Readers interested in curious cartographies may enjoy this unusual interactive map of Ohio created by professional cartographer Andy Woodruff. While the map's appearance is fairly conventional, what sets it apart is that Woodruff, upon realizing that Ohio has 88 counties, assigned each county to correspond to one of a piano's 88 keys based on census data, thus turning Ohio into a cartographic musical instrument of sorts. Users can choose a census attribute, such as population per square mile or percent renter-occupied units, then "play" the map by mousing over the counties. Other options include playing a route between two cities, all the counties as a chromatic scale, or the song "The Entertainer." This version is actually Woodruff's second iteration of this project, which had to be rebuilt in HTML and Javascript after Google Maps for Flash stopped working. Those interested in the back story of this map will find a link to Woodruff's initial version with additional commentary at the beginning of this blog post. It should be noted that using this map requires a desktop computer, as it will not work on mobile devices, and that headphones may be appropriate if exploring this map in public.
Comments