What Charles Booth did for London (see previous post), the Justice Mapping Center does for various American cities, regions and states. Except with a much better methodology. And better technology. And more completely.
Over 500 rural communities in Georgia are being removed from a new map
- created by that state's Department of Transportation - because lazy
cartographers claim that there is not enough room to fit their
placenames. Never mind that Rand McNally, AAA, Thomas Guides and other
companies have kept the names intact with creative typography.
Apparently the Georgia DOT only has one font size on their computer:
too big.
Boingboing.com reports that such communities as Roosterville, Cloudland, Hemp, Due West (a decent-sized college town), Poetry Tulip and Po Biddy Crossroads have all been left off this new map. Sorry guys - your towns no longer exist. The Associated Press reports:
A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.
awesome image appropriated from Boing Boing
via Cartography: the Canadian Cartographic Association's weblog:
The Oil Drum: New York City has an interesting map of the United States that displays the amount of social capital per state. Social capital is a bit of an ill-defined term but simply indicates the sense of community and interconnectedness people feel. Or as Robert Putnam, author of a book on social capital Bowling Alone says, “The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].”
mysociety.org has produced some very interesting travel-time maps - for Cambridge, London and the nation as a whole. Future additions include relating journey times to housing price; adding travel cost data; incorporating reliability-of-transportation-mode data; and real-time web service, which would be tremendously useful as part of a trip-planning tool. Imagine something like this tied to every airline, bus, train and highway - with real-time construction, weather, and other data piped directly to it! via oblomovka
I can verify that this site is wonderful and good after easily creating my own google map hack. Just in case you are curious where to find feral cats in Sacramento, well, try here. I know you've been curious. Anyway, I'll let them tell you (via their 'about' section) why they're so cool:
Wayfaring hopes to be a great resource for people who want to build personalized maps, and share them publically or privately. When we first started talking about building this site, we just wanted to make it easier to find activities around the globe through this map and destination sharing. What bar should you go to while waiting for a table at your favorite restaurant, for example? Just simple things like that so traveling can be a little easier.
Much like Wikipedia, the value or goodness that will come from this site will come from those who use it. Almost everything can be edited and changed, so be good to each other. The trip you save might be your own.
To see an example of how this site is best used, try checking out the Best of Wayfaring!
New Google Maps hacks seem to be springing up every day, thanks to their API. Here's one that plots the past course of Hurricane Rita and plots its possible future path over the next few days.
An excerpt from MIT's SENSEable City Lab project about the Mobile Landscape:
Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!
Because it is possible to simultaneously 'ping' the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.
CommunityViz is a GIS-based software program for community planning developed in partnership with the Vermont- and Colorado-based Orton Family Foundation. The Foundation was established to help rural communities with scarce planning resources cope with the challenges faced by development.
The program has a number of applications for planners and citizens to envision how hypothetical growth scenarios could look. In the five years since development began, CommunityViz has aided in a diverse range of applications from park site selection to dam removals. Users can adjust and weight community preference indicators and may view results in several different formats including cartographic maps or navigable 3D renderings of future growth.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation "is a research organization involved in exploring, examining and understanding land and landscape issues." Their Culver City office is host to the CLUI Land Use Database, an online collection of more than 1000 "unusual and exemplary" geographic sites throughout the US. You can browse this free public reseource by category (industrial, mining, waste, military, nuclear / radioactive, r&d, transportation, water, cultural) or search landmarks by keyword.
A well-illustrated pictorial map with with a rich information layer targeted toward tourists and other visitors to Washington DC, DC Flyby allows you to "fly" above a minimalized version of the Capitol mall and other downtown areas, zooming in to various government buildings, museums, metro stops, theaters, hotels, and other locations of note. The map is part of the District of Columbia's online Visitors Resource Center. I'd love to see this approach for other cities, with more extensive linking, multiple layers of information that could be turned on and off ala Google Earth (i.e., maps for visitors, residents, traffic maps, density and demographic information, public transport availability, etc all on the same substrate).
Tired of outrageously expensive software to launch web-mapping applications? Tyler Mitchell discusses how you can obtain all the tools you need to develop all kinds of GIS applications, for free, in this article in Directions Magazine. However, there are drawbacks to Open Source software. You may have to sacrifice your free time to learn how to install and configure all the necessary components to get some of these GIS applications to work. I downloaded MapServer several months ago and I haven't had enough time to get it up and running on my Suse Linux machine. If you have time and patience (who's got that?), Open Source might work out for you.
Daniel Charles asks in the latest Technology Review (very interesting new articles, by the way): 'do maps have morals?' He uses this question as a way to organize a review of four recent books on history & GIS...and the history of GIS. Technology, as the old saying goes, is a double-edged sword, but that hasn't stopped some from putting lots of stock in the idea that visualising our world in better-organized layers will (possibly) save it. A parallel theme in this article is that of the breeding of this visual literacy. Do some academic upbringings -landscape architecture for instance- breed a culture of innovation around that sword? [ MITs Technology Review ]
I fear the next step might be to place a GPS tracking device on each ice cream peddler:
When obesity researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were looking to prevent obesity among schoolchildren, they turned to an unexpected group of experts: mapmakers. The university's Cartographic Modeling Laboratory got to work, drawing maps of the neighborhoods around five Philadelphia elementary schools. What resulted were not ordinary street maps. Rather, they were maps showing "food opportunities."
