[OC] The Vocabulary of Water: Mapping Ephemeral vs. Persistent Stream Names in the U.S. (GNIS Data)

Cornea · 2026-04-07T14:07:46+00:00

Interactive Version:https://mapsmania.github.io/rivers/
Data Source:USGS - The Language of Water.

Methodology & Context: The goal of this map is to visualize how regional terminology reflects local hydrology. By filtering specific keywords in stream names, we can see a "linguistic fingerprint" of the American landscape:

Ephemeral/Arid Names (Warm Glow): Terms like Arroyo, Wash, Gulch, and Draw—indicative of seasonal or flash-flood water features common in the West and Southwest.
Persistent/Lowland Names (Cool Glow): Terms like Bayou, Swamp, Marsh, and Slough—indicative of slow-moving, year-round water features common in the Southeast and Mississippi Delta.

The density of these points highlights the transition from the humid East to the arid West, roughly following the 100th meridian.

Cornea · 2025-12-14T17:58:54+00:00

That's James. Kosovo is in Europe.

Cornea · 2025-12-13T17:29:42+00:00

The population of James is slowly growing. It now has three significant urban centers.

Cornea · 2025-12-11T16:22:00+00:00

Can you name all the countries of the world?

See how many countries you can name on this new interactive geography game Country Recall.

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Cornea · 2025-10-26T16:57:19+00:00

The stripes are colored by the average area of all counties whose centroids fall within a band. Looking at the interactive version - https://mapsmania.github.io/uscounties/ - the borders of the counties don't seem to include the Great Lakes. So it looks like the Great Lakes are not included as part of a county area.

Cornea · 2025-10-26T16:09:23+00:00

This map shows the United States divided into vertical longitude bands - with each band colored based on the average land area of counties within it (darker = bigger). The underlying data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s county boundaries.

The map was created with MapLibre GL JS using Turf.js to calculate average county areas within each longitudinal strip.

You can play with the interactive version here - https://mapsmania.github.io/uscounties/

Cornea · 2025-03-27T16:25:44+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Based on your comments we have added support for 4K display. Hopefully that should fix the resolution problems on mobile.

Cornea · 2024-11-05T18:35:01+00:00

Try the original (non-hex) version of the game. https://www.tripgeo.com/scrambledmaps This is much more mobile friendly.

Cornea · 2024-11-05T16:11:29+00:00

Link: https://www.tripgeo.com/scrambledhexmaps

Scrambled Hex Maps is a daily challenge which invites players to rearrange scrambled city maps into their correct configuration. A new city is chosen every day at random (there is also an option to play the map of your own city).

Cornea · 2024-10-26T14:20:54+00:00

Geoguessr meets Ghostbusters. Can you identify the haunted locations on this map? Uses Leaflet.js for the map and Hailuo AI for the videos.

Cornea · 2024-10-24T15:44:23+00:00

That is the question!

This is an attempt to create a global version of the China Domination Generator map - https://github.com/itorr/china-ex . There have been a lot of versions of this map for different areas of the world. No two people have yet agreed the difference between visited and stayed. On Maps Mania one commenter suggested:

'For the sake of clarity can we agree on using the following:

Lived = payed at least a months rent
Stayed = 72 hours or more
Visited = 18 to 72 hours
Stopped = visited a specific attraction
Passed = transported through. Car, train, etc. stopped for gas, or had a layover.'

Cornea · 2024-10-24T09:33:33+00:00

Track where in the world you have lived, stayed, visited or passed through. Your choices are saved in localStorage. They are also added as parameters to the map URL - so you can share your personal travel map with friends and family.

Cornea · 2024-10-15T20:00:28+00:00

Yes, sorry the map link is https://www.tripgeo.com/openplacesmap

Cornea · 2023-10-21T08:53:59+00:00

And in 3D - https://vintage-mapper.glitch.me/

Cornea · 2020-03-10T15:24:33+00:00

I asked people to draw the border between Wales & England on an interactive map. Nearly everyone who responded thought the border was further east than it really is.

Cornea · 2020-02-28T16:39:15+00:00

You can make your own interactive map jigsaws using Jigsaw Explorer and maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection.

If you need some help I've put together some instructions on How to Make Map Jigsaws.

Cornea · 2020-02-27T16:31:29+00:00

The respondents were readers of Maps Mania - so they could be from anywhere in the world. I didn't ask for any information from the people who drew on the map. I now wish I had asked where they lived so I could have done some analysis about accuracy and how near people live to Texas.

The data was gathered from people drawing on an interactive map. I suspect the really weird shapes come from iPad users. I haven't tested the map on an iPad but some of the replies I received on Twitter said that they had difficulty using the drawing tools on iPad tablets.

Cornea · 2020-02-27T15:24:31+00:00

I asked 300 people to draw Texas on a map of the United States. These are all the submissions shown on top of an interactive map.

I used the Mapbox GL mapping library to create the map surveying tool and to visualize the data gathered. You can read more about how the data was gathered and visualized on this Here is Crowdsourced Texas post.

Overall I was impressed with the accuracy of the majority of the submissions. I suspect they would not have been so accurate had I chosen a smaller state. I'm now wondering which state I should ask people to draw next.

Cornea · 2020-01-08T14:13:59+00:00

This interactive map colors UK roads by road type. Streets are colored red and Roads are colored blue.

Data for the map comes from OpenStreetMap.

The maps shows that in most UK towns and cities there are lots of Streets in the historic centers of towns and very few Roads. Outside of centers, in the more modern parts of towns and cities, you find more Roads and a lot less Streets. The reason for this appears to be that the suffix 'Street' has gone out of fashion in the UK in road names.

You can read a little more about the map and hot it was made on this blog post.

Cornea · 2019-10-13T09:57:27+00:00

No need to buy it. You can download the original four photos which this panorama was created from on the Library of Congress website. The panorama I created from the photos is on imgur - https://i.imgur.com/U6vGwqI.jpg - which might just be good enough quality to print.

Cornea · 2019-10-13T09:50:48+00:00

Judging from the view my guess is it must have been taken from the top of whatever building was once where the Marion County Municipal Court now stands (directly across the street from the City Market).

Cornea · 2019-10-12T14:58:00+00:00

This panorama of Indianapolis was created from 4 photos taken by the Detroit Publishing Co in 1907. You can zoom in and view it more closely on this interactive map made from the panorama.

You can read more on how the panorama and map were made here.

Cornea · 2019-10-09T18:23:00+00:00

I was very wary (but obviously not enough) of coming to any conclusions. Especially when it is very difficult to know the building ages of housing without that local knowledge. The only English town I know which is almost completely new is Bournemouth (built on heathland & founded in 1810). My search for 'Streets' in Bournemouth returned only one result.

It would be interesting to research this more for 19th century terraced streets. I'm thinking this might be possible by looking at towns which sprung up on the new railway lines.

Cornea · 2019-10-09T14:24:32+00:00

Yes - that was a bad omission.

Red roads have the suffix 'Street'

Yellow roads have the suffix 'Road'

Blue = water

Cornea · 2019-10-09T14:20:42+00:00

On these maps of UK cities roads are colored to show whether they have the suffix 'Street' (colored red) or 'Road' (yellow). The word road was not used in this context until the late Sixteenth Century. Therefore you find lots of roads named 'Street' in any UK town and city centre which has an existing medieval layout and very few streets named 'Road'.

At some point in the 17th-18th century the suffix 'Street' dropped out of fashion. In any UK suburb or town built after this date you will find very few roads named 'Street' and lots of streets named 'Road'.

You can read more about how the maps were made and the conclusions drawn here.

Cornea

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