We map the world around us without even thinking about it. Flying into a new city, we automatically assess the size and shape of the thing, orienting it to the mountains or oceans or fields beyond. On the ground, we piece together our own mental maps based on the neighborhoods we pass through and the sites we visit. When our mental maps aren't good enough, we can always turn to Google.

It's much harder to map the digital spaces we inhabit everyday. Longtime members of certain online communities will be able to give you the general contours–who hangs out with whom, and who posts where. But that organization is largely invisible. It's not something you can just look at. It has to be learned. In the case of Stack Overflow or Github, however, Alex Dragulescu's interactive maps can help you get the lay of the land.

Dragulescu, a former student of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, casts the popular programming sites as cities of their own, mapping users based on relationships and common activity and stretching them vertically in accordance with their influence on the site. The result is half-bar chart, half-cityscape. He calls it Ekisto.

>He's already seen people making references to the 'Javascript Slums.'

In their current form, the maps are most useful to veterans of the respective communities. "From the feedback I've got so far, they can immediately recognize clusters and even give you a narrative of adjacent group dynamics," Dragulescu says. He's already seen people making references to the "Ruby downtown ghetto," "iOS Jailbreakville," and the "Javascript Slums."

But we can also get a more general sense of the communities through the topography of the maps themselves. StackOverflow clusters, Dragulescu notes, are fewer and more more distinct. Github has a smattering of smaller clusters, representing similar types of projects being worked on by small groups of 10 or 12 people.

Ultimately, though, Dragulescu hopes that these types of visualizations could help not only veteran users but newcomers, too. Consider what you see when you first arrive at the Twitter home page: the login screen.

"In real life that is the equivalent of a blank wall or tall castle door," Dragulescu says. "Imagine if instead you would see a rich landscape of the community at that current point in time."

With the right level of resolution, these types of maps could help users find new people to follow, locate topics of interest, or pinpoint clusters of activity. But they also offer something different–something less strictly utilitarian. At their most panoramic, Dragulescu's creations aren't just maps but portraits of these dynamic digital spaces. In essence, they offer that same view you get from the window seat, where you can simply appreciate the vast, complex beauty of the activity below.