[See also:
http://barbarahui.net/litmap/ ]

[via: "This brilliant mapping of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn by @barbarahui shows/ tracks the multiple, frantic displacements of the journey, allowing you to zoom into the landscape but also see its global connections.
Key viewing for #TheReadingsofSaturn
Here: http://barbarahui.net/litmap/ "

https://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1016962352217018368 ]

"I created Litmap as part of my Comparative Literature PhD dissertation project. It's a digital map that plots all of the places that are mentioned in W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn.

Litmap is featured in the documentary Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee. You can also read about the project in this New York Times ArtsBeat post.

If you'd like to read more about the theoretical context for Litmap, following is something I wrote in 2009 to explain the project in the context of my dissertation.

Litmap was created with the goal of enabling humanities scholars to read literature spatially – a mode of reading which I believe to be crucial to understanding contemporary literature and textuality at large today. The Litmap application aims to leverage the strengths of the digital computing platform to present literary narratives in a way that opens up spatial readings of those texts.

If you'd like to read more about the theoretical context for Litmap, following is something I wrote in 2009 to explain the project in the context of my dissertation.

Litmap was created with the goal of enabling humanities scholars to read literature spatially – a mode of reading which I believe to be crucial to understanding contemporary literature and textuality at large today. The Litmap application aims to leverage the strengths of the digital computing platform to present literary narratives in a way that opens up spatial readings of those texts.

What is meant by spatial?

Taking up the call of spatial thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey, as well as literary “cartographer” Franco Moretti, spatiality is here conceived of in all of its conceptual complexity. This includes a consideration of the geospatial shape of the narrative, i.e. the contours that emerge when the place names mentioned in the texts are plotted on geospatial map image. It also includes attention to the more subjective, slippery—yet no less real—spatialities at work in each narrative, including the scale of global and local place, and the networks of colonialism, imperialism, migration, language, and media that exist across and between those places. The project seeks to represent and examine these networks as they exist in and around literature. Indeed, the network emerges as a crucial spatial paradigm for understanding contemporary narratives.

What is meant by geospatial?

By definition, geospatial is an adjective used to describe or denote data that is associated with a particular location. This is geographical space and place as conceived of in a positivist, empirical way. In other words, the earth is thought of as a spherical surface on which one can plot any location with a certain degree of mathematical accuracy using, for example, numerical latitude and longitude coordinates. The use of numerically precise data means that a range of geospatial calculations can be performed on a given geographical dataset. This is typically carried out via the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), or computer software specializing in the processing of geographical datasets.

Given the utility and free availability of geospatial applications like Google Maps and Google Earth, GIS technology and its attendant geographical representations are becoming rapidly entrenched in our cultural consciousness. Those of us who live in well-mapped locales and have access to networked personal computing technology are growing accustomed to viewing and navigating our surroundings via the use of these geospatial applications.

What is meant by network?

As with the concept of spatiality, the network is here conceived of in both concrete and abstract terms. It includes not only physical networks (wired communications networks, transportation networks, etc.) but also the colonial, imperial, migratory, and linguistic networks constituted by the movements of people, goods, and ideas across geographical space. Additionally, it includes imaginary networks such as those that exist in Stephen Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts in which people throw off both tangible and intangible linguistic traces of themselves, and are hunted down via this stream of bait by terrifyingly real yet otherworldly “primordial thought sharks.” In Hall’s novel, each person’s linguistic output is conceived of as a fundamentally material extension of the subject. Litmap allows the reader to map both the concrete geospatial aspects of the novel (“Hull, Leeds, Sheffield” (104)) and also the “un-space” that exists within its spatial imaginary: a labyrinth of tunnels underground, and a trip to a parallel thought world.

Networks are in the general sense “an arrangement or structure with intersecting lines and interstices resembling those of a net” (“Network, N,”). At the interstices exist the nodes of the network. This paradigm of the network is recognizable in many contexts. On geographical maps, the lines are the railroad tracks, roads, and flight paths; the nodes are the stations, villages, towns, and cities (i.e., geographical places) where those lines intersect. The Internet is of course a famous example of a communications network. An early Internet map shows connections between different locations “on the network”: the lines represent data wires, while the nodes are the locations at which those wires meet and the digital data they carry is processed.

The kinds of networks illustrated via Litmap are numerous, with each narrative containing one or often multiple networks, each of a unique configuration. Depending on the kind of spatial information given in each narrative, these networks are plotted with varying degrees of geospatial precision. Sometimes it is possible to map a piece of literature almost entirely down to the street level, while at other times the text requires much more subjective and abstract spatial renderings.

What is meant by place?

In keeping with spatial theorist Doreen Massey, I contend that places be defined as the nodes that are constituted by the intersection of multiple lines or paths of social networks. As she describes it:

[W]hat gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, a region, or even a continent. (28)

Thus places denoted by markers on map images are not fixed, immobile, bounded entities with unified histories, but rather dynamic, socially defined “moments.” While it is true that each latitude and longitude point would still exist on the map without an attached pin (or place), it is crucial to understand that these mathematically-defined coordinates do not give place its particularity, nor did that place as place exist a priori. Rather, it is the fact of the intersection of various social networks at that location which give it its very definition as place. As Massey argues, localities do have specificity, but – and this is crucial – they are defined on a far larger scale than that of their geospatially immediate bounded surroundings.