[via]
Our friend Brecht informs us that "Measuring Beauty," an article in the most recent Scientific American, analyzes what non-political variables drive people to immigrate to the United States, principally to rural areas. The map above combines the study's six primary indices - warm winter (average January temperature), winter sun (average January days of sun), temperate summer (low winter-summer temperature gap), summer humidity (low average July humidity), topographic variation (topography scale) and water area (water area as proportion of total county area). The raw data is provided as well, but apparently not in a GIS format.
As the total amount of data on the web increases (Google is currently
searching more than 8 billion web pages) regular search engines are
going to become increasingly useless. The number of results for the
small Texas town of Lufkin is 902,000.
In order to cope with the overwhelming amount of data available it is inevitable that the web will become more spatially-oriented. Associating location with data isn’t a difficult leap. It is not only currently happening but there is a growing amount of evidence to show that information with a spatial component is more desirable.
Joe Koberg and Jeffrey Hicks have written a piece of software that allows a digital camera to work in tandem with a GPS receiver. They used python and a number of other packages to capture the data, and the resulting image is published through Zope and the now ubiquitous Worldkit. This is totally gnarly. Do people still say that?
GIS, deeper than anyone ever imagined:
Our GIS life-cycle was born of Oracle, and with SDE, it returns to Oracle. But, to do as our first prototype did, to leap from Oracle tables, to coverage, to shapefile, and back to Oracle tables, is to, in fact, build a winding artificial construct that merely serves to return us back to our own beginning - the relational database, albeit in a slightly different format.
Two brave souls at the Minerals Management Service watch as the Dog Catches Its Tail. Forgive the subject stretch, as this paper misses the urban requirement, but this graphic was just too hilarious to pass up.
We now have technology that allows us to walk the streets without walking the streets. Amazon's yellow page service slash search engine, A9.com, lets us virtually wander around a few major cities to find the business for which we are looking. Here's a quicktime video where the creators quickly describe the experience. From a data steward's view, I'd have to think that it would be a severely money draining exercise to link real photos to an ever-changing landscape. But try it before they go under, because it is a little fun to play with. For instance, I just took a virtual stroll to an Apple Store in San Francisco. Rad. Thanks to waxy.org for the tip.
A charity in London, Eaves Housing, has now published the Poppy Report, which examines and tries to understand the patterns of the sex industry in London by mapping locations where commercial sex takes place. The project also aims to help emancipate those who are trafficked into the city for this purpose.
Use the handy Environmental Justice Geographic Assessment Tool that your favorite feds have made to identify, via EnviroMapper EJ, the polluters in your zip code.
The International Journal of Health Geographics is an fascinating online journal that harbors articles on the myriad ways the health profession uses GIS and geographic data to illustrate patterns of disease and illness around the globe.
Lori Napoleon writes:
I collect personal maps people draw. One's memory and perception of a place is very personal, so each is a reflection, however small or large, of how the individual connects to their environment: knowing, organising, and understanding it. In short, each one is a small token of memory and experience, whether created in order to help me understand a place, to direct me to the nearest gas station, or as an answer to my persistent requests to find the local gem of a strange little town.
from the abstract:
Urban Tapestries provides a mobile location-based platform to connect people with the places they inhabit through their stories, experiences and observations. Currently based on an 802.11b mesh network in the heart of London, ordinary people author their stories of the city and embed them in the places that inspire them. Others who are logged into the system can read these stories, author their own and engage the largely invisible, multidimensional layers accumulating in the city. Our research asks if people use UT in meaningful and interesting ways. Drawing from theories of everyday life and urban space, we have developed experimental ethnography as a method for investigating the relationships between communication technologies, users and the socio-geographic territories around them.
Map Tribe is a mobile device-based tool for "learning about the image of the city," although perhaps that short (and translated-from-the-French) description doesn't do it justice. Basically, it's a software app for mobile phones that lets a group of users see each member's position superimposed on a city map and add shared objects / locations to the map.
The platform will be server based , allowing computation to be carried out outside the relatively constrained capabilities of the mobile phones. On the server, GIS software will be interfaced with an SQL engine to answer the ping requests from the mobiles. Neat!
The USGS has some information on their Urban Dynamics Research Program's Temporal Urban Mapping project up on the web. Basically, TUM is a technique for "temporal mapping and spatial analysis of land transformation due to urban development." The site includes animations showing urban growth in various sample regions, including this great animation for the San Francisco Bay Area, 1800 - 1990, as well as background information on the project, data compilation and spatial analysis methodologies and more.
This java application allows you to see flight and air-traffic movement around SFO. Radar data - with a 10 minute lag - is animated directly on top of the map. Links to other airports are also on the site (LAX; JFK). via Boingboing.net
Recent Comments