Today, I'm going to call attention to mapmaking by one of our Cartographica users, Stephen Taylor. You can see his Animation of Covid-19 New Cases, and updates to it on his YouTube Channel. The illustration uses a colored circle to show the daily count of new cases for each county relative to the county's population. We're happy that Cartographica could be one of the tools that was helpful in bringing this animation to life. Stephen, commenting on his work: The project started in early April when I and the circle of friends tried to come up with a way of …

Due to the quick-moving nature of the COVID-2019 (2019 Coronavirus Disease), we are not going to publish any maps here directly, as they would be nearly immediately out of date. However, if you're interested in the latest updates from the World Health Organization you can visit their Coronavirus disease 2019 situation reports page to get the latest. They are posting a new report (PDF) daily. In addition, There is a daily map being produced by a number medical establishments available at HealthMap.ORG, complete with links to a data archive on GitHub.

Dinosaur Database has a really interesting interactive map which will show a location on the Earth as it has moved through time. Type in your address in the upper-left corner and then use the menu at the top of the page to dial back time to show that location as it would have been millions of years ago. Although the map has few practical uses, the educational value is significant and it's a great illustration of the power of visualization.

The United States National Park Service maintains and controls more than 84.4 million acres of park land in the United States. Much of the land is historical in nature and has been preserved for future generations to enjoy and learn about the various parks. The use of the parks is as varied as the many historical and ecological characteristics that define each unique location. One of the most popular types of parks within the United States are National Military Parks. These parks are typically located on the sites of famous battlefields and other important historical and strategic locations around …

West Nile has increasingly become a concern of U.S. health professionals and officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A recent interview reported in USA Today revealed the concern that the CDC is giving the recent West Nile outbreak. According to the article, CDC Director of Vector-Borne Infectious Disease, Lyle Petersen, is quoted as stating, "We think the numbers may come close to or even exceed the total number of cases reported in 2002 and 2003, both of which were severe West Nile virus years." According to CDC numbers there were more than 250 deaths due to …

Drought conditions and high temperatures throughout the world are causing problems with wildfires. There are presently several thousand wildfires burning throughout the world, which have resulted in millions of dollars worth of damage. NASA has made available a set of shapefiles that identify the locations of wildfires presently burning throughout the world. The shapefiles are nearly real-time with data available at time intervals of 24 hours, 48 hours, and 7 days. Click on the following link to Download the wildfire data. For this post I downloaded the wildfire data from Russia and Asia. Once the data are downloaded import them …

We are continuing our coverage of the 2012 Olympic games in London, England, and we have an updated medalcount.csv file that can be used to map the distribution of medal counts around the globe. Download the medalcount.csv file. The medal counts are accurate up to 1:00pm on Wednesday, August 1. [Updated Final medal counts are available by downloading Final_Medal_count.csv] Once downloaded, save the file as a .csv. This dataset can be used to create choropleth maps and can be continually updated as the games progress. Download the World file from Geocommons and then import the data …

The 2012 summer Olympics in London, England are here, which is very exciting for many athletes and fans of sports from across the globe. This year's Olympics will host athletes from more than 200 countries and will consist of nearly 40 sports. The games will run from July 25 - August 12; for a schedule of the events take a look at the schedule on the official Olympics website. To celebrate the diversity of the event we decided to build a dataset that contains the countries participating in the Olympics along with the number of athletes from each location. The first …

The recent Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama's health care plan has been received with mixed feelings across U.S. states. The goal of the health care plan is to ensure that all American's have an equal opportunity for health care insurance. A key aspect of the Obama health care plan was to expand Medicaid to cover those who were not covered by Medicare. This expansion was meant to fill the gap for people who couldn't afford insurance, but were determined to be poor enough to be exempt from the penalty for not holding insurance. The penalty for not …

