Find Movies – by Location & Period! / / No Comments In September, we were graced with the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find where iconic movie scenes were filmed, and the World Cinema Atlas, which allows you to discover movies by where they were set Now, a new interactive map lets you discover films by both where and when they take place. If you have a keen interest in watching a movie set in a particular time and place, then TitleAtlas is the interactive map for you. For example, you could use TitleAtlas to search for films set in 19th-century New York (Gangs of New York, Little Women, etc), or to find movies set in London during the Swinging Sixties (The Krays, Quadrophenia, etc). The TitleAtlas search... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Find, location, Movies, period
A Year of Lightning / / No Comments This animated map shows a year’s worth of lightning strikes across the United States. The animation reveals the clear seasonal patterns of lightning storms across the U.S. As you watch the animation, you can see the country’s lightning season move northwards with the changing seasons. During winter, lightning is largely confined to the Gulf Coast before activity spreads north in spring. By summer, thunderstorms are lighting up much of the country, with particularly intense activity across Florida and the Southwest, before the storms retreat south again in autumn. The map is one of the latest visualizations from the ever impressive mapped.earth. I recently featured mapped.earth’s... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Lightning, year
Providing Global Relief / / No Comments Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn’s global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map’s colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view. As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world’s mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Providing, Relief
Using AI to Annotate Vintage Maps / / No Comments Bosphore 1819 is an interactive version of a beautiful 1819 topographical map of the Bosphorus. The original Plan Topographique du Bosphore de Thrace ou Canal de Constantinople et de ses environs was surveyed by François Kauffer between 1776 and 1786, before being redrawn and expanded by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage and published in 1819. The original map is wonderfully detailed, but navigating it isn’t particularly easy – particularly if you can’t speak or read French. Hundreds of villages, palaces, fortifications, streams, capes and other landmarks are labelled using French spellings of Ottoman Turkish names. Bosphore 1819 turns all those labels into a database that can... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Annotate, maps, using, Vintage
Shine a Light / / No Comments There are plenty of maps that show you where the world’s lighthouses are. Lighthouses, live does something much more interesting: it shows you how they actually work. Instead of just showing each lighthouse as a static point on a map this map gives you a sense of what its light signal actually looks like at sea. Lighthouses, live plots charted coastal lights on a dark, night-time relief map and animates each one according to its real-world light characteristics. Some lights sweep continuously across the sea, while others flash in distinctive sequences, with the timing and colour of each beam taken from nautical charts. Impressively, terrain data is also used to block the light based on... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Light, Shine
The US Deportation Map / / No Comments Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported ‘include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.’ The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration’s global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have been deported there alongside a breakdown of the nationalities of those who have been deported. The map is part of The Deportation Project, an international investigation involving 24... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Deportation
GeoWhisperer – See How the World Has Changed / / No Comments Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic ‘park’ is being built over. This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Changed, GeoWhisperer, World
170,000 Movies – One Interactive Map / / No Comments I recently reviewed the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house. However, the fact that a film was shot near you doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie is set in your neighborhood. In many cases, filmmakers use one location to stand in for another, either because it’s cheaper, more convenient, or simply looks the part. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, while set almost entirely in the moody, nocturnal streets of Greenwich Village and Manhattan, was shot almost entirely in London. Even more astonishingly, London was also used to create some of the iconic, sweat-soaked... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 170000, Interactive, Movies