The built-in ability of digital mapping interfaces to zoom in for a local view and out for a global view, coupled with the ability to programmatically draw connecting lines between places based on certain predefined criteria, make for a platform inherently adept at representing the local-global, networked nature of space and place that Massey so compellingly argues for. The user of Litmap can therefore zoom in to examine the particularities of a place mentioned in a text and then zoom out to look at the way in which it is connected to other locations within that text’s spatial imaginary.

Works Cited
Hall, Steven. The Raw Shark Texts. New York: Canongate, 2007.

Massey, Doreen. "A Global Sense of Place." Marxism Today June 1991: 24-29.

“Network.” . Def. A.2.a. The Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 28 October 2009. <http://dictionary.oed.com/>."

"In a world ever-more mediated by data about place, Local Code : Real Estates is a project that seeks to identify and engage legally and socially abandoned urban sites, transforming undocumented, and marginal conditions through emergent, digitally mediated methods into a social, and ecological resource. It takes as its starting point an instrumental, and unfinished project by Gordon Matta Clark: Fake Estates : Reality Properties.

Between 1971 and 1974, it took Matta-Clark months of sifting through microfiche to locate the fifteen vacant and moribund sites – fragments of New York real estate – that form the work. (Photographs, maps, and property deeds for the sites, collected by Matta-Clark, were assembled by his widow, Jane Crawford, into exhibitable artworks after 1980.)

Today, using a Geographic Information System, or GIS, the same search can be accomplished in minutes, and locates thousands of marginal, city-owned vacant lots throughout the five boroughs of New York. When Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates were first presented together in 1992, the mere fact of their documentation, was cause for attention. Today, however, Fake Estates may be essential in considering how we might respond to a revolution that has occurred since that time, in the information architecture of the city.

This is especially true since New York is, at least in this regard, far from unique. Analysis of other North American cities shows a similar pattern of urban vacancy; thousands of remnant parcels, and hundreds of acres of fallow
public land."

[via: https://twitter.com/vruba/status/717891312683356160
https://twitter.com/mtchl/status/717907711459872770
https://twitter.com/vruba/status/717917873969102849
https://twitter.com/mtchl/status/717919016463896576
https://twitter.com/vruba/status/717920437041168384 ]

"Drifter is a multilayered portrait of the Murrumbidgee river system, made out of data. Historic images, newspaper articles, scientific observations and digital maps; tens of thousands of data points come together in three ever-changing views.

Map uses digital newspaper articles to trace fragments of the river's (white) history, from everyday life to large-scale interventions. Alongside these human stories, thousands of scientific observations reveal some of the nonhuman life of the river.

Sifter transforms text into texture, drifting through text snippets from newspaper articles discussing the Murrumbidgee and its tributaries, piecing together the names of some of the living things that go unmentioned in these accounts.

Compositor combines historic images from library and archive collections with contemporary images from fieldwork monitoring the health of the river's wetland ecology.

About

Drifter is a work by Mitchell Whitelaw, created for exhibition at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in conjunction with the Land Dialogues conference. A big-screen, non-interactive version is on show there until June 2016.

This web version works best with a modern browser and a big-ish screen.

Drifter is part of a research project on combining digital scientific and cultural heritage materials to create rich representations of landscape. It builds on the speculative, generative approaches to digital heritage developed in Succession.

Sources

Geospatial data sources

• US Geological Service HydroSHEDS River network
• Digital Chart of the World water areas
• Open Street Map towns and rivers
• Australian Department of the Environment, Interim Classification of Aquatic Ecosystems in the Murray Darling Basin based on the Australian National Aquatic Ecosystems (ANAE) Classification Framework - Wetlands

Newspaper articles: Trove, National Library of Australia

Frog observations: Atlas of Living Australia

Frog audio

• Amphibiaweb
• Australian National Botanic Gardens
• Frogwatch ACT - recordings by Ederic Slater
• Museum Victoria Biodiversity Snapshots
• North Central Catchment Management Authority Frogwatch resources - recordings by Murray Littlejohn

Images from the National Library of Australia and Flickr Commons where credited.

Wetland fieldwork images courtesy of Dr Skye Wassens and her team, Institute for Land Water and Society, Charles Sturt University.

Built With

• The Trove API
• The Atlas of Living Australia API
• Leaflet.js
• jQuery
• howler.js"

"A high-performance, feature-packed library for all your mapping needs.

FEATURES

Tiled Layers
Pull tiles from OSM, Bing, MapBox, Stamen, MapQuest, and any other XYZ source you can find. OGC mapping services and untiled layers also supported.

Vector Layers
Render vector data from GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML, and a growing number of other formats.

Fast & Mobile Ready
Mobile support out of the box. Build lightweight custom profiles with just the components you need.

Cutting Edge & Easy to Customize
Map rendering leverages WebGL, Canvas 2D, and all the latest greatness from HTML5. Style your map controls with straight-forward CSS."

