Mapping your Email!

Immersion by MIT will map your Email connections for you - have a look at the demo (pretty cool!). Now here's the real question: will anyone actually do this and hand-over their Email to these three dudes from MIT?

Gloucester Harbor

Here is a great example of a detailed sonar (i.e. underwater) DEM spy-glassed underneath a regular bathymetric map with a series of place marker for places of interest: Gloucester Harbor

Rivers Dams 1800 to 2002

This is a very nice presentation by the folks from CartoDB: Mapping the spread of dams in the US. Also included is a map of dams per state, maps in major watersheds, and a risk assessment map for all dams.

North Dakota Inverted!

Very cool from TheUpshot: What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground

Superfund Sites

How close are you to a Superfund site is a simple and effective interactive web map. The interactive charts and graphics below are also quite interesting.

Urban Trees

Street trees in urban environments are a popular topics these days in urban planning and development and the NYT produced Nine Cities That Love Trees - tree maps for New York City, Philadelphia, Austin, Detroit, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Portland, Tampa, and Pittsburgh.

China's Supercaves

The title is typical 'sensational' for National Geographic, but the 3-D laserscanning technology and storymap visualization used are very impressive: China's Supercaves

Reasons For The Seasons

I'll be honest - I can't figure-out what to do with this: Reasons For The Seasons is a Google Earth KML animation, presumably to learn about the reasons for the seasons.

Earth Quiz

Earth Quiz is pretty cool: you can become a teacher and add your own sites, questions, hints, and media.

The Future of Visualization

This is pretty interesting:

Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide

In case you really need to know: Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide

Drones and SFM inside a volcano!

Worth the annoying Geico ad...

Landsat 8 on AWS and more

Landsat and Amazon were in the mapping news this week as the USGS and NASA are now making Landsat 8 data freely-available to anyone via the Amazon Cloud. Here's more from Jill Clark at Spatial Reserves: Landsat 8 Data Now Available on Amazon AWS - looks like the actual spectral bands are available, plus the metadata.

Here are two interesting Landsat 8 maps (via Maps Mania):

1. Landsat 8 creates a complete mosaic of the Earth every 16 days. Of course that does not mean that the image that your are interested in is actually usable - clouds are always an issue.
2. Landsat live is as close as you can get to a real-time picture of the entire Earth. Again, as before, your place of interest may be under clouds...just wait 16 days!

NASA Vital Signs of the Planet

NASA Vital Signs of the Planet is a nice and concise website around the facts of climate change: evidence, cause, effects, consensus, vital signs, and FAQ.

Vector Map

Hmm - weird, but cool: 3D extruded buildings, animated traffic: Vector Map

Data.gov

Data.gov is the home of the U.S. Governments' open data and pretty cool. For example, consider the Aquifers dataset with all the download options and excellent metadata. You can even open the data directly into Plotly and CartoDB.

Mapping with MS Excel

This was just a matter of time...Esri Maps for Office has been around for a while and now we have Power Map Preview for Excel 2013 from Microsoft. Aleks Buczkowski has a quick little tutorial over at Geoawesomeness.

Twine 2.0

Twine 2.0 is an "open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories" aka story games. Anastasia Salter has a post over on ProfHacker Making Story Games with Twine 2.0 and Dan Cox has nice Twine 2.0 Tutorial series on YouTube.

Wind History Map

Wind History is an interesting visualization of the prevailing wind speeds and directions at stations across the United States from 2006 to 2010. Here, for example, is KBOS (Boston Logan International).

QGIS Demo

Nothing fancy here, just a nice mapping demo using QGIS:

Science Mapping

Nature has a nice article by Mark Zastrow Data visualization: Science on the map as part of their Toolbox section featuring scientific software, app, and online tools. The focus is perhaps too much on TileMill and CartoDB, but still a worthwhile read.

Zaption

With Zaption you can edit and annotate online videos to make them more of a higher-order learning experience (read a review here). A campus license for 200 faculty and 6,000 students runs $5,731. Of course, there are other free options such as Vidbolt and VideoANT that do the same thing but without the built-in learning analytics.

ViziCities

ViziCities is (yet another...) 3D urban visualization platform and free and open source and global. Get the pre-release on Github!

Cool Maps!

Cool Maps is a pretty slick collection of maps made using Esri and ArcGIS Online, for example:

• Love Thy Neighborhood
• Sale of Two Cities
• Living La Vida Local

25 Maps that will change...

We've seen these maps and compilations before, but still fun to watch for 2:50 minutes:

It's hot out west!

This will become a real issue for the folks in Nevada, California, etc. this summer...lack of snow, lack of water, fire, etc. More here from NASA.

The Top-10 Coldest and Warmest Years

Well-done NASA: The Top-10 Coldest and Warmest Years (and even as a hip animated GIF!)

Climate Science: What You Need To Know

NASA Satellites

Tripline

Tripline is another option for quick and simple web mapping.

Scribble Maps

Scribble Maps is fun and easy to use - great for teaching!

Tools and Resources for Data Visualisation

Tools & Resources for Data Visualisation from Amit Kapoor

Remote Sensing Teaching Materials

This may be useful: The FIS Project (teaching materials for problem-based learning using remote sensing - more information).

EdGIS

EdGIS is a free website with free geotools for teaching and learning, for example:

1. Student Data Mapper
2. Digital Wall Map

More here: Tech-Enabled Field Studies 

FAOSTAT

FAOSTAT is the Statistical Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: data, interactive graphs, and maps - a great resource!

QGIS

That's nothing new - QGIS is a very capable open-source alternative to Esri - actually, in practice, probably the only realistic way to avoid Esri products as MapWindow seems to be stalling these days.

• Full QGIS Training Manual (includes PostgreSQL and PostGIS) - also available in print.
• QGIS Uncovered (excellent 25-part video tutorial by Steven Bernard)

Mountains of Fire

Great story map by Esri: Mountains of Fire

Natural Graphics

Natural Graphics produces Natural Scene Designer - a 3D mapping program. It's pretty inexpensive and they also sell the necessary DEM data.

indiemapper and Natural Earth

Free mapping tools and data: indiemapper is a simple and free tool to make maps inside your browser and Natural Earth provides excellent public domain vector and raster data. Plus, consider this compilation of free GIS data for all 50 US States.

Hail in the US

US Hail an animated heat map showing the distribution of hail across the USA between 1955 and 2013 - very cool and using all the currently hip tools.

Snowflakes!

CartoDB & Plotly & IPython

Talk about a hip combination: CartoDB & Plotly & IPython

Making Lithium!

Salar de Atacama (check it out in Google Earth!):