Archives for category: Cartography
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Deductive Tourist Traps

9 June 2010 //
0

Eric Fisc­her has pos­ted a new series of visu­al­isa­tions ‘Loc­als and Tour­ists’ depict­ing the loc­a­tion of pho­tos taken in urban areas around the world. In this dublinphotos.jpg series he attempts to dis­tin­guish between those taken by tour­ists (people who seem to be a local of a dif­fer­ent city and who took pic­tures in this city for less than a month) and those by loc­als (people who have taken pic­tures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

What imme­di­ately struck me was his ingeni­ous re-use of the exist­ing data to cre­ate new inform­a­tion. By explor­ing indi­vidu­als pos­ted pic­tures over time he was able to hypo­thes­ise as to whether they were vis­it­ing or resid­ing in a par­tic­u­lar area. This allowed for a means to com­pare the gaze of the two groups.

I imme­di­ately star­ted to explore his map of Dub­lin to see if any pat­terns emerged and then to try and sug­gest explan­a­tions for them. There is a healthy and reg­u­lar mix of pho­tos by both groups in the cent­ral core, but imme­di­ately to the east is a large blue box of pho­tos taken by loc­als. It appears to sur­round the new Aviva Lans­downe Sta­dium in Balls­bridge. Addi­tion­ally on the north­side the National Botan­ical Gar­dens have a heavy con­cen­tra­tion of pho­to­graphs by locals.

The most prac­tical applic­a­tion of Loc­als versus tour­ists is to con­sider how a vis­itor might use these visu­al­isa­tions to find the hid­den city known only to its inhab­it­ants — to find those secret spots worthy of cap­ture by loc­als, but seem­ingly missed in the tour­ist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geot­ag­gers’ World Atlas’ look­ing at from where the pic­tures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

Categories Cartography, Info Architecture, Photography, Visualization

Matt’s Wobbly Journey

28 July 2008 //
3

Today’s gad­get du jour is the Roy­al­tek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and gps.jpgData­log­ger. I have long wanted to exper­i­ment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS data­log­ger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that pro­jects your track on an LCD screen with the dif­fer­ence being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your pos­i­tion to flash memory at reg­u­lar inter­vals. You can then down­load the data­file to your com­puter and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morn­ing and I popped the bat­ter­ies into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the soft­ware (Win­dows only unfor­tu­nately — Par­al­lels to the res­cue). The install was smooth and the device was recog­nized imme­di­ately. I access it and changed to log­ging inter­val to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a cur­rent mobile phone. It is powered by two AA bat­ter­ies which sup­posed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

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Categories Cartography, Maps

Mashing Without Code

16 May 2008 //
3

Faced with find­ing a place to live in Dub­lin, I decided to quickly attempt to cre­ate a mashup of poten­tial dubMap.jpg prop­er­ties mapped through­out the city. This is, I sense, an increas­ingly com­mon sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find any­thing that accom­plished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manu­ally in either the My Maps sec­tion of Google Maps or cre­ate a KML over­lay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated and cap­ture the list cur­rent to when I was look­ing at it. I would note that many sites have their own spa­tial dis­plays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dub­lin scene. The site I was using to look for rental oppor­tun­it­ies is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selec­tions on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) list­ings in the area of the list­ing you have chosen. You can addi­tion­ally select a par­tic­u­lar agency and have their list­ings plot­ted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My object­ive was to cre­ate a cus­tom search, take the detailed res­ults, identify the loc­a­tion, geo­code it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple — in prac­tise sub­ject to the vagar­ies of daft and the tools used.

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Categories Cartography, How To, Info Architecture

Downright Useful GPS

5 June 2007 //
1

helsinkiThe HKL Helsinki’s Pub­lic Transit has a mov­ing, real time map of bus loc­a­tions avail­able via their web­site. Now that’s what the pub­lic wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS report­ing is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to dis­play its routes, the stops it makes and make the con­nec­tion you need. You can even choose to ‘fol­low’ the bus and have the map scroll with its pro­gress. It is most fun if you do this in satel­lite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later). Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cartography, Maps, Visualization

Why Space and Time?