[via: http://elasticterrain.xyz/
via: https://twitter.com/moritz_stefaner/status/711850707859673088 ]

"One of the most interesting, if unanticipated, side effects of modern copyright law is the practice by which cartographic companies will introduce a fake street—a road, lane, or throughway that does not, in fact, exist on the ground—into their maps. If that street later shows up on a rival company’s products, then they have all the proof they need for a case of copyright infringement. Known as trap streets, these imaginary roads exist purely as figments of an overactive legal imagination.

Trap streets are also compelling evidence that maps don’t always equal the territory. What if not just one random building or street, however, but an entire map is deliberately wrong? This is the strange fate of digital mapping products in China: there, every street, building, and freeway is just slightly off its mark, skewed for reasons of national and economic security.

The result is an almost ghostly slippage between digital maps and the landscapes they document. Lines of traffic snake through the centers of buildings; monuments migrate into the midst of rivers; one’s own position standing in a park or shopping mall appears to be nearly half a kilometer away, as if there is more than one version of you on the loose. Stranger yet, your morning running route didn’t quite go where you thought it did.

It is, in fact, illegal for foreign individuals or organizations to make maps in China without official permission. As stated in the “Surveying and Mapping Law of the People’s Republic of China,” for example, mapping—even casually documenting “the shapes, sizes, space positions, attributes, etc. of man-made surface installations”—is considered a protected activity for reasons of national defense and “progress of the society.” Those who do receive permission must introduce a geographic offset into their products, a kind of preordained cartographic drift. An entire world of spatial glitches is thus deliberately introduced into the resulting map.

The central problem is that most digital maps today rely upon a set of coordinates known as the World Geodetic System 1984, or WGS-84; the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency describes it as “the reference frame upon which all geospatial-intelligence is based.” However, as software engineer Dan Dascalescu writes in a Stack Exchange post, digital mapping products in China instead use something called “the GCJ-02 datum.” As he points out, an apparently random algorithmic offset “causes WGS-84 coordinates, such as those coming from a regular GPS chip, to be plotted incorrectly on GCJ-02 maps.” GCJ-02 data are also somewhat oddly known as “Mars Coordinates,” as if describing the geography of another planet. Translations back and forth between these coordinate systems—to bring China back to Earth, so to speak—are easy enough to find online, but they are also rather intimidating to non-specialists.

While algorithmic offsets introduced into digital maps might sound like nothing more than a matter of speculative concern—something more like a dinner conversation for fans of William Gibson novels—it is actually a very concrete issue for digital product designers. Releasing an app, for example, whose location functions do not work in China has immediate and painfully evident user-experience, not to mention financial, implications.

One such app designer posted on the website Stack Overflow to ask about Apple’s “embeddable map viewer.” To make a long story short, when used in China, Apple’s maps are subject to “a varying offset [of] 100-600m which makes annotations display incorrectly on the map.” In other words, everything there—roads, nightclubs, clothing stores—appears to be 100-600 meters away from its actual, terrestrial position. The effect of this is that, if you check the GPS coordinates of your friends, as blogger Jon Pasden writes, “you’ll likely see they’re standing in a river or some place 500 meters away even if they’re standing right next to you.”

The same thread on Stack Overflow goes on to explain that Google also has its own algorithmically derived offset, known as “_applyChinaLocationShift” (or more humorously as “eviltransform”). The key, of course, to offering an accurate app is to account for this Chinese location shift before it ever happens—to distort the distortions before they occur.

In addition to all this, Chinese geographic regulations demand that GPS functions must either be disabled on handheld devices or they must be made to display a similar offset. If a given device—such as a smartphone or camera—detects that it is in China, then its ability to geo-tag photos is either temporarily unavailable or strangely compromised. Once again, you would find that your hotel is not quite where your camera wants it to be, or that the restaurant you and your friends want to visit is not, in fact, where your smartphone thinks it has guided you. Your physical footsteps and your digital tracks no longer align.

It is worth pointing out that this raises interesting geopolitical questions. If a traveler finds herself in, say, Tibet or on a short trip to the artificial islands of the South China Sea—or perhaps simply in Taiwan—are she and her devices really “in China”? This seemingly abstract question might already be answered, without the traveler even knowing that it’s been asked, by circuits inside her phone or camera. Depending on the insistence of China’s territorial claims and the willingness of certain manufacturers to acknowledge those assertions, a device might no longer offer accurate GPS readings.

Put another way, you might not think you’ve crossed an international border—but your devices have. This is just one, relatively small example of how complex geopolitical questions can be embedded in the functionality of our handheld devices: cameras and smartphones are suddenly thrust to the front line of much larger conversations about national sovereignty.

These sorts of examples might sound like inconsequential travelers’ trivia, but for China, at least, cartographers are seen as a security threat: China’s Ministry of Land and Resources recently warned that “the number of foreigners conducting surveys in China is on the rise,” and, indeed, the government is increasingly cracking down on those who flout the mapping laws. Three British geology students discovered this the hard way while “collecting data” on a 2009 field trip through the desert state of Xinjiang, a politically sensitive area in northwest China. The students’ data sets were considered “illegal map-making activities,” and they were fined nearly $3,000.

