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Vote for your Favourite Map! August for me has gone far too quickly, and Map of the Month has also come round again very quickly! Fortunately, as was the case last month, there’s been some great maps to explore over the dry summer spell. To follow up on last month, congratulations to Craig Taylor on winning the inaugural Map of the Month with his awesome #PlotmyPaws doggy themed data viz. From looking at recent activity, #plotmypaws is going from strength to strength. Back working on my #plotmypaws project this weekend, lots of #dog tracks coming in now! I want to believe they are somehow coordinatingRead More →

World Cup Quiz

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Let’s get quizzical So today I’m going to be doing something a little bit different to normal. Rather than rambling about a great map or geographical subject, here’s something a bit more fun. I’ve talked about geography and football before (see here and here) and particularly recently with the World Cup currently taking place in Russia. Some of you may have enjoyed the excitement of the tournament, while some may have no interest in football whatsoever. However, hopefully some sort of love of geography and maps brings us all together – therefore I’ve made an interactive quiz below. While it relates to the 32 countries takingRead More →

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Surpassing goals With a matter of hours to go before the month long football extravaganza begins in Moscow, it seems an opportune moment to look at the relationship between the beautiful game and the beautiful subject (geography if you were wondering). This is a topic I have looked at previously, examining the relationship between economic power (through GDP at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)) and footballing prowess (through FIFA World Rankings). On the eve of the World Cup, it is time to revisit the current state of play. With two web maps, we can look at those who have qualified, past successes of countries, travel distances, andRead More →

Eurovision 2018 - Jury - Public Vote Difference

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Overcoming geography While dust settles in Lisbon, after another crazy night of Eurovision revelry, we can now take time to analyse the patterns of this most geographical of contests. Netta Barzilai won the contest with the song “Toy” for Israel, overcoming it’s isolated geography and lack of neighbours, to win the Eurovision Song Contest 2018. Maybe the best song really does triumph over geography and ‘political voting’. This is a topic I have covered in the past, and while it would be naive to think this is a solely music contest – one only had to hear the audible boos when the televoting came fromRead More →

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The double act of Music and Geography Firstly, a very belated happy new year, as well as celebrating the first year anniversary of The Map Den! I’ve really enjoyed getting further involved in the geospatial community through this website, sharing interesting developments and content in social media, and hopefully contributing in my own tiny way on here. Geography, the study and the communication of this through maps, GIS and other geospatial forms is a great passion of mine and I believe is inherently relevant to the world around us – perhaps more than ever. Everything happens somewhere. Another strong interest of mine is music, aRead More →

Santa Claus Story Web Map

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Santa Claus coming to town…via maps With Christmas coming soon and Santa preparing for his annual global delivery service of presents, I thought it would be an opportune time to investigate the origin of Santa Claus, using a story map created in Mapbox. To get the fullscreen version of the embedded map below click here, and hope you enjoy!   Finally and most importantly, Happy Christmas and have a Happy (mappy) New Year! Happy Mapping, DavidRead More →

Map of knowledge of Celtic language

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Croeso! Fáilte! Degemer mat! Failt ort! Dynnargh dhis! If you managed to work out the languages in the above greetings without Google, congratulations! For those who needed to Google (including myself), will know for the record that the above all means ‘Welcome’ in Welsh, Irish Gaelic/Scots Gaelic, Breton, Manx and Cornish respectively. However, despite being ‘native’ languages to their respective regions of the British Isles and Northern France with long histories, they are minority languages compared to English and French respectively, with differing fortunes and histories. In a previous article exploring the geography of Wales, we have seen how the Welsh language is a historical link to pre Angl0-SaxonRead More →

Dull Twinned with Boring

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Welcome to ‘Twin City’ Enter most towns, cities or villages in not just the UK, but in Europe and beyond, and you will likely find a ‘Welcome to [insert place name]’ and underneath ‘Twinned with [insert twin cities]’. Perhaps it is easy ignore these twin cities and linkages, or dismiss them as nothing more than symbolic, but what is the story behind twin or sister cities and what does it mean today? For those unaware a twin or sister city partnership is where there is a ‘friendship’ and legal/social agreement between one town or city (or even a region) to another , usually in a different country.Read More →

UK_ESC_Overall_Post2000_Points Comparison

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Trying to understand and explain the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) isn’t the easy. Tune in on the evening of 13th May 2017 and in between overly-scripted hosts, thumping Eurodance and ballards, you’ll treated performances like Azerbaijan’s which includes a man wearing a horse’s head. Meanwhile Italy is one of the favourites, despite having a man dancing in a gorilla suit- and this is par for the course each year in the ESC. For those unfamiliar with ESC,  on the face of it, this is an annual song contest where each competing European country writes and performs a song, which is then scored by a panel of judges andRead More →

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England is often known as the ‘home of football’ due to the its role formalising the first standardised rules of ‘association football’, and this game that was spread globally over the 19th and 20th century. In its early origins in England , the Football Association was formed in 1863, which formalised the rules of the game and started the FA Cup in 1871, but football remained an ad-hoc amateur game, run by those who could afford to play this as a pastime.  For example, the majority of founding FA clubs were private school teams, despite the large popularity of the game in the industrialised inner cities of Victorian Britain.Read More →