Tags: geography

Misconceptions

Some common geographic mental misplacements.

Globle

Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.

Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.

Time Lords | Lapham’s Quarterly

A fascinating look at the history of calendrical warfare.

From the very beginning, standardized global time zones were used as a means of demonstrating power. (They all revolve around the British empire’s GMT, after all.) A particularly striking example of this happened in Ireland. In 1880, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared GMT the official time zone for all of Great Britain, Ireland was given its own time zone. Dublin Mean Time was twenty-five minutes behind GMT, in accordance with the island’s solar time. But in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, London’s House of Commons abolished the uniquely Irish time zone, folding Ireland into GMT, where it remains to this day.

Mapping a World of Cities

A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.

Lights at sea

Lighthouses of the world, mapped.

An Atlas of Cyberspaces- Historical Maps

These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.

Let’s make the grimy architecture of the web visible again by Russell Davies

Beneath the URL shorteners, the web!

It’s increasingly apparent that a more digitally literate citizenry would be good for a thousand different reasons. A great way to start would be to make URLs visible again, to let people see the infrastructure they’re living in.

Tom Waits Map | A map of places from Tom Waits songs

This geography lesson makes a nice companion piece to Johnny Cash has been everywhere, man.

Sound Mirrors

Before there was radar, there were acoustic mirrors along the coast of England—parabolic structures designed to funnel the distant sound of approaching aircraft.

Submarine Cable Map 2015

This year’s map from TeleGeography is looking lovely.

Tobias Frere-Jones: My Kind of Neighborhood

Some sleuthing uncovers an interesting twist in New York’s psychogeography:

All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.

How to see through the cloud

This is a great explanatory piece from James Bridle in conjunction with Mozilla’s Webmaker. It’s intended for a younger audience, but its clear description of how web requests are resolved is pitch-perfect primer for anyone.

The web isn’t magic. It’s not some faraway place we just ‘connect’ to, but a vast and complex system of computers, connected by actual wires under the ground and the oceans. Every time you open a website, you’re visiting a place where that data is stored.

Edible Geography

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this site up until now, but it’s right up my alley: equal parts urban planning, ethnography, and food science.

Submarine Cable Map

This year’s TeleGeography map of the undersea network looks beautiful—inspired by old maps. I love the way that latency between countries is shown as inset constellations.

Dronestagram

A new project from James, keeping track of the sites of illegal drone strikes.

It’s been just a week since Clearleft unveiled the Map Tales project that we built at Hackfarm and there have already been some great stories told with the site.

Paul documented his 2009 road trip to South by Southwest.

Alessio put together a photographic guide to his adopted home, showing the secrets of Barcelona.

Andy told two tales of two different trips: wine-tasting in California’s Dry Creek Valley and hanging with the hipsters in East London.

Fellow Brightonian Tom Prior has recreated the story of the famous Stirling Moss victory at the 1955 Mille Miglia, the legendary open-road endurance race in Northern Italy.

I love the simplicity of Oliver and Peter Walk to School that Peter Ruk has embedded on his site—beautifully simple psychogeography.

I’ve made a map tale of the voyage of The Beagle with material fromAboutDarwin.com.

Meanwhile Anna is putting together the tale of the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole because—get this—a relative of hers was part of Scott’s team!

There’s plenty of room for improvement with Map Tales. It would be nice to have customisation options at some point—colours, fonts, maybe even map tiles. Some narratives would probably work better with aerial imagery, for example. In fact, that’s something that Andy has been tirelessly tinkering with. To get a taste of how that looks, check out Britain From Above, the epic map tale of the 2008 BBC documentary series.

Historypin | Home

Old photos placed on a map. Quite engrossing.

The Landscape of Music

The geography of musicians.

TURF BOMBING

Turf Bombing is a device-agnostic location-based game. Could be fun. I've already claimed my neighbourhood.

MapMSG.com - Statetris

Very very cool and addictive cross between Tetris and geography knowledge. It took me 19:45 to get all of Europe on a medium setting. That's pathetic.