What remains so oddly compelling here is the uncanny gulf between the world and its representations. In a well-known literary parable called “On Exactitude in Science," from Collected Fictions, Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges describes a kingdom whose cartographic ambitions ultimately get the best of it. The imperial mapmakers, Borges writes, devised “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” This 1:1 map, however, while no doubt artistically and conceptually wondrous, was seen as utterly useless by future generations. Rather than enlighten or educate, this sprawling and inescapable super-map merely smothered the very territory whose connections it sought to clarify.

Mars Coordinates, eviltransform, _applyChinaLocationShift, the “China GPS Offset Problem”—whatever name you want to describe this contemporary digital phenomenon of full-scale digital maps sliding precariously away from their referents, the gap between map and territory is suitably Borgesian.

Indeed, Borges ends his tiniest of parables with an image of animals and beggars living wild amidst the “tattered ruins” of an abandoned map, unaware of what its original purpose might have been—perhaps foreshadowing the possibility that travelers several decades from now will wander amidst remote Chinese landscapes with outdated GPS devices in hand, marveling at their apparent discovery of some parallel, dislocated version of the world that had been hiding in plain view."

"Discover places and capture the world around you.
Join us and help visualize the world."

[via: http://2012books.lardbucket.org/ ]

"Maps are everywhere—on the Internet, in your car, and even on your mobile phone. Moreover, maps of the twenty-first century are not just paper diagrams folded like an accordion. Maps today are colorful, searchable, interactive, and shared. This transformation of the static map into dynamic and interactive multimedia reflects the integration of technological innovation and vast amounts of geographic data. The key technology behind this integration, and subsequently the maps of the twenty-first century, is geographic information systems or GIS.

Put simply, GIS is a special type of information technology that integrates data and information from various sources as maps. It is through this integration and mapping that the question of “where” has taken on new meaning. From getting directions to a new restaurant in San Francisco on your mobile device to exploring what will happen to coastal cities like Venice if oceans were to rise due to global warming, GIS provides insights into daily tasks and the big challenges of the future.

Essentials of Geographic Information Systems integrates key concepts behind the technology with practical concerns and real-world applications. Recognizing that many potential GIS users are nonspecialists or may only need a few maps, this book is designed to be accessible, pragmatic, and concise. Essentials of Geographic Information Systems also illustrates how GIS is used to ask questions, inform choices, and guide policy. From the melting of the polar ice caps to privacy issues associated with mapping, this book provides a gentle, yet substantive, introduction to the use and application of digital maps, mapping, and GIS.

In today's world, learning involves knowing how and where to search for information. In some respects, knowing where to look for answers and information is arguably just as important as the knowledge itself. Because Essentials of Geographic Information Systems is concise, focused, and directed, readers are encouraged to search for supplementary information and to follow up on specific topics of interest on their own when necessary. Essentials of Geographic Information Systems provides the foundations for learning GIS, but readers are encouraged to construct their own individual frameworks of GIS knowledge. The benefits of this approach are two-fold. First, it promotes active learning through research. Second, it facilitates flexible and selective learning—that is, what is learned is a function of individual needs and interest.

Since GIS and related geospatial and navigation technology change so rapidly, a flexible and dynamic text is necessary in order to stay current and relevant. Though essential concepts in GIS tend to remain constant, the situations, applications, and examples of GIS are fluid and dynamic. The Flat World model of publishing is especially relevant for a text that deals with information technology. Though this book is intended for use in introductory GIS courses, Essentials of Geographic Information Systems will also appeal to the large number of certificate, professional, extension, and online programs in GIS that are available today. In addition to providing readers with the tools necessary to carry out spatial analyses, Essentials of Geographic Information Systems outlines valuable cartographic guidelines for maximizing the visual impact of your maps. The book also describes effective GIS project management solutions that commonly arise in the modern workplace. Order your desk copy of Essentials of Geographic Information Systems or view it online to evaluate it for your course."

"Given the proliferation of GPS devices and interactive mapping online, it’s easy to declare the traditional map obsolete. Intuitive turn-by-turn directions have replaced road atlases, Google has upgraded the static map with everything from real-time traffic to restaurant reviews, and Wikipedia has taken the place of the hefty geography textbook. Is there any hope for a cartophile? Will the stand-alone map, lovingly produced and custom designed, be only a niche product for rich collectors and Luddites?

Framing the question that way is misleading because it conflates two separate changes in recent geographic knowledge. One is the shift from paper to the screen. And yes, even though wall maps still have an important size advantage, it is, indeed, difficult to see much future for the traditional coffee table atlas, road map, or topographic quad. But the other shift is much more important, and here the digital realm offers a huge advantage.

The proliferation of new spatial tools — everything from the GPS and GIS (Geographic Information System) to the easy availability of statistical and environmental data sets — is making certain kinds of mapping more relevant and ubiquitous than ever. We are not facing the decline of maps, but a shift from maps as repositories of geographic fact to maps as interpretive, argumentative, and unapologetically partial. Cartographic authorship has changed dramatically as well, since scholarship, design, and craft are now increasingly mingled. Mapping is no longer a specialist pursuit anxious about its scientific credentials; it is instead a powerful form of everyday communication. Whether these new maps appear on paper or online is largely irrelevant."

