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
[Deutsch weiter unten] Recently, I’ve been looking into analysis and visualization of Twitter networks. So, David Bauer posting a list of 300+ German-speaking, Twitter-using journalists came just right. Scroll down to see the resulting network. By they way, you can find more information on the technical background of the production of these Twitter network visualizations in this post. [German] … Continue reading Journalists’ Twitter network
[Deutsch weiter unten] Recently, I’ve been working on a Twitter-related project with two friends of mine. As there’s nothing to present yet, I won’t go into detail regarding that project. But working on Twitter-related stuff led me to explore the generation, modelling, analysis and visualization of Twitter networks. Then, some weeks back, Swiss journalist/author/blogger David … Continue reading Twitter networks – Mechanics
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
This: made me chuckle. There is indeed a plethora of badly designed infographics out there (often these bad specimens are images 300 px wide and 3000 px high). Honestly, I have my doubts about this format anyway: e.g. I think infographics often don’t give enough context to the statistics they depict to do a topic … Continue reading On poorly designed infographics
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
Wikistream shows you the sometimes immense activity that is going on backstage at Wikipedia. If the overall stream gets too fast to grasp anything (yes, that’s rather commonly the case!), you can filter what is shown to you by country and type of event. Pressing “P” pauses the stream of events. In these days where … Continue reading All the edits, deletions and insertions of Wikipedia in real time? – Voilà!
After the last post I have to report about a movie again already: Part of the Off Book series by PBS Arts, the short documentary gives a glimpse into computer generative art. Computer generative art in the words of Luke Dubois (starring in the documentary) is
[art] where you surrender control over some aspect what’s going down to some [computer] process.
Generative Art: Computers, Data, and Humanity portrays three artists and their work.
In Turning Data Into Music and Stories Luke Dubois tells how he turned casualties, missing and refugees of 8 years of war in Iraq into an 8 minute musical piece. Dubois says the reason for him to do that was, that the Iraq war is the first conflict of the U.S. where we have more data than information. I am not sure whether this is true from the information side (i.e. whether people were better informed about other wars), but modern gizmos and equipment certainly do produce heaps of data and thus maybe, in fact, make us know or feel less about what is going on.
I also found myself agreeing to Dubois saying:
This century is the century of data. That’s gonna be the defining thing.
I would add to that: and how we approach that heap of data. We amass such amounts of data that turning it into valuable, actionable information is getting harder and harder. In some fields, where data was hard or expensive to get, the situation has changed and we now seek for ways how to filter and intelligently assess incoming data streams. This is certainly true for many fields in Geography.
“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
For once for a slightly different map: PopSci has a geo-centric map of the visible universe as it was acquired over time, from 1950 (top) to 2011 (bottom), precisely: Different object categories are coloured differently in the map. For example, the inner green ring above consists of minor planets, the blue dots are stars. In … Continue reading Map of the Universe
