Why are we fas­cin­ated with the inter­sec­tion of time and space??

A couple posts this morn­ing caused me to take a step back and con­sider this lar­ger ques­tion. I am fas­cin­ated with the brooklynvisu­al­iz­a­tion of the rela­tion­ship between time and space. I used GIS tools kludged to allow for change over time in my MA work on hotels in late 19thC Guelph. Things have since evolved in won­der­fully new dir­ec­tions. Visu­al­iz­a­tions have become increas­ingly rich in anim­a­tion, detail, and cre­at­ive approaches to adding two non-flat, non-static dimen­sions to flat and static media
I was tak­ing a look at outside-in’s blog­ger maps. They con­nect blog and tra­di­tional media cov­er­age with a map to illus­trate quant­ity and fre­quency of com­ment­ary in spe­cific loc­ales. Their map of Brook­lyn buzz show­ing neigh­bour­hood areas and the fre­quency of their men­tion in local blogs versus tra­di­tional media is actu­ally quite stun­ning. At its simplest it is little dif­fer­ent from the grand­father map of spa­tial rep­res­ent­a­tion of chol­era out­breaks in Lon­don by Dr. John Snow. Snow how­ever was able to pin­point a par­tic­u­lar well as the trans­mis­sion means for the chol­era out­break. A dir­ect link between repor­ted cases and the day to day activ­it­ies of the vic­tims. The use of mov­ing pie charts in the mod­ern maps show­ing the bal­ance between tra­di­tional versus blogged media is a great visu­al­iz­a­tion choice. But does it tell us any­thing without under­stand­ing the con­text of what is being repor­ted?
I have blogged pre­vi­ously on Kevin Lynch’s men­tal maps and their is a clear indic­a­tion in the media map of a neigh­bour­hood of spa­tial per­cep­tion of a neigh­bour­hood. This is also true in their blog­ger map of kottke.org, which provides a mov­ing map mash-up of the indi­vidual loc­a­tions of that Dan Kot­tke has blogged on. You can see his focus shift, but the sub­ject of his focus is not entirely appar­ent, even with the smooth ref­er­ence and cit­ing of the stor­ies below the map. The map also col­lects other ref­er­ences to this same loc­a­tion and charts the res­ult. I am a little unsure as to why a spot reports 1 story by Dan and 9 stor­ies by oth­ers and then gives him 25% of the pie, but I am sure they are meas­ur­ing some­thing subtly bey­ond my ken.

The concept of track­ing con­ver­sa­tion in and about spe­cific loc­ales is quite fas­cin­at­ing. I am not sure it is neigh­bour­hood focused, and out­side in is prob­ably a good way to describe as this seems as much extern­ally faced as intern­ally interactive.

Does the abil­ity to see time and space simply give us a God’s eye view and make us feel empowered? Track­ing local blog activ­ity about loc­al­it­ies is very cool in concept. It’s put­ting some great data out there for us to con­sider in fig­ur­ing out what we are actu­ally wit­ness­ing. It’s very raw. Can we meas­ure how these stor­ies influ­ence one another and start to gauge who is writ­ing about what they read? More so, can we start to peg these stor­ies to con­crete action?