MapQuest has recently made available, through information on their developer website, access to their tile servers for OpenStreetMap-style tiles of satellite imagery (mostly from government sources) and their street databases. Because both CartoMobile and Cartographica support customized OpenStreetMap-style tile sources, you can now add these to your maps. Cartographica Desktop Within an existing mapset, add a new live layer by choosing File > Add Live Map… Choose Other OpenStreetMap Server: from the list of sources Type the following into the URL box: http://oatile1.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/sat Click Add A new layer named OpenStreetMap Live will …

In an article released last week it was reported that the Federal Aviation Administration has released the names and locations of Organizations approved for flying drones within the U.S. Drones have become infamous over the past several years due to their use for military purposes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other places. The use of the military technology for domestic purposes should not be unexpected as we have seen many military technologies cross-over for domestic purposes. Many argue that the use of such Military technology in local police agencies may be problematic and seen as an increase in …

Not done with Cartographica, but a good visualization of the spill so far, the NY Times has put together a animated series of maps of the oil leak showing the extent and (to the right) the comparison with the Exxon Valdez and the "largest accidental oil leak into a body of water", also into the Gulf of Mexico, but lasting 10 months before it was stopped.

Building off of the last post I decided to incorporate Google Earth and some analysis to show where Al'Qaida and Taliban forces have been concentrating in Afghanistan. To determine the areas of operation of both of these terrorist organizations I compiled information from various sources to create a basic map of where these groups are operating and where the U.S ground forces are focusing their attention. After a little research I created a basic map of the areas of operation by simply using the measure tool in Cartographica to determine the X and Y coordinates in order to create …

The war is Afghanistan is currently an important issue for many people. Many families have loved ones serving our country in an attempt to fight global terrorism. Generally, speaking most of us know very little about the landscape of Afghanistan, including topographical, infrastructural, and political, layout of the country. In an attempt to provide a little spatial information about Afghanistan I have put together a blog post highlighting some of these issues related to this war torn county. The data for this blog post was recovered from Afghanistan Information Management Systems which is a free GIS data download website. The …

The DC GIS department has teamed with the DC Department of Public Works, to do this animated map of snowplows. Despite the fact that the animation leaves tracks, it gets the point across, and it's kinda neat. Basically, it's recorded real-time plow data superimposed over the map of the District.

I recently came across an interesting New York Times article about crime in New York City. The article mentions that crime in NYC is highest during the summer months, which is a common finding among criminologists and others interested in crime trends. The article includes an interesting use of mapping by including an interactive map where victims, offenders, motive, and weapon can be viewed. The article mentions that crime in NYC is highest in the summer months, which is a classic issue in Criminology, and one that has been studied by numerous researchers. The increase in crime during the summer …

This post is an extension of the last Google Sketch Up/Google Earth example. In this post we are going to do a similar process except we are going to import a large structure on a larger plot of land. This posting is using an example that I developed after the city of Lexington, Kentucky announced that a new 40 story hotel would be built downtown. I used this opportunity to design what I thought would be an interesting building for the city. In this example we are dealing with a plot of land that actually included about 20 parcels …

We all remember when the economic stimulus package was announced earlier this year by President Obama. However, what we were unsure about was were all of the money was going. MSNBC has released a new mapping tool that allows users to see where and how much stimulus money has been spent. The stimulus tracker is very interesting because it allows users to see not only where stimulus money is being spent, but also in what ways the money is being used. The website provides state and county level data and provides a detailed list for each project that is being …

I recently came across a great website called World Wind Central that has compiled a great source of orthophoto data. I decided to use data form the website to show how to download import and map orthophotos along with data collected from the census bureau. In order to create maps with orthophoto data included, you first must download the orthophoto data from a website like World Wind Central . If you wish to include census data you can simply download shapefiles and import the census and orthophoto data into the same map (assuming they are on the same projection). To illustrate …

Building off of Gaige's May 2009 post regarding data available online from the city of Washington D.C. I decided to create a few interesting maps just to show some of the analytic capabilities of Cartographica. The city of Washington D.C. provides a large range of data regarding practically anything that can be spatially analyzed within the city. For this example I decided to collect several demographic, infrastructure, and other social data to create a few interesting maps. Compiling a large amount of data from an online source such as D.C. GIS is a valuable skill to learn …