people + technology + mapping
collecting info on people, urbanization, technology, mapping, mobility, space, and design. This is assembled by Tricia Wang, an ethnographer and researcher on how low-income communities use communication technologies. She writes about her fieldwork in China and Mexico at Cultural Bytes. Contact her! ______________________________________
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another processing find: “software analyzes the international data interchange as well as the network traffic of the Deutsche Telekom in real time.” Check it out here.
Deutsche Telekom germany pocessing software information analysis
Wednesday, November 25th 2009 3:31am
this is a great example of how there’s always room for exciting innovation in everyday objects- even the mostly seemingly mundane can become layered with meaning and knowledge. Maphole is a guide to pedestrians (invented by Jiae Kwon). I wonder if a cut will make these real!
IWhat I would love to observe is the use of these map-holes in a city and to see how power and narrative is reinforced through these map-holes.
Who are these map-holes for? Who controls these map-holes? Who makes decisions on what is being pointed to - what kind of information will these show - where will it lead a pedestrian? Will they be for tourists? Will they be for the urban citizen? Will the location specific map-holes, such as in an art district? Who benefits from the map-hope?
how do they maps-holes respatialize the city? How do map-hopes reconfigure pedestrian movement?
I think that these mapholes could work to reinforce existing class-drawn boundaries in city.
For example, when I spent a few weeks in Stockholm a few years ago - for a social welfare country known for its social equality - I had a difficult time finding the low-income parts of the city. When I arrived, with a little online research about the hip-hop and yummy international food scene - I found out that a lot of undergrounded artists were from Rinkeby, a area of Stockholm that has lots of new immigrants, newly accepted Iraqi refugges, and older immigrants from countries such as Turkey. But after trying to look up information on Rinkeby online, talking to local residents, researching local guide books - I still had a difficult time finding any info on Rinkeby other than people’s advice that “you don’t need to go there.” Which of COURSE anytime someone tells me that I always take as a great indicator for me to go there.
My point is that the absence of information on Rinkeby, or any neighborhood can render it an invisible place. I was being told the dominant narrative that local citizens gave to outsiders - here are beautiful parts of Stockholm that you should see and here are the parts that you don’t need to see. But that very narrative is laced with assumptions of what kind of outsider I was and what I valued. My moment illustrates how the dominance of one platial (yes I made that word up) narrative can render another place invisible. Could map-holes work in the same way? By only pointing out some places, other places get left out. Could map-holes become map-hopes - pointing people to a version of the city that you can’t find in tourists books? Or could these map-holes become wired with blue-tooth and tourists could beam the hole for information that they were interested in finding?
Well if I start seeing these pop up in NY, I will put up stickers that say “Bed-Stuy” over the arrow pointing towards “Soho” or stickers that say “yoga center” over “Macys” or a sticker that says “Fresh Food” over “McDonalds.
Here are some other bloggers who have commented on map-hopes, Yankodesign, GIS-Lounge, Inventor spot, and DoGizmo.
oh and I had a GREAT time in Rinkeby. I visited a local school, met residents, ate great turkish sweets, and hung out with some newly arrived iraqis. It was just as great as my day wandering around in Gamla Stan. My photos from a day in Rinkeby and photos from my time in STockholm.
zadi:
“Map Hole is a new road guidance tool designed to direct pedestrians and travelers to their final destination using existing elements in the urban landscape. It locates the pedestrian with a starting point and provides information on the exact distance or average walk time to the listed landmarks.”
- Yanko Design (h/t The Daily What)
man-hole manhole technology city urban pedestrian stockholm rinkeby immigrants racial class boundaries invisible narrative place jiae Kwon maphole invention ground sidewalk directions gps gis
Tuesday, November 17th 2009 2:27am
This post is not directly about Digital Urban Mapping - rather it’s a commentary about the state of data visualization in urban mapping. Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), the creator of this image, made a statement that resonated with me. He notes that the current festish around data visualization may be more indicative of aesthetics being prioritized over data comprehension.
“The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.
But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.”
This makes me think about the world of visualization and digital mapping for visualizing urban processes. So far, my only experience with urban mapping has been with architects - professionals who tend to be great at visualizing cityscapes and not so great at observing and explaining human interaction. but hey more reasons for architects and sociologists to team up! One of the reasons why I want to work with architects is because I think sociologists are missing the imaginative, the scale, and the visual. A lot of our work gets stuck under so many theoretical barrels and methodological corners that to even begin to think about visualizing our data when we can’t even explain it in everyday language just seems overwhelming. And the very aspect that Mario brings up - about processing information - well I think that sociological studies overall (there are many exceptions) fail to really make the research understandable to a wider public.
I am afraid of my work falling into that trap as I feel that’s what graduate school has trained me to do - write in obscure language that doesn’t communicate with other disciplines or practitioners. So I’m realllly trying hard to make a commitment early on in my fieldwork to think about how to visually communicate my research.
The difficulties in visualization is that as visual objects they are excellent at showing the snapshot of situations, the state or the result or the change over time in X/Y variables. On the other foot, visuals are not as excellent at communicating processes or motivations - the cultural reasons for why X/Y happened or changed over time (more techniques are being developed to make this easier- that’s why processing is so awesome).
