Keynote about trends in GIS and visualization

People at Zurich electricity provider ewz have recently kindly invited me to give a keynote presentation at one of their telematics events.

The task was to sketch emerging trends in GIS and visualisation from three perspectives: as GIS consultant at Ernst Basler + Partner, as a researcher at Oxford Internet Institute and as an individual that sometimes undertakes GIS and geovisualisation projects. I ended up highlighting four big trends that I think will continue to control developments in GIS/visualisation (although I will concede that certain aspects of these trends are over-hyped here and there). The actual keynote consisted of significant interactive parts, but I embed the slides here in case you want to check out trends and examples: Continue reading “Keynote about trends in GIS and visualization”

Flickr as a vehicle of narrative: photos contextualised in space and time

After my project proposal had been accepted, I have attended a workshop at ETH Zurich, titled “Cartography & Narratives” organised by Barbara Piatte, Sébastien Caquard and Anne-Kathrin Reuschel in last summer. The goal of the workshop was to explore “mapping as a conceptual framework to improve our understating of narratives”. Narratives are “an expression in discourse of … Continue reading Flickr as a vehicle of narrative: photos contextualised in space and time

ZIPScribble Map Italy

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

ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part II

Having seen a visualization by Robert Kosara of EagerEyes a loooong time ago, I wanted to try to reproduce it for Switzerland using Processing. This is the second installment of a two-parts post covering this project, in which I will describe how to arrive at the final result, the ZIPScribble Map. I’ll do that in some detail, maybe this is helpful to somebody.

In the first installment of this series I explained my process up to an intermediate result: a map depicting all the postal code locations in Switzerland, like this:

This involved creating a basemap with TileMill, using Till Nagel’s MercatorMap class in Processing, finding and downloading postal code data from Geonames and writing a Processing sketch which makes use of all these. In this second installment I will explain how to arrive at a ZIPScribble Map for Switzerland from the above intermediate result. So from the first part we have many things in place already. What is missing are basically three things: Continue reading “ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part II”

ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part I

Having seen a visualization by Robert Kosara of EagerEyes a loooong time ago, I wanted to try to reproduce it for Switzerland using Processing. This is the first installment of a two-parts post covering this project, in which I will describe how to arrive at an intermediate result. I’ll do that in some detail, maybe this is helpful to somebody.

The visualization is called the ZIPScribbleMap: “ZIP” for postal codes, “Scribble” for rather obvious reasons (as in “it looks like what I doodle while on the phone!”): Continue reading “ZIPScribble Map: Switzerland – Part I”

Processing 0195

Starting from yesterday the Processing team offers Processing 0195 pre-release for download. Lots of bugs have been fixed and 0195 is considered a stepping stone for a Processing 1.5 stable release in a few days. (via Ben Fry) Continue reading Processing 0195

Intro to Processing

(This post is based on an earlier post in another blog in German)

For quite some time I’ve been following the news about Processing. Processing is an open-source environment for creating visualizations programmatically. The project was initiated by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry in the Media Lab of the MIT.

Processing encompasses both the Java-based Processing programming language and an Integrated Development Environment, IDE, in which to write code. Processing enables users to generate rather complex graphics and animations (also with interactivity). Considerably fewer code is needed to implement something in Processing rather than in Java itself.
According to the website some of Processing’s feature highlights are: Continue reading “Intro to Processing”