Crowdsourcing projects like OpenStreetMap, Google Map Maker or Building Maker without compensation for contributors rely on volunteers’ efforts. There are various studies which try to shed light on the motivational factors of such volunteers. One way to motivate people to contribute their time and effort can be to make them feel that they are part of … Continue reading Motivating volunteers
Maps are about territory. And in history, cartography has often been (ab)used to political ends. Due to its big popularity and global visibility Google’s geo-products have attracted their share of border and naming debates and disputes over time and the change of a border’s status or the name of a proportion of land in, for … Continue reading Google in Libya
A while ago I reported on a collection of historic maps of undersea cables. In today’s post I’d like to highlight an interactive and up-to-date version of such a map: For every undersea cable, Greg’s Cable Map by Greg Mahlknecht shows characteristics such as a list of landings of said cable, bandwith, length, construction date and … Continue reading World’s wiring scheme in an interactive map
The New York Times’ Abstract Sunday of this week features the World Map of Useless Stereotypes by Christoph Niemann of I LEGO N.Y. fame. Obviously, the geography has been messed with a little. And New York and its five boroughs (minus Staten Island) are prominently displayed completely out of scale with the rest of the ‘map’. … Continue reading The World Map of Useless Stereotypes
The Urban Earth project by The Geography Collective aims at representing humanity’s habitat by walking across some of earth’s biggest urban areas. The motivation is critical of media and their portrayal of our living environments:
The media distorts the way we see our world(s) with stereotypical images highlighting the most extremes of places. Urban Earth aims to expose what our cities really look like away from the bias and spin of commercial agendas.
(This reminds me a bit of the distorted body image in the media and, for example, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. For an ever-astounding short film [1:15 mins] click here. End of short side-track.)
The Rules
The recipe of Urban Earth is very simple: Walk across a city taking a photograph every 8 steps (roughly) and put them together sequentially into a movie. Photographs are always taken looking forward, without focusing on specific landmarks or ‘nice’ parts of the cityscape. The thing about an Urban Earth walk is that it tries to find normality within each city:
Geography is more important than many people think. A random route across a city may expose many things, but an Urban Earth walk is special because it attempts to reveal what a city is like for the people who live in it. Urban Earth is not about following the tourist trail or tracking down the most extreme places… it is about finding normality.
Boing Boing highlights this map of undersea cables of the Eastern Telegraph Company system printed in 1901. At Boing Boing’s source a person points to a treasure trove for anybody interested in the history of undersea cables or, specifically, related cartography. Above map with its salient red cables clearly highlights the Europe- and US-centric history of … Continue reading Old maps of undersea cables
From Penn State University and partners comes the fourth instalment in the Geospatial Revolution series [18 mins]. The programme is an “outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact” – and it’s great for any (soon-to-be) geo-enthusiast! The rest of the episodes can be … Continue reading Geospatial Revolution Episode 4 is available!
Yesterday in the late afternoon the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) declared (German) the exposure of maps via web service and opening up of their API (press release also only in German) through Swisstopo web access (brief description in English) with the following two options: WMTS option (Web Map Tile Service): This service lets you display current geodata (aerial … Continue reading Swiss maps on your website
In cooperation with local partners MIT’s Senseable City Lab has developed six real-time visualizations of the city of Singapore which is on display since April 8 in the exhibition LIVE Singapore!, co-curated with the Singapore Art Museum. Continue reading “Real-time visualizations of Singapore”
A new method developed by Wang et al. claims to be able to geolocate IP addresses much (they claim 50 times) more accurately than has been previously feasible. The new method uses a three-tier approach: 1) sending a data packet and measuring how long it takes to bounce back, indicating an imprecise distance; 2) doing the same with all institutions with known geolocation (for example, universities or businesses) within 200 km distance of the first guess and comparison of bounce-back-times to refine the estimated location; 3) doing a similar refinement to 2) at a finer resolution.
Continue reading “New method locates you within a few hundred metres”
As a sort of April fool’s joke (I guess) and a pun on the Open<XY>Map naming scheme somebody (Grant Slater of Firefishy?) set up an OpenWhateverMap: http://openwhatevermap.org It doesn’t quite deliver on the promise though, IMO, since it shows ‘only’ differently rendered OpenStreetMap tiles. It fails to acknowledge the full picture of developments in the … Continue reading OpenWhateverMap
Today I first heard about TargetMap. TargetMap is a mapping portal in public beta. Everybody can create customised maps with their own data (so-called ReportMaps). The interface for creating a ReportMap and the display of a ReportMap is implemented in Flash – and thus requires a bypass of your Flash blocking software (and cannot be consumed using iDevices).
Using the TargetMap wizard you can choose the world, a region or specific countries to be mapped. TargetMap then offers various options to bring data onto your map. You can:
Costs
The service is essentially free if used for public maps. If you don’t want your data to be on display publicly, you can opt to create maps for your own exclusive use – this, however, requires you to pay a fee to TargetMap (somewhat hefty 195$ for an annual subscription). Continue reading “TargetMap let’s you put your data on – well – a map”