I wonder if all these trends towards data visualization is also a reflection of the information overload that we deal with in everyday life and a desire to just quickly get the facts and jump out before the nitty gritty details come in to overwhelm the moment. There are countless times when I’ve come across a looooooong article and I’m debating whether or not to read it and I then become really happy when I see a chart - even better when it’s a pretty chart! :) My brain just things - “get me the details - I don’t always need to know or have time to know why.”
Nothing bad can happen with trying to make data prettier right? Especially when it’s in the hands of people who care just as much about the data as the color palette.
You can read about his project here.
via @lennyjpg
Mario Klingemann data visualization processing aesthetic design information data artist graphs charts
Thursday, November 12th 2009 3:43am
I just discovered Eager Eye’s Zip Scrabble Map from 2006. It quickly communicates information about population density and temporal sense of US expansion, and makes for beautiful wall art!
(via Urban Cartography)
This is so awesome. Visualization guru Robert Kosara at eagereyes.org has written a script to visualize the relationships between zipcodes and population within state borders. Check it out:
What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected.
The idea for the ZIPScribble came from playing with Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode. That little applet allows you to explore the ZIP codes interactively, and reveals some very interesting patterns. What it does not give you, however, is an idea of the overall structure of the ZIP space. Jeffrey Heer has reimplemented zipdecode using his prefuse toolkit, and provides a file containing ZIP codes and coordinates. So off I went on a little programming exercise to see what simply connecting the dots would do.
This guy is so awesome. I could spend a whole day on his site. Go there now.
Monday, November 2nd 2009 2:07am
I just started looking into Processing.org and I found an interview with Aaron Koblin. Koblin made the beautiful images for Flight Patterns. I just found out about his SMS Amsterdam visualization. It’s really beautiful and useful of social analysis. I wish that this could be done for any area in the world with the press of a button!
Looking through all the work at Processing is really inspiring. Now I just need to find a month to dive into this language.
processing aaron koblin sms amsterdam urban visualization cellphone texting text messages
Wednesday, October 28th 2009 12:44am
I’ve downloaded The Department of Land Affair’s (Eastern Cape, South Africa) tutorial and within a few minutes I felt that it was more clear than GIS for Dummies in terms of explaining the very technical basics of GIS mapping. The tutorial includes worksheets and videos. You can download all the worksheets (pdf or odt) at once also near the bottom of the page.
I’ve also discovered Quantum GIS’s open source mapping software for macs and windows! and Qgis is an active mapping community, hosting an upcoming Qgis Developer’s conference in Vienna this coming November. That’s always a great sign! So I’ve downloaded version 1.3.0-3 standalone OSX Leopard (minus GRASS). I’ve installed the app, opened it, and stared it. I have no idea what to do now but I’m looking forward to marking out a day in December to sit down with the tutorial and software.
(via Free Geography Tools)
Great Introductory GIS Tutorial And Screencast Series
The Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa has created a terrific tutorial series on GIS called “introducing GIS”. PDF worksheets and video screencasts cover topics like vector and raster data, attributes, topology, coordinate systems, map production and spatial analysis in a clear and easy-to-follow fashion. The worksheets are freely distributable under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, while the screencasts are released under Creative Commons. While you can watch the screencasts in your browser, they are a bit small – I would recommend downloading them so that you can open them in a stand-alone video viewer that you can resize to larger dimensions for easier viewing. Right-click on the video link and choose “Save as”. For that matter, if you download all the screencasts and worksheets and put them on a DVD, you have a great educational resource to share and distribute.
The site has a custom Windows installer of the open source GIS Quantum GIS, including the data presented in the tutorials. However, Quantum GIS also runs on Mac and Linux, and they offer the tutorial data as a separate download; find the link at the bottom of the web page. For that matter, the Quantum GIS Windows installer they have is version 1.0.2, while the most recent stable release version for Windows is 1.2.0-1. So even if you have Windows, you may want to download the data separately, and install the most recent version of Quantum GIS using the osgeo4w installer.
tutorial gis mapping free open source maps quantum GIS leapord osx
Tuesday, October 27th 2009 11:58pm
Wow I just discovered the Open Street Map Project through Mapperz’s post Atlanta being the best mapped city in the world. It would be great to do an social-mapping project in Atlanta!
And I found my field site, Wuha, China, on the OSM map - here is a rudimentary outline of Wuhan to the left! This means that I could consider doing my social mapping project with cressica through OSM! -tricia
________________
(via Mapperz)
Atlanta, the capital of the US state of Georgia will soon be the world’s most digitally mapped city, according to organisers of a massive “Mapathon”. Source: BBC News
Open Street Map Project (OSM 411)
What is a Mapathon?
Mapping on-mass [crowdsourcing] the downtown Atlanta area including parks, university campuses and historic sites. Volunteers will be on hand to help new mappers learn how to use a GPS or Walking-Papers and have helpful tips for beginners. Come for the whole day or just stop by for an hour to learn the basics of community mapping and add a few points of interest to the map.
October 16th 17th 18th
During this three day mapping event, local businesses, community groups and OSM members will join together to launch a citywide initiative to help make the map of Atlanta one of the best in the US. For details of how to get involved in this fun, family-friendly event, see the Atlanta Citywide Mapathon page.
map atlanta open street map project open street map osm wuhan china open source mapathon gps
Tuesday, October 27th 2009 11:35pm
