When the proverbial cow kicked over the proverbial lantern on a Tuesday night in 1871 Chicago, it set in motion an urban transformation that would see its hodgepodge of wooden buildings replaced with the Windy City we know today. Now, thanks to the data viz wizards at Esri and the patronage of The Smithsonian, you can compare the two cities block-by-block.
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No matter what your beliefs, it’s hard to deny that the era in which the Bible takes place was a more, uh, brutal time, filled with plagues, salt pillars, and excessive murders—plus plenty of conflicting moral diktats from the man himself. Now, one designer has built a handy map to help us navigate the text.
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What if you could capture the entire history of recorded human existence into one epic infographic for the ages? Crazy, right? Back in the 1930s, a man named John B. Sparks tried—and The Vault recently dug up his attempt. It’s called the Histomap, and it’s still incredible nearly 100 years later, if just slightly out of date.
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On July 25, data fans rejoiced when New York City government opened up a gigantic amount geospatial data to the public. The dataset, PLUTO, is “a real-world version of SIm City” based on tax lot data (it sounds less interesting than it is). Now, maps based on PLUTP are hitting the web—and these are some of the coolest.
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These days we’ve got plenty of ways to visualize data within our cities, from car crashes to Flickr photos. But there aren’t many tools that let us compare information about multiple cities at once—until now. Meet Urban Observatory, a site that compares data from 16 global metropoli.
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As long as you’re not in the immediate landing path, meteorites are really fascinating. Over the past century, The Meteoritical Society has confirmed 606 eyewitnessed meteorite landings around the world. Designer Sebastian Sadowski maps them all out in a great interactive infographic that’s tons of fun, until you realize you’re a meteorite’s sitting duck no matter where you live.
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I don’t have any superpowers. Neither do you. But we can both salivate with envy at all the marvelous flavors of superpowers we could have, if they were real. And to aid us in that noble pursuit, Pop Chart has put out their Giant-Size Omnibus of Superpowers, a (fairly) comprehensive menu of powers and their associated owners.
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Twitter never tires of finding clever new ways to show off its mountains of tweets, it’s going literal with actual mountains of tweets. Twitter’s in-house data visualization scientist Nicolas Belmonte put together these new, interactive, topographical maps of tweet history, and the result is a digital mountain range like you’ve never seen.
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The Center for Investigative Reporting is doing a really serious and extensive multi-part series on the drug trade and border patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are budget analyses, infographics and policy reviews. This is legit reporting. But you know what, sometimes you get so wrapped up in your work that you don’t realize you’re getting a contact high. It happens. And it’s the only thing that explains this video.
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While you folks are doing your Saturday thing and maybe checking out ol’ Giz now and then, somebody’s gotta write it. That somebody is me, and this is what it looks like. From a cursor’s-eye perspective anyway.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
