Maps Mania
Every year around 2.8 million trips are made by Chinese people traveling home to spend the Chinese New Year with their families and Baidu releases its Qianxi (migration) visualisation. This interactive map allows you to explore which national highways were the most congested over the Chinese New Year Spring Festival. It also allows you to visualise the movements to and from China’s largest cities over the holiday period.
The Map Room
On Sunday Tom Patterson announced that the Equal Earth Physical Map is now available for download in JPEG, Illustrator and GeoTIF formats. Unlike its political counterpart, no territorial boundaries appear on this map (though cities do). They’ve released the map into the public domain: if you don’t like their labels, or their choice of cities or colours or textures, you can make changes to the map and put out your own version.
Renaming Confederate Avenue(s)
Map of the week
Last week the City of Atlanta renamed Confederate and East Confederate Avenue to United Avenue. They also renamed a small street, Confederate Court as Trestletree Court. Google and Apple Maps both responded quickly with the new names. Over the years several streets with names honoring Confederate or Klan leaders have been changed. An article in CityLab includes this map showing streets that have been renamed in blue, recommended renamings in orange and other streets with Confederate names.
Technochauvinism, Deep Knowledge and Paper Maps
The Map Room
Paper maps continue to find their defenders. The latest is Meredith Broussard, author of Artificial Unintelligence. In a piece for The Conversation, she applies her argument against what she calls “technochauvinism”—the idea that the digital and the technological are always better—to mapmaking. “Technochauvinists may believe that all digital maps are good,” she writes, “but just as in the paper world, the accuracy of digital maps depends entirely on the level of detail and fact-checking invested by the company making the map.”
Maps Mania
DX Lab’s Pano-scope allows you to view some of the vintage historic panoramic photographs in the New South Wales State Library Collection. The library owns historical panoramic photographs taken in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales dating back as early as 1876.
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