Website: Visual Communication: Timelines & Maps

Why use maps?

"Maps are tools. They can get you from one place to another and help you visualize the surrounding area.

Maps are primary documents of our history, marking a point in time as it was seen.

Maps give context to stories, helping the reader to understand "where the story exists in space.

Maps simplify complicated information. Maps take complex data sets and display them in a pleasing graphic you can use to answer questions about your world."

from 10 Reasons why maps are important

Timeline Tools

Neatline
Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines.
TimelineJS
TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines.

Creative Map Use

(Farm) Animal Planet
Livestock production around the world.
Journeying through a 17th-Century Apothecary Manuscript
The project uses maps to show where apothecary ingredients came from.
U.K. Song Map
"Design studio Dorothy innovates the way we look at an ordinary map. By transforming the names of familiar cities and towns into the titles of well-known songs, they’ve made getting from point A to point B all the more thrilling."

Map

John Snow's Map of London's 1854 Cholera Outbreak.

The cholera cases are highlighted in black.
Snow and other scientists were able to trace the cholera outbreak to a single infected water pump.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/mar15/happy-birthday-john-snow/

Map Tools

Harvard WorldMap
Build your own mapping portal and publish it to the world or to just a few collaborators. WorldMap is open source software.
Recogito
Recogito provides a personal workspace where you can upload, collect and organize your source materials - texts, images and tabular data - and collaborate in their annotation and interpretation. Recogito helps you to make your work more visible on the Web more easily, and to expose the results of your research as Open Data.
StoryMapJS
StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.

Maps Tell Important Stories video

"Science maps serve as visual interfaces to immense amounts of data, depicting myriad objects in ways that allow us to effectively discern apparent outliers, clusters, and trends." - Places & Spaces

Timeline + Map Tools

TimeMapper
TimeMapper is an open-source project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Labs for creating elegant timelines and maps.
VisualEyes
VisualEyes is an HTML5 web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations. VisualEyes enables scholars to present selected primary source materials and research findings while encouraging active inquiry and hands-on learning among general and targeted audiences.

Find Maps

British Geological Survey
The official geological department of the United Kingdom, it produced it's first survey in 1835.
China Geological Survey
China's official geological surveys.
David Rumsey Map Collection
In the 1980s, David Rumsey, president of the digital publishing company Cartography Associates, began building his collection by first focusing on maps of North and South America. With materials dating from the 16th to 21st centuries, the collection is unique in its scope of maps focusing on the United States.
ExploreUK
Search for maps held by the University of Kentucky.
Geological Survey of India
The official geological survey of India.
Geological Survey of Japan
Japanese national geological survey.
Geoscience Australia
Australia's national geological site.
Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections
Maps held by the Kentucky Historical Society, mostly of Kentucky.
Library of Congress
Search for maps held by the Library of Congress.
Natural Resources Canada
Canadian maps.
Servicio Geologico Mexicano
The Mexican Geological Survey is the agency that generates the geological-mining information of the country.
United States Geological Survey
Maps produced by the United States Federal Government.