This week, we’re happy to begin a 30-day preview of one of our most distinctive interactive mapping projects: The London Low Life Map. This map was produced for Adam Matthew Digital, a digital publishing company based in the UK. Adam Matthew produces digitized archives of historic primary source documents, collected around a central theme, for higher education institutions. This map was built as part of their London Low Life collection that explores the seedy underbelly of Victorian London. It examines the documents of sex, drinking, gambling, and the institutions that sprang up to combat those very vices. As the map is integrated into Adam Matthew’s collection, we will only be able to grant access to our readers for 30-days. I encourage you to explore the map and enjoy Adam Matthew’s fantastic collection of historic maps and images. Since we’ve pulled the map out of the collection, I wanted to give you some context on what is included.

View the map >>

Historic Basemaps

The full London Lowlife project gives users access to a mountain of primary source documents from Victorian London, so it only makes sense that we start with maps made of greater London during this era. We’ve included some metadata with each of these maps (author, date, publisher) to give historical context and placed them on top of a custom Cloudmade basemap (with adjustable opacity) to give some modern context as well.

Taking these historical maps from raw image to geographically accurate overlay was an incredibly intricate procedure. While some maps existed as single, contiguous images, others were scanned in their current forms as pages, separated by fraying canvas. Before we could rubbersheet the maps to OpenStreetMap data (with the help of the UW Cart Lab), we had to manually remove the seams and align the resulting image fragments to one another. Furthermore, because these maps were at different sizes and scales, we had to build a system that would identify maps with limited resolutions and restrict the zoom levels available on the fly.

It’s fascinating to view the changes in the street maps over time, especially which streets were given primary status then and now.

Tallis Streetviews

In the mid-nineteenth century, John Tallis drew detailed views of the fronts and façades of buildings along Central London’s streets. Originally designed as a “visual yellow-pages” (businesses would pay to have their shops labeled), his 88 plates now survive as a first-person perspective into the streets of Victorian London.

We wanted to make these plates as immersive as possible. With the help of AMD’s editorial staff, we took Tallis’ original image and added some color to sharpen the images, shadows to depth, and a blue-sky background to increase the realism of the images. Finally, the images were run through Google Sketchup to create the perspective views that place you in Victorian London and allow you to look down either side of the street.

Be sure to click the “view original” button to see the original plates to view the intricate detail surrounding the street images.

Thematic Data

While the historic basemaps and Tallis Streetviews of the London Lowlife map attempt to provide insight into the qualitative aspects of Victorian London geography, we also wanted to explore the changing character of the population through quantitative thematic mapping. Simple demographic measures like population and density can provide a major insight into the nature of a city. However, we believe the most telling indicator of life in Victorian London, and certainly true to the name “low life” ascribed to this project, is the explosion in social services that sprung up throughout the city to deal with the new urban population.

By dragging the timeline to view an animation of the entire century, you can watch population increase in various sections of the city and then the services emerge to try and meet the need.

Victorian London

The final section of the map gives a taste of the larger London Lowlife project by placing a selection of the primary source documents on the map. It’s an engaging way to explore city by viewing some fantastic records of the landscape and people of Victorian London.

Mouse over a category point on the legend list to quickly highlight all corresponding points.

View the map >>

We’re very happy to be able to show-off our collaboration with the Illinois Department of Public Health and IPRO. This map makes information about the quality of health in communities available to the public, highlighting socioeconomic disparities that may exist. When combined with our indiemapper platform as well as linked graphs and charts, the clinical data in the map can be used to examine the health needs of a community, county or region for better policy and planning.

Above is a quick demonstration video showing the basic functionality. After watching the video, check-out the map itself.

I only have a few rules in life. One of them is when the makers of this gin offer you a straight-up trade–bottles for maps–you take it… and you don’t cut your partners in on the deal. That was the situation when a friend-of-a-friend approached me to build this simple locator Google maps mashup which I took on as a side-project away from my normal Axis Maps work.

Death’s Door Spirits is a craft distillery based out of Washington Island, WI and distilled in Madison, WI. They use locally-sourced ingredients for their gin, vodka, and whisky which they distill in small batches. While their small-scale makes their products excellent, it also makes them tricky to locate. The purpose of the map is to simply show where you can buy bottles or cocktails containing their spirits.

Since the map was so straightforward, it gave me the opportunity to experiment with a few new technologies I’ve been meaning to check out. Here’s what I thought…

Styled Google Maps: Death’s Door has a fantastic graphic identity thanks to some great work by Grip Design (who also contributed some designs to this map). I wanted the map to fit in with their existing style while stripping out a lot of the extra Google Maps data that would clutter up a map like this. Google Maps Styled Map API allowed me to do both. The styled map wizard was helpful for sketching out styles but mostly I was making whole groups of features invisible and going with stock colors for the roads and water. Not being able to input RGB values for these styles made the process harder than it should have been.

Amazon SimpleDB / CloudFusion: I’ve been a big fan of Amazon’s SimpleDB technology since we used at as the foundation for indiemapper user management. I’ve found it to be more reliable than MySQL and faster as well (but that could just be our budget hosting plan). It was a little unapproachable to me at first but the CloudFusion PHP library made it as easy–if not easier–to query the database and parse the results for the map. The biggest missing feature here is a nice front-end browser like PHPMyAdmin which would have allowed the client to edit their data directly. Instead, I had to build some rudimentary tools so they could manage their data themselves.

Google Font Directory: It was nice to have access to a wider variety of fonts than just the standard web-safe font-family sets. The Google Font Directory gave me access to a limited but FREE selection of a nice variety of fonts distributed across Google’s massive network. Most useful was Yanone Kaffeesatz which is a dead ringer for the Death’s Door title font. The fonts can be a lot to load at runtime so it was important to pare down only to the fonts I was using in the map.

jQuery Ajax / jQueryUI: Made it incredibly easy for someone with my level of programming skill (let’s call it “recreational” to be polite) to efficiently get the data into the map and build some nice UI effects like animation and the accordion component. I can’t recommend it highly enough so there’s going to be no italics section with the caveats in it.

You can view the full map here …and if you’ve got any good cocktail recipes, that’s what the comments are for.

Death’s Door Spirits Locator