More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.

Three maps, three stories.

The top map is Cleveland, where I used to live. Everybody’s leaving. It looks like an explosion.

The middle map is Austin, where I live now. Everybody’s moving here. It looks like a black hole.

The bottom map is Pickaway County, Ohio, where I grew up. Hardly anyone leaves. Hardly anyone moves in. It looks like a puddle.

Treasure Island Map - Classics Illustrated #64 - 1943 - Comic Book Cartography

Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways-curving, crossing, branching-defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.

Slideshow of the book

Looks awesome. via Kottke.

via Steve Juras

Here, from Floating Sheep, is a map showing where different kinds of Christianity predominate in the United States. If you’re a little unclear on how these different branches of Christianity relate, there’s an overview here, a family-tree style chart here, and tables that compare their beliefs and practices here.

Via Richard Florida

See that little red Methodist band near Southern Ohio? Yep, that’s me.

Bobulate on “Cartography for an audience of one”:

Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication, has been studying wayfinding — not in the maps from professionals — but in the handmade maps that people draw for one another:

Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient — they edit out unnecessary information. They often include what Stiff calls “an error detector, something that tells you something’s gone wrong.” (If you see the red barn, you’ve gone too far.) They adhere not to mapmaking norms but to the user’s particular needs.

More than boxes and arrows, they’re conversations:

The maps we draw for one another also have a certain ephemeral beauty. Each map is the product of a conversation. While most professional maps serve “countless numbers of people who have countless purposes,” Stiff says, maps like these are “made for an audience of one.” Examining these bits of personal cartography — studying the ways “we edit, we twist, we rearrange, supportively” — can teach us how humans really perceive and understand maps.

This from Slate’s ongoing six-part series on Signs: How They Tells Us Where To Go.

Finding images in unexpected places…

These maps don’t work. Whenever I see no color on these maps, I think that part of the country is probably doing less of the sin, when in actuality, no color = average, green=good. If you glance at the gluttony map, it looks like only Texas and Virginia/North Carolina are gluttons — instead, the whole country is average, those are just the spikes (no green, anywhere).

(via @cubitplanning)