Map archives:

Library of Congress — Map Collections
You can’t beat the LOC (though I do wish they had updated the design of their website sometime since the late ’90s.)  Collections focus on America, with maps organizaed around cities and towns, transportation, wars and battles, exploration, and general maps.

Free Educational Maps for the Study of World History
Has a few sections, the My Maps section has maps of historical periods and events from Canada, the USA, and Europe.  The Maps+ section has original source maps from various countries and time periods.

Macrohistory & World Report
Has maps of various historical periods and places, organized by time period.

Map blogs:

Strange Maps
Frank Jacobs loves maps, but finds most atlases too predictable. He collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones…

Cartographia
It hasn’t been updated in 3 years, but has a nice collection of maps with analysis, plus the author is way into Minard (creator of the Napoleon’s March infographic we looked at) which is cool to see other things by the master mapper.

Derek Watkins
Cartography, neogeography, and genius loci in a networked world. A newer blog with just a few posts, but interesting.

Infographics:

Visual Complexity
Ed Epping from the Art Department sent me the link to this site with the comment, “…the MOTHERLODE!” It’s true, amazing infographics projects here, worth spending the time to browse through and see what’s going on.  From their own description:  “VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines…

Information is Beautiful
…and so is this blog.  Excellent infographics, often around society, politics and health issues.

Flowing Data
Excellent blog on infographics and the visual representation of data, charts and graphs, statistics, you name it.  They also have a book (kind of technical, but not impossible) that is in our class library in the Design Studio.

I Love Charts
Title says it all — everything from the latest inforgraphics to classic (and funny) magazine charts, and even photos of Venn diagram tattoos.  All the ways information can be graphed and charted.

Infogen
More humorous infographics, maybe trending a bit towards the kind of things that might be in glossy hipster magazines rather than more abstracted representations of information (bar graphs and charts and such-like) but still worth a look.