
Using collected memorabilia, newspapers, census data and some 21st-century mapping software, a Hopkins English and history professor and his small team of grad students have traced the first 20 years of Frederick Douglass’ life in Maryland.
Using collected memorabilia, newspapers, census data and some 21st-century mapping software, a Hopkins English and history professor and his small team of grad students have traced the first 20 years of Frederick Douglass’ life in Maryland.
Earlier this year, Johns Hopkins University historian N.D.B. Connolly worked with researchers from a handful of schools to assemble an online map archive showing evidence of government-abetted redlining. A writer for National Geographic took notice, including it in his list of the top maps produced this year.
If you don’t know what a tripoint is, don’t worry — I didn’t until this morning, either. According to the Washington Post, a tripoint — also known as a trifinium — is a place where three states converge. And Maryland’s got several of ’em.
The New York Times has a nifty new interactive map drawing on new research about income mobility in the United States. It’s so interesting to play around with that it’s easy to overlook a sad, stark fact: Baltimore City is one of the worst places in the entire U.S. for income mobility.
“Gentrification” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. Sometimes it’s a “loaded term”, sometimes it’s a warning, and sometimes it’s a call for development. But just where (and how) is such gentrification happening? Governing Magazine decided to examine the issue on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, looking at census tracts where certain signifiers of gentrification– home prices, median incomes, and educational rates– showed significant increases over a short period of time.
These “judgmental maps” have been popping up on the internet for several months now. They began with the “Judgmental Denver Map” created by a local comedian, which included helpful geographic designations like “to buy weed from rich hippies,” “boring wealth,” and “loose chihuahuas.” Since then, more than two dozen cities have earned their own similarly scathing maps– and now it’s finally Baltimore’s turn. (Check out the full size map here.)
According to Google autocomplete, Baltimore is bad, dangerous, poor, and ghetto. Turns out you can do the same thing with Yahoo autocomplete and get slightly different — and even more entertaining/insulting — results. Who knew that apparently thousands of people were searching Yahoo for “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people”?!
We’ve featured other data visualization maps on Baltimore Fishbowl, and even other data visualization maps that depict segregation. But none have been quite so, well, beautiful as the racial dot map put together by demographer Dustin Cable.
In Cable’s map, each point represents an individual person. Yes, that means that there’s a tiny dot somewhere on this map that stands for you. Of course, the overall picture is more like a impressionist painting, fuzzy around the edges and distinct only when you look up close. Zooming in allows an increasingly precise look at where people live in and around the city: from a distance, Baltimore clearly reveals itself as a majority-black city, with majority-white outposts extending to the north. But a closer look complicates things:
It was Baltimore’s 284th birthday yesterday. (Which is amazing! The city doesn’t look a day over 270!) To celebrate, the Atlantic Cities published a bunch of compare-and-contrast images illustrating how the city has grown and changed over the past century. But what’s even more interesting is what’s stayed the same — as evidenced by the 1911 harbor map vs. the 2013 harbor, which look remarkably similar.