Human Geography





On The Line

Apr 27th, 2011 | By

I’ve been fortunate enough to look over the shoulders of  a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The project titled “On The Line” is an online, interactive history of schooling, housing and civil rights in the city of Hartford, Connecticut that was created by [...]



Getting rid of all Left Turns

Jan 19th, 2011 | By

Some transportation engineers at NS State University have published a new study that shows left turns aren’t needed.  We can create what are called “superstreets” that allow only right hand turns.  This improves both travel times and safety, not to mention fuel economy.  This isn’t exactly a new idea.  Michigan already has this type of [...]



Mapping Facebook

Dec 15th, 2010 | By

Mapping social networks isn’t anything new, but I find this lovely map of Facebook users in the BBC to be incredibly striking.  First, because it’s obviously beautiful.  Second, because you can use it as a proxy for the digital divide.  The map details connections between friends on Facebook with the bright points at the end [...]



Google Funds Offsite Windfarms on East Coast

Oct 12th, 2010 | By

Any of our long-time readers/listeners can tell you I’m a HUGE fan of offshore windfarms.  I think they flat out just make the most sense for sustainable energy production.  Apparently Google agrees with me.  Google is funding a windfarm that is supposed to stretch from New Jersey to Virginia and generate enough power to light [...]



Map of all the munitions dumped in Europe after WWI and WWII

Oct 5th, 2010 | By

OSPAR Commission has released a map showing the known locations where munitions where dumped following World War’s I and II.  The way of thinking at the time was the safest way to get rid of all of those unexploded bombs, grenades, land mines, and whatnot was to toss it in the sea.  The status report details [...]



Mapping the Segregation of US Cities

Sep 23rd, 2010 | By

The Atlantic Wire has a short piece about a series of maps by Eric Fischer detailing racial living in 40 of the largest US cities.  Unfortunately the maps are stored on Flickr as flat files, so it’s hard to zoom in and around to see more detail.  The basic method appears to get racial information [...]



Visualizing Average Days Worked and Vacation by Country

Sep 13th, 2010 | By

I’m a big fan of infographics, so much so that I sometimes find seeing spatial information organized in an non-spatial way (ie a map) to be the clearest way to communicate an idea.  This infographic detailing average work week lengths and average vacation days is one of the ones I think really works.  The combination [...]



Urbagrams – Mapping the social city

Sep 10th, 2010 | By

In order to investigate the idea of a social archipelago, the notion that our cities are “fragmented islands of social activity separated by large areas dedicated to commercial workplaces, flows of vehicles, residential sprawl or industrial sites.” Anil Bawa Cavia analyzed more than a million Foursquare check-ins in a number of cities and mapped those [...]



Wedding Geography

Aug 28th, 2010 | By

Several crafty types have created homemade moving compass wedding invitations for their weddings including a heirloom quality one made of recycled chip board, a super fun interactive one posted on Crafster with a great compass related poem, and some artistic hand drawn maps and compass invitations by Pier Gustafson. On the basic logistics side, many [...]



Facebook Discovers Places Exist

Aug 19th, 2010 | By

Alright, I admit I stretched a bit for that headline.  However, the important bit is that Facebook has now added Places to it’s features.  Places allow you to tag where you’re at when you post status updates.  On the benign side of the coin (that’s the Harvey Dent one for you DC nerds reading), this [...]