"MapTiler is graphical application for online map publishing. Your map can create overlay of standard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft VirtualEarth or OpenStreetMap and can be also visualized in 3D form by Google Earth. Only thing you have to do for publishing the map is to upload the automatically generated directory with tiles into your webserver.

Supported files for conversion: TIFF/GeoTIFF, MrSID, ECW, JPEG2000, Erdas HFA, NOAA BSB, JPEG and more...

MapTiler is graphical interface for GDAL2Tiles utility, which is part of GDAL."

"“Landscape turns” and “spatial turns” are referred to throughout the academic disciplines, often with reference to GIS and the neogeography revolution that puts mapping within the grasp of every high-school student. By “turning” we propose a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together.

For the broader questions of landscape – worldview, palimpsest, the commons and community, panopticism and territoriality — are older than GIS, their stories rooted in the foundations of the modern disciplines. These terms have their origin in a historic conversation about land use and agency."

[Introduction: http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/ ]

"What is the Spatial Turn?
The Spatial Turn in Literature
The Spatial Turn in Architecture
The Spatial Turn in Sociology
The Spatial Turn and Religion
The Spatial Turn in Psychology
The Spatial Turn in Anthropology
The Spatial Turn in Art History
The Spatial Turn in History"

"Collects aerial photography of 1-10sqkm in a single flight at down to 5cm precision.
The eBee has a flight time of up to 45 minutes allowing to cover areas of up to 10sqkm in a single flight. With its 16MP camera it can shoot aerial imagery at down to 3cm/pixel resolution. The images can then be used to create maps and elevation models with a precision of 5cm."

[via video within: http://slavin.tumblr.com/post/75567104781/playfulsystems-game-company-of-ex-ubisoft ]

"Find interesting people. You’ll learn a lot more from a great professor (or mentor, or friend, or tutorial) talking about something outside your specialty than you will from someone boring who’s working on exactly what you’re interested in. Don’t get insular! All the best artists I know have close scientist friends and vice versa.

That principle alone should expose you to enough interesting ideas that you will be able to see the most productive paths for yourself. I guess I could go on:

Look for real problems. “Let’s make a map of the furthest point from a McDonalds in each state” may be a useful exercise, but it’s not a real problem. Accurately measuring how earthquakes propagate is a real problem. Making sure that indigenous land rights are represented is a real problem. Finding early evidence of village destruction is a real problem. That doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time on scientific and humanitarian topics, especially as a student! But your work is valuable and should be spent on things you care about, even if they’re silly. If you learn to ask interesting questions that no one else is asking, you will get a good reputation among the people whom you would actually want to work for.

Learn as much statistics as you reasonably can. Trust me. Half the time I solve a tough technical problem it involves learning some stats, and then suddenly I see all these other places where that bit of knowledge applies. In fact, I’m making a note: I should learn more stats.

Read Edward Tufte’s books front to back several times, even the parts that don’t seem to have anything to do with maps."

…

"If you need to do some work (a course, a job) that you don’t believe in, fine, and try to learn something from it. Pay the bills. But don’t bring it on yourself. Don’t say “Well, Yoyodyne makes kitten-seeking missile guidance computers and their contract doesn’t allow side projects, but I need something solid on my résumé, so I’ll just spend four years there while I get on my feet.” It might work by chance, but odds are it’ll lead to selling out, burning out, and just generally being no use to yourself or anyone else. The GIS industry is a moving target: don’t aim for a good job, aim to invent it.

One of my coworkers came to the company from a project to map the history of the ancient Mediterranean; another got on the radar because he was mapping the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk. Our lead developer was a philosophy/studio art major. I dropped out. Very few of us majored in GIS or CS. But we all ended up here because each in our own way we fundamentally care about geography – place, space, and helping people work with representations of their world more easily. Of course we’re a startup so things are a little unusual, but really, to any company worth working for, showing initiative, carefulness, curiosity, and delight in geography itself matters so much more than any one item on your CV.

When people say “do what you love” they don’t mean “goof off and trust the world to provide”; they mean “you’ll be working below your abilities whenever you don’t have intrinsic motivation, so find it”.

Stick with open-source tools as much as reasonably possible. There are various advantages, but one is that in principle you can always look inside them and figure out exactly what they do. In practice that’s rarely easy, but it’s still valuable. You also get to share your work with a much larger community – given that maybe 3% of the population can afford a closed-source GIS package, 97% of Earth’s latent GIS talent is in the open-source world. Help bring it to fruition:

Teach. Any time anyone is paying attention to you, you’re teaching anyway, so it’s good to be deliberate about it. This might take the form of a notebook blog, for example: “Today I tried to do X with method Y, but got result Z. Will try again next week”. Teaching forces you to think carefully in certain ways (as does programming!). Teaching also helps you keep ethics in mind. Mapping is a special kind of power that most people cannot tell is being abused even when it is; having to justify something to a student is one technique to keep in mind the consequences of things."

