The Map of the day | Map of the U.S. nation's Laboratories

…Or probably the map of the week. This map is described as an interactive version of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Laboratories. It has been tweeted by Geographer Javier Arbona, one of the editors behind the excellent website Demilit.
The map originally appeared on Symmetry Magazine in an article entitled Around the US in 17 labs.

U.S. Department of Energy's National Laboratories | Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy and Symmetry
The map originally appeared on Symmetry Magazine
"The US Department of Energy has nurtured hubs of innovation in the United States for more than eight decades.
Discoveries made at the national laboratories have saved lives, solved mysteries of nature, improved products, transformed industries and served as a training ground for students who go on to pursues careers in science and technology." - Symmetry Magazine

The legend makes the map particularly easy to read: (1) in blue, the DOE Laboratories; (2) in red the DOE Office of Science Laboratories.
There seems to be several other maps that map out the Department of Energy DOE Laboratories such as these two examples below:

Department of Energy National Laboratories | Courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy

As seen, these two maps are a little bit too conventional in comparison with the interactive and quite ludic Symmetry Magazine's map.
I'm reminded of an interview of Michal Migurski, a (former?) Director of Technology and partner at Stamen Design, a San Francisco-based studio well-known for its data visualization and mapmaking.

Department of Energy National Laboratories | courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy
Originally appeared on Wikipedia

In this interview with Meta Markets, Migurski said an interesting statement about the growing importance of visualization in the age of the web — and the apps. Indeed he pointed out that:

I think that visualization is going to get more and more normal and more and more expected as a part of just dealing with information. The way that we understand the word visualization to be used, often all it means is the next logical step in showing information. It's really more a future-focused word, whereas things that used to be called visualization become normal and day-to-day and aren't considered special anymore. You think about scatter plots, pie charts, colored heat maps, that kind of thing. All that stuff was incredibly cutting edge a decade ago, and then as the data and tools have become more available they become features of other things.

Visualization as an instrument to critically — or commercially — show, address, or to think with, is no longer to demonstrate. An example: Stamen Design's collaboration with NBC to design a real-time visualization of Olympics discussion on Twitter, known as NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker, as reported on a 2010's edition of the New York Times.

At the very least, even serious information can be interpreted as ludic as Olympic Twitter data…

Source: Symmetry Magazine