There’s nothing new about infographics, except possibly the name we give them now, as this collection of diagrams, dating from the 1950s back to the sixteenth century, goes to show.

The David Rumsey Map Collection contains more than 30000 historical maps and images, including the above Chart of the Inhabited World, dating from 1824.

A print designed by Benedikt Groβ and Bertrand Clerc… if the map of London were drawn up based on the schematic map of the city’s underground train system, this is how it would look.

The geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.

Here’s a zoomable version of the map.

By juxtaposing a NASA satellite composite photo of the Earth at night, with Facebook’s friendship map, Ian Wojtowicz has produced an image (full size 3.9MB) showing cities and regions – seen in yellow – whose inhabitants do not generally use Facebook. Although virtually absent in some places, the social network still has an incredibly vast reach.

How old is your globe? A handy guide for determining the vintage of old world globes that may be in your possession. Also a way of keeping track of the ever changing geopolitical face of the Earth.

Rorschmap takes images from Google Maps and renders them in kaleidoscopic-like style.

Press the “go” button in the top right-hand corner to start the show.

A collection of maps of Africa, dating back to 1541. While there would probably be older, though far less complete maps, dating back to Roman times and earlier, this isn’t a bad gallery at all.

A rather large map (6000 by 3888 pixels in size, so also a reasonably heavy download), or visual representation, of the known universe that includes our location. It certainly puts our place in the cosmos into perspective, and is best viewed on the largest possible monitor you can find.

US artist Nikki Rosato creates portraits and sculptures of the human form out of old road maps that she has cut up, with intriguing, though slightly eerie, results.

“The map is memory,” says Rosato, who was originally inspired to work with them after stumbling across a box of vintage maps in a used bookstore in Virginia. It’s a statement that works on two levels. As visual representations of place, the maps in her work demonstrate how we are all defined by place; how place is irrevocably stamped upon us. But, increasingly, maps are a memory themselves – tangible products of the cartographer’s hand, rapidly outmoded by technological advances.

The Tabula Peutingeriana, a map of the road network spanning the Roman Empire, despite being created sometime after the fact in the thirteenth century, was a forerunner – of sorts – of later transit maps such as the London Tube, or New York Subway, maps.