"Last weekend we captured 100 acres of aerial imagery at 4cm resolution. It took less than an hour to fly, and it was easy to publish the imagery on the web using TileMill and then trace in OpenStreetMap. Autonomous flying platforms like Sensefly's eBee paired up with a nimble software stack are changing aerial mapping. Drones like the eBee can cheaply and accurately photograph medium-sized areas, and then the imagery can be made immediately available to everyone.

The drone operates less like an RC plane and more like a Roomba. You can define an area of interest on a laptop, beam it to the eBee, and then just toss the drone in the air where it will autonomously collect imagery. Within 40 minutes, the drone took 225 photos covering 100 acres from an altitude of 120 meters. Larger areas of 2,500 acres and more are possible, but this was sufficient for our needs.

As soon as the drone landed, the images were loaded into Postflight/Pix4D for georeferencing and mosaicing and then into TileMill for resampling and tiling for the web. Afterward the imagery is easily added as a custom layer in OpenStreetMap's iD editor for tracing.

The high resolution of the stitched mosaic is really useful for editing in iD. As you can tell, we're excited about what Sensefly's eBee means for the future of open-source mapping. Small autonomous aircraft are excellent for capturing timely imagery or where other aerial imagery is not available."

"James Newhard is Director of Archaeology at the College of Charleston, where he works to bring 3D imaging, mobile technology and geographic information systems to a field more popularly associated with shovels and dusty brushes. Gizmodo got in touch with Dr. Newhard to learn how he uses emerging tech to dig deep into ancient societies."

…

"In another blog post you mention drones in archaeology. What's a good example of how you could use drones?

Drones—oh man, they are hot. In early 2000, I was a grad student working in Albania with a young PhD. We had the inglorious task of mapping the site. We’d start out every morning, and jot down a point every four to five steps to make a high-resolution topographic map. It took us about 12 weeks of field work to put that map together.

Now, you just put a couple sensors on a drone and fly that thing over the site, and you’ve got it in a day. It goes off at a low altitude and snaps everything up; the images are all geo-rectified; bada bing bada boom, there it is."

"In the storage room of an Internet cafe that the Spatial Collective uses for its office, I watch Kaka and the other slum mappers play idly with their GPS devices. In nine clicks, they zoom out the view broader and broader to encompass Nairobi city, then Kenya, then Africa, then the globe. Kaka laughs when I point out his habit.

"It's good to know where your spot — where your spot is in the world," he says, shrugging.

And the more time he spends looking at his home through the lens of the GPS, the more he can't shake the sense that the outside world is finally looking back.

"With the GPS if you mark a point, you know that there's someone out there who will get the information that there's a something happening here — or that there's me here," he says, with a sheepish chuckle.

While basic inadequacies and deep uncertainty still define the life here, he says, the days when some unscrupulous developer could send arsonists in at night and erase all traces of a community seem to be fading into the past. Among residents, there's a growing sense that in seeing their slum from the satellite level, from 10,000 miles up, they are starting to take their city out of the shadows."

"Spatial Collective Limited is a Nairobi-based social enterprise that uses Geographic Information Systems for community development.

Through data collection and visualization, we support communities to identify available resources and apply this knowledge in development initiatives.

We work with myriad actors, including local residents, governments, non-governmental organizations, small businesses and research institutions.

Our collective expertise lies in community organizing, participatory digital mapping, web-based mapping technologies, and data collection and communication. We implement projects that build the capacity of local institutions, and advise organizations on the effective uses of digital maps."

[via: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/07/17/202656235/in-kenya-using-tech-to-put-an-invisible-slum-on-the-map ]

"By default, d3.geo will cut lines and polygons where they cross the antimeridian. This is usually appropriate for conic and cylindrical projections.

Projections with the same type of clipping are simple to transition using a weighted average of the source and target projections.

Based on Projection Transitions by Mike Bostock."

[See also: http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/ ]

[via: http://roomthily.tumblr.com/post/46302455340/map-projection-transitions ]

"These activities were not always congenial to the program of government reform towards democratization. Many of them used participatory methods instead to net poor peoples into networks of debt and reliance on hierarchical authorities.

The reasons for the failures of participatory technology are actually quite specific.

Participation was appropriated during the 1970s as a means of cheap development without commitment of resources from above. The theme of participatory ownership of the city, pioneered in discussions about urban planning in the West, remained strong in the context of the developing world, and even grew in a context of spiraling urbanization. In India, the Philippines, and much of Africa and Latin America, postwar economies pushed peasants off of the land into cities, where the poor availability of housing required the poor to squat on land and build their own homes out of cheap building materials. At first, the governments of these towns collaborated with the World Bank to take out loans to provide expensive, high-rise public housing units. But increasingly, the World Bank drew upon the advice of western advocates of squatter settlements, who saw in western squats the potential benefits of self-governance without interference from the state. In the hands of the World Bank, this theory of self-directed, self-built, self-governed housing projects became a justification for defunding public housing. From 1972 forward, World Bank reports commended squatters for their ingenuity and resourcefulness and recommended giving squatters titles to their properties, which would allow them to raise credit and participate in the economy as consumers and borrowers.

