National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo presents the “world’s first large-scale spherical OLED” and what do you think they display on it? Right! Cool! As soon as they can do that with bendable OLED panels and thus do away with the gaps in the globe’s surface, I’m sold! On another note: While … Continue reading Geo-Cosmos: Huge globe of OLEDs
Mark Graham has posted a critique of a “Twitter map” that featured in the Economist at Zerogeography. The map was compiled by Portland Communications and Tweetminster and shows the number of tweets per country (original version of the map can be found in this presentation by Portland Communications): Mark Graham raises these interesting points regarding … Continue reading Economist’s Africa Twitter map provides some teachable insights
I just got news that TileMill now also runs on Windows (besides Mac OS and Linux). TileMill is a browser-based tool to prepare map tiles which you can, for example, overlay on Google Maps or use as basemap in a Processing sketch. The latter of which I have in my ZIPScribble maps series (here, here or … Continue reading TileMill available for Windows, too
I have made various ZIPScribble Maps – Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy – as well as a two-part tutorial on how to produce them using Geonames data, TileMill basemaps and Processing as visualization environment. Those were inspired by the original ZIPScribble Maps by Robert Kosara. He’s back with an interactive version of many ZIPScribble Maps (interactive in … Continue reading Interactive ZIPScribble Maps
Via the GIS Doctor (in itself a fun blog) I got introduced to NY Times’ Opinionator. The Borderlines category on the Opinionator is maintained by author/blogger Franc Jacobs who “writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.” Borderlines writes about interesting stories around country borders. So far, I’ve read the superbly entertaining and well informed … Continue reading Where’s Europe?
Still in last year, Cédric Moullet, amongst others MapFish and GeoExt contributor, sparked a discussion by his post “Why OpenStreetMap fails to replace official or proprietary base maps in a sustainable way ?” (note how this doesn’t sound like a question but bears a question mark ;) For simplicity, I will re-list Cédric’s 13 points here: … Continue reading OpenStreetMap: A valid competitor to official base maps?
Chicago Press gives away History of Cartography as PDF for free! If you are a cartography buff, you have to check out this offer. Topics span: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies Cartography … Continue reading “History of Cartography” for free
The title pretty much sums it up: Continue reading Iberian peninsula from space, at night
“Einigkeit und Recht und Frei-ei-heit…!” But before we get to that, as explained earlier, there are different levels in my ZIPScribble Maps: Level 1 ZIPScribble Map: Only the first digit of the postcode is compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected, for example, between postal codes 8679 and 9000, but no discontinuity is detected between 8399 and 8400. … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map Germany
“Allons enfants de la patrie…!” But before we get to that, as explained earlier, there are different levels in my ZIPScribble Maps: Level 1 ZIPScribble Map: Only the first digit of the postcode is compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected, for example, between postal codes 8679 and 9000, but no discontinuity is detected between 8399 and 8400. … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map France
Earlier I’ve blogged a two-parts tutorial on how to create ZIPScribble Maps using the Processing visualization framework. The map uses a background I made with TileMill and CC-BY-licensed postcode data from the Geonames gazetteer portal. (By the way, here’s an informative short TileMill tutorial by Pierre La Baume) As explained earlier, there are different levels … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map Italy
Today’s xkcd features a sociology of map projections. Hilarious! :) Mercator? You’re not really into maps. Take that, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mapquest, …! PS if you’re not an xkcd regular: Don’t miss the mouseover caption. Continue reading What your map projection says about you
