How the World Draws the World / / No Comments I recently shared this map (above) showing the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people playing the Borderline country border game. This combined map brings together all the borders and coastlines drawn by players in Borderline and its companion game, Coastlines. In Borderline, players attempt to draw the outlines of individual countries on a blank map from memory. The results can be surprisingly interesting, which is why, alongside the global map above, you can also explore How the crowd draws every country. This multiple-map visualization animates between each country’s actual borders and a composite outline created from all the players’ attempts to... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: draws, World
A Fair Election Map for the Midterms / / No Comments Will there be fair elections on November 3rd? I can’t promise that, but Karim Douieb can promise a fair election map. His 2026 House Forecast Map replaces the standard geographical congressional district map with one where every district is equal in size. Click the “One seat, one cell” button, and the map morphs from a ‘geographic map into one where each state is resized by its seats and every district gets the same area.’ Reading the Battlefield The interactive map synthesizes data from the Cook Political Report, categorizing all 435 House seats according to race competitiveness ratings: Solid / Likely / Lean Democrats: 214 seats Solid / Likely / Lean Republicans:... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: election, Fair, Midterms
The World’s Most Notable Places. / / No Comments Do you remember the World’s Most Notable People Map. On Monday, I decided I’d build a World’s Most Notable Places Map, showing locations based on their Wikipedia QRank. I abandoned the project today after discovering the Wikipedia Importance Map. Earlier this month, Wikimedia Enterprise released the Geospatial Wikidata Databset.. This is a large, open dataset that connects geographic features in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with information held in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage. The idea behind the dataset is simple but powerful: OpenStreetMap tells you where things are and provides their geographic shapes, while Wikimedia projects can tell you what they are, why they matter... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: most, Notable, Places, world's
There are 89,603 Dogs in New York City / / No Comments There are 89,603 registered dogs in New York City. Dog owners are required to obtain a license for their pets, registering details including the dog’s name, breed and birth year, along with the owner’s ZIP code. Every Dog in New York is an interactive map that puts this canine census on the map, revealing which breeds dominate individual neighborhoods, where particular dog names are most popular, and how the city’s dog population has changed over time. Using the map you can search for a breed, a dog’s name, or a neighborhood to discover where your pooch would fit in – and where they would stand out from the crowd. The map is colored by the most common dog breed... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 89603, City, Dogs, there, York
What America Looks Like After 700 Meters of Sea Level Rise / / No Comments Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters? The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters – meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment. If you’re looking to explore actual, science-backed climate projections rather than wild cartographic extremes, Climate Central’s Coastal Risk Finder is probably a better sea level rise map. However, Sliding Shores does offer a more... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: after, America, Level, like, looks, Meters, Rise
The World is Your War Zone / / No Comments There are quite a few ugly buildings in my town that I’d like to demolish. Now I have the chance to actually knock them down (if only virtually) with World Strike. World Strike is a fun new open-world, real-time multiplayer tank game where the arena is literally the entire planet – and every single building can be reduced to rubble. So if you’ve ever looked at a building and thought, “This would benefit from some high-explosive ordnance,” then World Strike is the browser game you’ve been waiting for. From a web mapping perspective, World Strike is an impressive technical showcase of Three.js integrated directly inside MapLibre GL JS. Rather than rendering standard... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: World, Zone
Mapping the Cosmos / / No Comments Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you. Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory’s survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of the changing universe. You can use Skyviewer to explore the results from these scans, navigating around Rubin’s imagery to discover stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. The experience... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Cosmos, Mapping
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