Participatory mechanisms installed by the Indian government to deal with water tanks after nationalization depend on principles of accountability at the local level that were invented under colonial rule. They install the duty of the locality to take care of people without necessarily providing the means with which to do so.

We need developers who can learn from the history of futility, and historians who have the courage to constructively encourage a more informed kind of development. "

"I was looking for a way to discuss the essential lessons of complexity and emergence—which, even in 2003, were pretty unfamiliar words in the context of design—and I hit upon this research on the spacesuit as the one thing I’d done that could encapsulate the potential lessons of those ideas, both for scientists and for designers. The book really was a melding of these two things."

"But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing.

The spacesuit, in the end, is an object that crystallizes a lot of ideas about who we are and what the nature of the human body may be—but, then, crucially, it’s also an object in which many centuries of ideas about the relationship of our bodies to technology are reflected."

"The same individuals and organizations who were presuming to engineer the internal climate of the body and create the figure of the cyborg were the same institutions who, in the same context of the 1960s, were proposing major efforts in climate-modification.

Embedded in both of those ideas is the notion that we can reduce a complex, emergent system—whether it’s the body or the planet or something closer to the scale of the city—to a series of cybernetically inflected inputs, outputs, and controls. As Edward Teller remarked in the context of his own climate-engineering proposals, “to give the earth a thermostat.”"

"most attempts to cybernetically optimize urban systems were spectacular failures, from which very few lessons seem to have been learned"

"architecture can be informed by technology and, at the same time, avoid what I view as the dead-end of an algorithmically inflected formalism from which many of the, to my mind, less convincing examples of contemporary practice have emerged"

"connections…between the early writing of Jane Jacobs…and the early research done in the 1950s and 60s on complexity and emergence under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation"

"Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt—who have gone a long way in showing that, not only should cities be viewed through the analogical lens of complex natural systems, but, in fact, some of the mathematics—in particular, to do with scaling laws, the consumption of resources, and the production of innovation by cities—proves itself far more susceptible to analyses that have come out of biology than, say, conventional economics."

"Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, in the field. You can scribble on it, draw things, make notes.

When you upload a snapshot of your print to Field Papers, we'll do some magic on the server to put it back in the right spot on the map. You can transcribe your notes into digital form and share the result with your friends or download the notes for later analysis.

You don't need a GPS to make a map or learn complicated desktop GIS software to use Field Papers. It's as easy as print, mark, scan.

This project is a continuation of Walking Papers, which was built for the OpenStreetMap (OSM) editing community. Field Papers allows you to print multiple-page atlases using several map styles (including satellite imagery and black and white cartography to save ink) and has built in note annotation tools with GIS format downloads. Field Papers also supports user accounts so you can save “your stuff” for later, or use the service anonymously. Maps from the two systems work together if you want OSM editing (see below)."

[Updated 10 July 2013: http://content.stamen.com/fieldpapers-v2 ]

"Notes from a six-day workshop with Johanna Drucker at MIT (April 2012)

[ALL APOLOGIES FOR MIS/INFORMATION BELOW. THESE ARE UNEDITED NOTES WRITTEN IN THE MOMENT AT MIT HYPERSTUDIO]"

"Story maps use the concepts and tools of geography to tell stories about the world. They combine intelligent Web maps with text, multimedia content, and intuitive user experiences to inform, educate, entertain, and inspire people about a wide variety of topics. Most story maps are designed for non-technical audiences.

Story maps are at the focal point of the rapid evolution of GIS from a technology available primarily to highly-trained specialists to an array of services and resources that can benefit everyone.

Learn how to create your own story maps in our Workflows and Best Practices summary. Read about characteristics and types of storytelling maps in our Telling Stories with Maps white paper."

"Now historians have a new tool that can help. Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused."

"Social and environmental historian interested in Alpine history and trans-regional approaches. Aspiring statistician, GIS guy and digital historian." [See also: http://www.wilkohardenberg.net/ ]

"Neogeography literally means "new geography" (aka Volunteered Geographic Information), and is commonly applied to the usage of geographical techniques and tools used for personal and community activities or for utilization by a non-expert group of users. Application domains of neogeography are typically not formal or analytical.…

The term neogeography was first defined in its contemporary sense by Randall Szott on 7 April 2006, and elaborated on May 27, 2006. He argued for a broad scope, to include artists, psychogeography, and more. The technically-oriented aspects of the field, far more tightly defined than in Szott's definition, were outlined by Andrew Turner in his Introduction to Neogeography (O'Reilly, 2006). The contemporary use of the term, and the field in general, owes much of its inspiration to the locative media movement that sought to expand the use of location-based technologies to encompass personal expression and society."

"Welcome to the website of the California Map Society. We invite you to take a tour, bookmark our site and come back for more. You'll find new and unusual sights with every visit. <br />
Here you’ll encounter stories behind historic maps, ways that modern topographic maps are made, techniques for making maps and even making a geographic information system (GIS)... yourself, how to start your own map collection and much more. We at CMS especially enjoy maps of California and by Californians– which covers a lot of territory—but you’ll find much more than California inside."

"Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap."

"We are in a period of mass-market place ambiguity.