5 June 2007 //
0

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 Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cartography, Visualization

Going Plazes 2.0

20 May 2007 //
0

plazes.gif

One of the more intriguing social net­work­ing applic­a­tions that I have been enjoy­ing over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my ini­tial exper­i­ences with this spa­tial addi­tion to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyber­space IP to place you in phys­ical space. If you are at a pre­vi­ously defined Plaze, then you are pin­pointed. If you have dis­covered a new place, you sup­ply some info about the place, refine the loc­a­tion and it is stored for future ref­er­ence. You can dis­cover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recom­men­ded and you can also get a Traze (a spa­tial and tem­poral indic­a­tion of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze your­self or to find nearby plazes. The sys­tem works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog read­ers show­ing where you are in real time –-> see my own side­bar. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Cartography, HCI, Maps, Social Network Analysis

Realtime Mashup

17 May 2007 //
0

flickrvision.jpgThis one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. Flick­r­Vi­sion uses stream­ing photo posts from Flickr that have loc­a­tional ref­er­ences. It dis­plays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are pos­ted to Flickr. Hov­er­ing over a popup will dis­play a large image of that photo for appre­ci­ation. If you are look­ing for the kooky, eclectic, or for the occa­sional flash of bril­liance, check out the site. rather like StumbleUpon with a geo-twist.

Categories Cartography, Info Architecture, Maps, Photography

Exhibit Keeps Getting Better

25 February 2007 //
0

scatterchart.gifI have men­tioned the Exhibit pro­ject out of the Semantic Inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of Metadata and Inform­a­tion in unLike Envir­o­ments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline pro­ject was one that I imme­di­ately was inter­ested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and cre­ates a graph­ical anim­ated chro­no­lo­gical timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napo­leon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the res­ults. A couple months back they intro­duced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and effi­ciently dis­play a JSON data­set in a vari­ety of flex­ible formats includ­ing search­able tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a light­weight struc­tured data pub­lish­ing frame­work that lets you cre­ate web pages with sup­port for sort­ing, fil­ter­ing, and rich visu­al­iz­a­tions by writ­ing only HTML and option­ally some CSS and Javas­cript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for struc­tured data nor­mally pub­lished through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essen­tially removes the need for a data­base or a server side web applic­a­tion. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for every­one who has a little bit of know­ledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people eas­ily inter­act with them.

timeline.pngThe beauty of this scheme is that it is a cli­ent side frame­work and approach­able by any­one wish­ing to share their data and requires little know­ledge of javas­cript or the like. Its quite robust and extens­ible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scat­ter­charts to the mix and the frame­work con­tin­ues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soli­cit­ing com­ments on users needs for future devel­op­ment. There’s a very act­ive devel­op­ment com­munity grow­ing around this product.

Categories Cartography, Info Architecture, Technology, Timelines, Visualization

Something New

14 February 2007 //
1

Am try­ing out the Plazes ser­vice. I am still plug­ging away with it, but from what I can share, it has found me and I am here:

Download Flash plugin

There you go. Have embed­ded same in my header, but like all the little baubles and doodads I have over­loaded the header a bit. I will tweak with this, but kind of like the little loc­at­ing ser­vice, as I am always very con­fused about where I am … now even I will know. What this pace for fur­ther mods.

Categories Cartography, Info Architecture, Maps

A Good Life Metaphor

31 January 2007 //
1

topo.jpgJohan HolmbergThe Prob­ab­il­ist has a very inter­est­ing way of look­ing at one’s life­path. He describes a way in which we can <a href=“http://www.theprobabilist.com/topography-of-self-growth/ target=“_blank”>envision our self-improvement as a topo­graphic map, or as he pos­its a topo­graphy of exist­ence. His blog “links prob­ab­il­ity cal­cu­lus with per­sonal devel­op­ment,” and seems to do much more at times. The concept of see­ing one’s life­path from topo­graphic per­spect­ive imme­di­ately sug­gests that if you can adopt this per­spect­ive, you can be in a pos­i­tion to appre­ci­ate numer­ous pos­sible paths and tra­ject­or­ies rather than remain­ing focused and pos­sibly trapped on a single lin­ear route-based one. His example of envi­sion­ing one­self on a hill or plat­eau defined by cur­rent diet­ary or income-generating assump­tions, but able to scan adja­cent or even dis­tant hills with dif­fer­ing defin­i­tions is quite apt. I now have a cer­tain men­tal pic­ture of myself on this vast schem­atic terrain…I won­der how you see your world after read­ing his thought-provoking article.

Categories Cartography, Timelines
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