The Map Room

The Guardian has taken the data from the Wikileaks Iraq war logs and plotted every death in Iraq on a map. Related article. Via Boing Boing and Google Maps Mania. See Google Maps Mania for links to other map mashups based on the Wikileaks release.

The BBC’s interactive map of Baghdad’s violence shows key locations, ethnic areas (which change throughout the period) and bomb attacks and casualties by month. Via Boing Boing.

Tofu’s “1520+ Hometowns” is a collage of all the town names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, cut from road maps: “In March of 2004 I began a map piece cutting out the hometown of each American serviceman and woman killed in Iraq. … In some cases the towns were so small that I had to search many maps and atlases to find them. One of the disturbing by products of this work are [sic] the maps of various states with many rectangular pieces missing where I cut out towns.” Via Kottke’s remaindered links.

A dramatic and effective animated Flash map that illustrates casualties suffered by coalition forces in Iraq over time: “The animation runs at ten frames per second — one frame for each day — and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred. Each dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot which fades to black over the span of 30 frames/days, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war.” Via Boing Boing.

Swissinfo has a story about a Swiss cartographer who’s put out a post-occupation, up-to-date map of Baghdad. The map is an update of a 2002 edition, but now includes such landmarks as bombed-out infrastructure and other changes since the invasion.

“Our strength consists of mentioning particularities and offering insider tips that have not been published anywhere else.”

Rohweder, who has never been to Baghdad, based the latest version on his 2002 edition and on satellite photos and images. But he needed a co-worker on site to do the fieldwork.

Martin Herzog, his business partner who is married to an Iraqi, spent about three months in the city collecting information on street names and buildings to update the map, which covers central Baghdad.

The cartographer’s company site is here; the site uses frames, but the Baghdad page, sans frames, is here.

The New York Times has put together an informative map of all the attacks in Iraq over the past 30 days — 2,368 in all. With breakdowns by type: small arms, homemade bombs, etc. Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.