 Military Expenditures as a percent of GDP . Top 100 Net migration rate .
A heaven for data freaks.
posted by talos on Jul 10, 2003 - 30 comments

A fresh perspective on world maps. Francis Irving writes about his fascination with upside down maps, "It needn't be a Eurocentric world." Why haven't more upside down maps made their way into our daily life?
posted by ericrolph on Apr 18, 2003 - 15 comments

"My name is John Johnson, I come from Wisconsin..." Find out the historical distribution of your last name throughout the U.S. (This will not, alas, be useful for Mr. Johnson, or the Smiths, Joneses, Williamses, and Browns of the world.) Brits, we haven't forgotten you! Of course, if you're doing genealogical research, you can turn to specific resources, like the US Census or the massive Familysearch.
posted by snarkout on Sep 10, 2001 - 15 comments

Map enthusiasts might enjoy The Geography Network, a new venture from ESRI, vendor of the most used GIS system. The site includes an in-browser viewer, so you don't need to own any ESRI products to see the free data. If you do, though, the data's yours for the downloading. They've already got the latest TIGER census maps as well as a ton of maps and information from around the globe. They hope to create a central location for GIS data sharing, and they're off to a good start.
posted by ewagoner on May 10, 2001 - 4 comments

These aerial photos must have the security services worried. The Millenium Map company has taken high-quality, detailed photographs of the entire UK, and from Jan 31st anyone can visit www.getmapping.com and view photos of their house at a scale of 1:1000, or more interestingly, zoom in on GCHQ and US National Security bases, such as the one at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, which supposedly is a key part of the worldwide surveillance network codenamed Echelon.
posted by echelon on Jan 27, 2000 - 0 comments