atlanta mapathon

In an effort to position Atlanta as the most digitally mapped city in the US, over 200 volunteer organizers carried out a large-scale, mapping exercise in the city two weekends ago. The "mapathon" was organized by citizens, professors, geo-professionals etc and OpenStreetMap (OSM), an organization that promotes "the most accurate" mapping through open source mapping - allowing the public to contribute and access maps and geo-data free of charge. Basically Wikipedia and Google Maps had a beautiful love child.

The founder of OSM, Steve Coast, founded the organization to address what he saw as a lack of community and user contribution, as well as restrictive licensing that prevents public access to important and useful data.

The Atlanta Mapathon was apparently a huge success and will be followed up with monthly mini-mapping parties!

people-mapping by the mapping people

I read about Worldmapper and one of their studies on BBC News. Worldmapper itself is an initiative of various geographers at Sheffield University (and one at University of Michigan...) that reinterprets maps to visualize different demographic information. The map shown above is from a series of population maps that the group developed to emphasize population densities  in different countries.

Professor Danny Dorling, who oversaw the study, argues that the creation of these maps "changes how you think about places...if you really want a fair map of an area you do it by population. What you are interested in most of the time is people." (via BBC News)

While I don't necessarily agree with this statement (depends on what field you're working in!), I do agree, of course, that population is a critical measurement to take into consideration when studying regions. On a country-by-country level, I don't think that these visualizations really add much to the comprehension of population densities. However, from the perspective of say, a planner trying to get his/her bearings on a new town, city county etc, this would be a really helpful visual tool to interpret population trends throughout the area of study.

Many of the other visualizations Worldmapper does are really instructive, such as an animation that displays internet usage over time or one that shows age of death worldwide.