Charting Our Adventures: Lofoten & Senja by Nadieh Bremer

A map of Senja, Lofoten & Vesterålen with touches of personal data to remember the five months I traveled through Norway in 2022 with my partner. I loved the whole country, but these locations stole my heart.

This map is meant as an ode to the Lofoten and Senja for anyone to enjoy but made extra special by the nuanced inclusion of thousands of personal data points showing our journey across this fantastic piece of Norway.

The (personal) data is placed subtly but shows the places where we spend time amongst the Norwegian fjords and mountains to a highly accurate degree. Using a rusty red to indicate all the hikes we did (with the data taken from our smart watches), red dots for our combined Google location histories showing the roads we traveled, red dashed lines across the water for each ferry we took, and larger diamond shapes for the 4 different cabins we stayed.

This map was built and designed using a combination of (non-standard) tools, including the OpenStreetMap API, Amazon Web Services Terrain Tiles, R, and primarily: d3.js & JavaScript. Retrieving each aspect of the map separately (e.g., the roads, the contour lines, the lakes) and placing this layer-by-layer on the map, with small touches to the design of each piece, to create the final result.

An elaborate blog/tutorial that goes into the design of this custom map can be found here: VisualCinnamon.com/2023/04/personal-map-norway-with-javascript