Maps, Everywhere - Or, How to Waste a Few Hours

[Interactive map of internal displacement from Show/World]

There are few things I love more than maps, and so I tend to spend an inordinate amount of my time looking for interesting maps online.  Which is one reason why working from home is dangerous.  Or, put another way, yet another sign that I probably need a life.

Anyway, it seems a shame to let such labors go to waste, so below are a few of the most interesting and useful maps I've found over the past month:

- First is Mapping Worlds: New Maps for World Affairs, where it's possible to lose a great deal of time.  The Humanitarian Response Index map is particularly interesting, showing how countries rank in terms of their provision of humanitarian and development assistance.

Most addictive, however, is the Show/World project, which resizes countries so that their appearance on the map represents the data for a particular subject.  For instance, if you look at their map on internal displacement (above), the largest countries suddenly become Sudan, Colombia and Iraq, while most of the western world fades to a microscopic size.

The Show/World project includes maps on a wide, wide range range of topics, everything from demographics to armed forces spending to remittance flows.

Other maps after the jump:

- Second is Ushahidi, which combines user-generated reports and Google Maps to integrate crisis-related information.

The site "allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them."  They currently have maps dedicated to tracking the conflict in Congo and xenophobic attacks in South Africa.  Their initial map looked at post-election violence in Kenya.

- Third is the InterAction Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Map, created by developmentseed: "The Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Map identifies by country the diverse range of current NGO capacities that indicate the level of community preparedness or that could potentially be leveraged in a pandemic situation."

Which in plain English means that the map allows you to drill down and look at the number of projects per country under a number of sectors, including information on each project.  More information is being added all the time.

- Finally, there's also a place in my heart for traditional, non-interactive maps.  Especially the map Africa: Conflicts Without Borders, which provides both the most detailed and easily visualized glimpse of Africa's conflicts of any map I've ever seen.

Random quote: "This is what you shall do.  Love the earth & sun & the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income & labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all that you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have th richest fluency, not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion & joint of your body." (Walt Whitman)