Christmas Islands

It is Christmas and Its been a busy time so please enjoy these maps of Christmas Island (aka Kiritimati)

Via Enderra

 Or, if you prefer the Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

30-Day Map Challenge

For the month of November, Topi Tjukanov announced a 30 Day Map Challenge on Twitter.

Announcing #30DayMapChallenge in November 2019! Create a map each day of the month with the following themes 🌍🌎🌏

No restriction on tools. All maps should be created by you. Doing less than 30 maps is fine. #gischat #geography #cartography #dataviz pic.twitter.com/6Go4VFWcJB

— Topi Tjukanov (@tjukanov) October 25, 2019

I did not take the time to participate but was amazed at the people who did, many of them every day-and some of the results are pretty fantastic.  I will highlight some of the ones I liked (mostly showing the tweets) though I did not see everything that came along.
For example, here is Lego Oaxaca.

Día 28: Divertido / #Yïkxekp

Un mapa de las #naciones de #Oaxaca en estilo #Lego#30daymapchallenge pic.twitter.com/atCYy1lWrQ

— Colmix (@Colmixe) November 29, 2019

Mangroves vs Hurricanes

#30DayMapChallenge Day 25: Climate - Mangroves vs Hurricanes
Mangroves have the ability to lessen the impact of flooding caused by hurricanes (reducing storm surges by 26-76%) BUT they are in an annual decline globally. pic.twitter.com/zH2nsElrFS

— Christopher Pollard (@CRVanPollard) November 25, 2019

European Hydrology

#30DayMapChallenge nr 26 (hydrology): Where each drop of rain in Europe (EU, actually) flows to pic.twitter.com/8iJ9krRRtE

— Maarten Lambrechts (@maartenzam) November 26, 2019

More from Maarten Lambrechts here.

Here is elevation data from the Philippines from Carl Churchill-his other work can be seen on his Flickr album.

New York CityBike data as animated hexagons-press play.

#30DayMapChallenge Day 4: Hexagons

Citibike trip data binned into hex pillars by finish position and pivoted into hourly blocks by stop time for New York.

Data via: https://t.co/OFuEtfnixP#map #3d #dataviz #nyc pic.twitter.com/tAnVDy1s5r

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylorGIS) November 4, 2019

Commuter Rail in the Northeasten USA

My submission for #30DayMapChallenge day 2 - lines:
Commuter rail (not Amtrak) in northeastern US. Some data was hard to find (esp @MTA). I've taken these lines from Wilmington DE to New Haven CT. Shows how challenging #railroad is in US. #Map produced in #QGIS 3.8. pic.twitter.com/HKgzCUYRr8

— Philip Pierdomenico (@PhilPierdo) November 2, 2019

London Fried Chicken Territories

London chicken territories, based on purveyors of fried chicken. #30DayMapChallenge #Day28 #Funny pic.twitter.com/DJZxBOqHrE

— Heikki Vesanto (@HeikkiVesanto) November 28, 2019

and whatever this is.

Mapping #30DayMapChallenge pic.twitter.com/ZpJpJpKJBN

— emil (@57x025) November 28, 2019

For more here is a huge gallery of submissions.

Jerusalem Over and Under

This month's National Geographic has a remarkable map showing Jerusalem's buildings and sites throughout its many eras of settlement. The fold out map is best seen on paper in the magazine but here is an image of it from Twitter,

Holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, modern Jerusalem has been shaped by 3,000 years of worship, conquest, devastation, and rebuilding. For @NatGeo, we worked on how to visualize this in a graphic. THREAD (1/21). https://t.co/qhwIBdAqNb pic.twitter.com/rhvl5y4AnJ

— Alberto Lucas López (@aLucasLopez) November 26, 2019

and a still frame from the animation above.

The tweet above begins an interesting thread of tweets detailing some of the challenges in creating these graphics. Here is another tweet from that thread showing some of the 3D buildings

Using architectural plans, photographs and text descriptions that included building dimensions, we made detailed 3D models of buildings. Some of the architectural plans were pulled from the website https://t.co/uJJdjp5GEY. Others from the Library of Congress (@librarycongress). pic.twitter.com/xOeoYD6SEh

— Alberto Lucas López (@aLucasLopez) November 26, 2019

One minor issue I have is the size comparison below. While most of us on the east coast of the United States understand this, I'm not sure how meaningful this is to people in other areas of the world.

For bonus content their web page lets you scroll through historical eras to see models of various buildings.

Atlas of Boston History

Via University of Chicago Press

 My wife bought me a copy of the newly published Atlas of Boston History for an anniversary gift. Editor Nancy Seasholes has enlisted a great team of cartographers, historians, planners and even economists to put together a well written and illustrated history. While it is tempting to take photos of some of my personal favorite maps and diagrams, in honor of copyrights I will stick to what is shown on their look inside pages. Sorry for the mediocre image quality.

The book progresses through history so a good start is the geologic setting. The two main colors represent two types of bedrock in the basin, Cambridge Argillite and Roxbury Conglomerate or Puddingstone. The green shapes are drumlins, glacial deposits smoothed into small hills. I really like the diagram below showing the layers of (mostly) glacial deposits from different eras, some from river or undersea deposits and a top layer of where the swamps and bays were filled in. This page also shows buildings and other features made from these rocks.

Here is a map showing the conflicts with the Natives of the area during "King Philip's" War.

Boston in the Revolutionary War era.

Here is a part of a map showing the Abolitionist Movement in the first half of the 1800's.

Some transit maps - the streetcar lines,

and the subway or elevated lines from 1918.

Finally, here is Boston's "racial dot map" for 2010, showing a city with a majority non-white population.

Lots more to see here. A nice holiday gift for the Bostonophile in your life.