As the third map in our new series of geographic visualizations of GDELT, we're excited to unveil a topical map that allows you to filter GDELT's massive global firehose to just coverage of specific topics and the locations associated with those topics over the past hour. Here the map below allows you to use the "Visible layers" dropdown at top right to filter GDELT for just coverage relating to Food/Water Security (orange), Transportation (blue), or Health/Disease (red). What you're seeing here is every location mentioned in the world's news media over the last hour in 65 languages as monitored by GDELT relating to these three topics. Note that the map below simply indicates that a given location was discussed in context with each particular topic, not that there is an ongoing activity there. For example, an article might indicate that there is an ongoing water emergency or disease outbreak in an area or it might discuss a historic emergency or outbreak that occurred in the past there, or it might even simply mention that the location is potentially vulnerable in the future.
We've picked several broad categories here to help showcase the enormous richness encoded within GDELT's metadata and tried to be as encompassing as possible in the coverage selected. Stay tuned for ways you can create your own such maps from GDELT in CartoDB!