London’s Rivers in Porcelain

The Little Globe Company is Loraine Rutt, a London-based cartographer and artist who specialises in maps created from clay, perhaps most famously crafting and hand-painting miniature porcelain globes in painstakingly precise detail. Her output is not just globe-based though, as this piece, showing London’s relief (hills and valleys) as well as its river network, both […]

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London’s Hidden Rivers

As London swelters a heatwave, people in search of a cooling waterside stroll might notice that London doesn’t apparently have many rivers. There is of course the mighty River Thames, and a few others here and there visible. But there are many more that you don’t just come across – they are just hidden underground. […]

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The Best of 2011

As 2011 draws to a close it is worth reflecting on what, I think, has been a defining year for mapping and spatial analysis. Geographic data have become open, big, and widely available, leading to the production of new and interesting maps on an almost daily basis. The increasing utilisation of technology such as Google Fusion Tables has …

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Naming Rivers and Places

A map doing the rounds at the moment (thanks to a plug from flowingdata) is Derek Watkin’s brilliant map of “generic” terms for rivers in the United States (above).The map shows how different cultural and linguistic factors have influenced the naming of geographic features in the US. For example French settlers named the streams they encountered “bayous”.

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