"# Multitasking allows MotionX-GPS to record tracks while you do other things on your iPhone such as taking phone calls, visiting a web page, listening to streaming music, or getting Live Voice Guidance with MotionX-GPS Drive for example. # Record tracks in the background with your screen off to extend your battery life! # Background Voice Coaching: hear audible progress updates (distance, time, speed, pace). # New Wifi/Triangulation mode estimates your position when GPS is unavailable."

"To accurately map the progress of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin over the course of the 21 novels by Patrick O'Brian."

"Trees Near You helps you learn about more than 500,000 trees that live on New York City sidewalks. For any area of the city, from block to borough, you can see the different species that live there, and measure the environmental (and monetary!) benefits that these trees provide.

Trees Near You was created by Brett Camper using street tree census data publicly released by the city government, and won a Best Application Honorable Mention in the NYC BigApps competition."

"Welcome to the GeoPlanet Explorer. Here you can explore the geographical information provided by Yahoo in the GeoPlanet API and data set.

"Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. NoiseTube is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment. Furthermore each user could also participate to the creation of a collective map of noise pollution by sharing automatically his geolocalized measures with the community.

By installing our free application on your GPS equipped phone, you will be able to measure the level of noise in dB(A) (with a precision a bit lower than a sound level meter), and contribute to the collective noise mapping by annotating it (tagging, subjective level of annoyance) and sending this geolocalized information automatically to the NoiseTube server by internet (GPRS)."

[via: http://www.iftf.org/node/3314 ]

"One of The Times’ recent graphics, “A Peek Into Netflix Queues,” ended up being one of our more popular graphics of the past few months. (A good roundup of what people wrote is here). Since then, there have been a few questions about the how the graphic was made and Tyson Evans, a friend and colleague, thought it might interest SND members. (I bother Tyson with questions about CSS and Ruby pretty regularly, so I owe him a few favors.)"

"Spatial@ucsb is an innovative university-wide resource and research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Its mission is to facilitate the integration of spatial thinking into processes for learning and discovery in the natural, social, and behavioral sciences, to promote excellence in engineering and applied sciences, and to enhance creativity in the arts and humanities.

"Kosmos is a lightweight OpenStreetMap (OSM) map rendering platform developed by Igor Brejc (User:Breki). It was primarily designed to be used by OSM users on their own computers to:

"Tile Drawer makes designing and hosting custom maps simple and straightforward. The project lets anyone run their own OpenStreetMap server in the cloud with one-step configuration and zero administration. Tile Drawer is a product of Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski.

[intro here: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/tile-drawer.html ]

"Easy mapping for drivers is old news; increasingly, "walkshed technologies" are making walking or taking transit a stress-free experience. But people who want similar tools for cyclists face a steep barrier to entry in the U.S.: a major lack of data about where it's safe to bike."

"A slippy map library for the iPhone. Fast! Completely written in objective-c using CoreAnimation. Runs like the built-in app. Currently OpenStreetMap Microsoft VirtualEarth and CloudMade are supported as map sources. Use it in your iPhone project. It's licensed under the new BSD license. You are responsible for getting permission to use the map data."

"“Where do you want to go?” and “Why do you want to go there?” are the basic questions behind Destinations. Continuously changing, the main page shows people’s responses to those questions. It is an introspective exercise and a forum for the exploration of shared aspirations.

You are invited to share your responses to the above questions. If we like what you’ve shared, we’ll include it in the main page rotation.

When sharing, you might want to create a username and login. That way, you can keep track of all your contributions and update them later if you want to tweak your wording or position the map just so.
Now more social.

We started a twitter account for the whole timespentalone series, but Destinations is the main attraction. Now, whenever you submit a destination, we'll twitter it and post a link to your submitted page. Follow us over at twitter.com/timespentalone.'"

"CloudMade help you make the most of map data. We source our maps from OpenStreetMap, the community mapping project which is making a free map of the world. Our aims are to continue the democratization of geo data and to expand access to open geo data through a range of simple yet powerful tools and APIs.

"Maps of America are what you'll find and make on nationalatlas.gov™. Maps of innovation and vision that illustrate our changing Nation. Maps that capture and depict the patterns, conditions, and trends of American life. Maps that supplement interesting articles. Maps that tell their own stories. Maps that cover all of the United States or just your area of interest. Maps that are accurate and reliable from more than 20 Federal organizations. Maps about America's people, heritage, and resources. Maps that will help you, your children, your colleagues, and your friends understand the United States and its place in the world.

"SELECT a subject from the top menu and watch the countries on the map change their size. Instead of land mass, the size of each country will represent the data for that subject --both its share of the total and absolute value."

"there are two ways to acquire topo maps for free. The easiest way is to download a free nifty app for Google Earth, called the Topographical Overlay, that will add a KMZ "layer" of official US topo maps on Google Earth. Once installed you can toggle it on or off...another way to print free topos. You can download, for free, a high resolution PDF file of any US topo map made"

"In this condition of total urbanity, maps as navigational tools for the physical traversal of space are supplanted by intelligent maps for navigating a contemporary space in which the physical becomes a layer of data in a global informational space."

"Planners, lenders, & most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. [this index] takes into account not just cost of housing, but also intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs"